TRENDS
The prescient film that told the story of the Indian wrestlers
Olympic medallist Sakshi Malik announced her retirement shortly after Sanjay Singh's appointment as Wrestling Federation of India chief, recalling a film called Dear Comrade about sexual harassment in sport.
ENTERTAINMENT
Palan: A filmic homage to Mrinal Sen’s Kharij in his birth centenary year gets everything wrong
National Award-winner Kaushik Ganguly’s 'Palan' is a sequel to Mrinal Sen's 'Kharij', the story of a Bhadralok couple whose apathy is responsible for a 'servant boy’s' death. Taut and clear-eyed, 'Kharij' won the jury prize at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival.
TRENDS
The significance of Rezoana Mallick Heena, India's fastest 400-meter sprinter
Rezoana Mallick Heena is the fastest quarter-miler in Asia. Heena also won silver in the 200 metres and the 400 metres relay at Tashkent, emerging as the athlete who won the most individual medals for India.
TRENDS
Director Konkana Sen Sharma on shades of 36 Chowringhee Lane in The Mirror (Lust Stories 2)
In 1981, Aparna Sen’s film about an ageing Anglo-Indian schoolteacher’s flat being used for sex was perhaps the original Lust Story. Konkona Sen Sharma moves the conversation about sex, voyeurism and public space forward by infusing class into it.
TRENDS
How artist Benode Behari Mukherjee saw Rabindranath Tagore's Santiniketan
A 45-feet scroll, painted by artist Benode Behari Mukherjee as a young man, while he still had vision in one eye, portrays Rabindranath Tagore’s campus as a lonely, somewhat wild land, amid the miniature canyon-like Khoai terrain of Bengal.
TRENDS
60 years of Jaya Bachchan, the girl next door of Hindi films, on Indian screens
Debuting as a 15-year-old in Satyajit Ray's Mahanagar, Jaya Bhaduri would go on to study acting at FTII and become one of the most successful leading women in Bombay’s film industry in the 1970s.
TRENDS
80 years since the Bengal famine: A portrait of the famine of 1943
Once the preserve of the royal and the rich, portraiture became a tool for artists Chittaprosad and Somnath Hore to document Bengal famine victims as fellow humans deserving of respect and not just pity.
INDIA
80 years since the Bengal famine of 1943: How a small team from 'People's Age' magazine documented the disaster in photos, reports, drawings
The Bengal famine of 1943-45 was meticulously documented by a tabloid-sized weekly magazine called People’s Age, which was published by the Communist Party of India and cost two annas - a price that was raised to three annas in September 1944.
TRENDS
Mrinal Sen centenary: From using real footage to voice-overs by Amitabh Bachchan, the legendary filmmaker set many trends
Mrinal Sen (1923-2023) directed 27 features, 14 shorts, and five documentaries in a 47-year-career, working with actors like Dimple Kapadia, Mithun Chakraborty, Mamata Shankar, Simi Garewal, Shabana Azmi and Dhritiman Chatterjee, among others.
TRENDS
How Satyajit Ray and 80-year-old Kolkata firm Signet Press changed publishing in India
The Calcutta publisher that published the first edition of Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India in 1946, is known for outstanding cover art and illustration, clean layouts, stylish typefaces.
TRENDS
In the season of SRK’s Pathaan, memories of Amitabh Bachchan and Nutan’s Saudagar
The Muslim in mainstream Hindi films is almost invariably fair-skinned, shalwar-wearing. Of Pathaan-like stock. The 1971 Rajshri Productions’ film told the story of a community of rural Bengali Muslims.
TRENDS
Dilip Kumar centenary: A look back at Citizen Kumar
So much has been written about Dilip Kumar, the legendary actor of Hindi cinema. Less has been said about Kumar, the citizen. He was the man we wish our superstars were today: peerless in his craft, committed in his convictions.
