Many goodies at the Chandigarh Literature Festival

A shout-out about this year’s edition of the Chandigarh Literature Festival , being held from November 5-8. I have been helping ...

Stars - big ones and little ones - descending

[ From my Mint Lounge column; this is also a continuation of thoughts about Nawazuddin Siddiqui from this post ] Vienna, late at night, film...

Farida Jalal, Tarun Bose, Usha Kiran - and other underrated actors in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's cinema

From Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor and Meena Kumari to Dharmendra, Sharmila Tagore and Rajesh Khanna to Amitabh Bachchan and Rekha, Hrishikesh M...

Belated thoughts on Manjhi, mountains, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Ketan Mehta

How absurd the Dashrath Manjhi tale is, and how overwrought it would seem if it had been thought up by a writer of fiction. Think about it....

Too much order in the court

[This is the first entry in my new fortnightly film column, "Above the Line", for Mint Lounge ] In conversations about the New Hin...

The voices of hunted lions: a conversation with Karthika Nair about her Mahabharata in poetry

[Did a version of this Q&A for Scroll ] Intro: Karthika Nair’s new book Until the Lions is a powerful retelling of the Mahabharata tha...

V Shantaram, the man who saw it all: a book about a pioneering filmmaker

[ Did this book review for Mint Lounge ] Madhura Pandit Jasraj’s book about her father V Shantaram contains a story that sounds apocryphal ...