Tag: Review

Clyde Waddell. Street scene with shoeshine boys outside the New American Kitchen, Calcutta. Gelatin silver print. 8″ x 10″, 1946. Image courtesy Aakriti Art Gallery…

First Lady Cyclist…

Pablo Bartholomew. Boy jumping off the roof of the Chinese Temple, Tangra, Calcutta. [1978]…

Nemai Ghosh. Ray on the beach while shooting the documentary Bala [1976] Nemai Ghosh. A still from Satyajit Ray’s Jana Aranya [1975] Nemai Ghosh. A still from Satyajit Ray’s Ghare-Baire [1984]…

One recurring motif of European high art in the twentieth century is to see that it is never ‘too high’. The pulls at the core identity of European modernity came from a variety of sources – the Word Wars, Marxism-Leninism and its various mutations in Stalinism-Communism, the rise of America, the passing away of an old European power elite in the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire inside Europe and the decimation of the British Empire outside, the breakdown of a…

Halfway into True Grit, it would still not be clear if this film was going anywhere. A fourteen-year-old girl is keen to avenge the death of his father and take control of the finances with a determination and gnash that sits uneasily on her. She is fascinated by the eye-for-an-eye ethic of wild Arkansas as much as she relishes the public hanging of three criminals that are part of a daily spectre for citizens and wayfarers in Fort Smith. Aided partly…

Abhimanyu by Ganesh Pyne. Mahabharata is not just full of both heroic as well as cowardly narratives but also possibilities. Incidences. Psychologies. Archetypes. Totems. Guilt. And of course tragedy. And for an artist, poet, author, the beauty of Mahabharata lies in its complexity, in its secret histories, it’s annals of beginnings and ends, of trials and dénouement, and an incessant preoccupation with death.  Ganesh Pyne — perhaps the last of the earlier generation of greats from this part of the globe who is…