Corporate Chicaneries
Auden wrote that many lives have been lived without love, but none without water. He couldn't possibly have written about the utter necessity of water without thinking of the billions…
Vidyarthy Chatterjee
The Sensualist Of Sound
There is no dearth of films on musical personalities. But most of them are little more than listless recitals of facts about a given musician’s life and accomplishments. Often failing…
A Special Woman
Manjuben is a picture of hard work, independent judgement and a strong desire to be rich so as to be able to call the shots in her professional relations with…
Gaza
Children in dozensbombed each dayadd to thousands in no timebut there is no one leftto sing the parting songas they are laid to rest the poetswho would have rent the…
Kalinganagar
(“The commissioning of India’s largest blast furnace at Kalinganagar (on September 20, 2024) is a momentous occasion for the steel industry.” – T.V. Narendran, Tata Steel CEO & MD) jal-jangal-jameenthe…
Courtly Indifference To Sudra Persecution
In the past quarter century or so, New Marathi Cinema has come to be enriched by important contributions from several young directors, including Mumbai-based Chaitanya Tamhane. Tamhane’s debut film, Court,…
Calcutta, Where was your Conscience Then?
When a young Anglo-Indian mother named Suzette Jordan was picked up on a February night of 2012 from a watering hole on Park Street, Calcutta’s popular entertainment zone, and repeatedly…
Hitler’s Hindutva Friends
The recent lifting of the ban on government servants enrolling as members of the RSS assumes extra significance in that it has come about on the eve of the centenary…
Is Violence Innate In Us?
Not a single day passes without several violent incidents being reported in the newspapers or on television. The nature of violence varies from place to place, but there is a…
‘Kharij’ – A Master’s Grapplings to Visibilise Hunger and Analyse Class Machinations
Can Kharij (The Case is Closed, 1982), one of the several memorable films that immediately come to mind whenever Mrinal Sen’s name is mentioned, be said to be a “hunger…
Genocide, Liberation, Cinema
( This is the first chapter of a book entitled, Desperation As Film Art to be published later in the year by Cerebrum Books, Kochi. The author believes that the…
Obstinate Memories
Marxists have come to power not always by the bullet; given the historical, political and social circumstances that they had to contend with, Lenin, Mao, Ho or Fidel had no…
Wrestling Woes – Where Real and Reel Lives Merge
It has been weeks since some of the country’s best-known and most successful wrestlers have been on ‘dharna’ at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi, to voice their outrage against the highhandedness…
Ousmane Sembene: Senegalese Voice, Universal Vision
This essay is a brief exploration of the life, times and legacy of one of the most distinguished cultural figures of modern Africa – the Senegalese trade unionist, writer and…
One David, Three Goliaths
After so many years, I have forgotten his first name, but can readily recall in my mind’s eye the pint-sized lawyer with a clean, shaven face and a shining bald…
A doubtful American Invention
“I don’t understand why India looks up to the Oscars… Audience is my Oscar.” – Mira Nair, quoted in The Telegraph, Kolkata, December 1, 2012 On April 23, 1992, a…
Marx, Christ and Other Passions
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) would have been a centenarian this year had he not fell foul of an extreme-Right conspiracy at the age of 53. Murdered on the beaches of…
A letter to Godard that never reached him
Here is a sad news that Godard is no more.Veteran critic Vidyarthy Chatterjee wrote a letter to Godard after listening to an interview, where the master confessed that he doesn't…
Daughter of Two Bengals
Debiprosad Ghosh, the distinguished but undeservedly neglected Calcutta film scholar and historian, has painstakingly researched the life, times and achievements of an important but forgotten Bengali actress. The beautiful and…
Sankha Ghosh: Conscience-keeper, chocolate-man
The death of the distinguished poet, writer, and teacher, Sankha Ghosh removes a huge, near-silent presence from the literary, intellectual, and moral landscape of Bengal. Sankha babu leaves behind a…
Big Capital & Political Class – A Hoary Collaboration
On his first visit to Jamshedpur in 1925, Mahatma Gandhi did something that was unthinkable to large sections of the workers of Tisco. Not only did Gandhi agree to attend…
Lives of Workers Should Matter
Contrary to what she is often made out to be, India is not a poor country. Rather, India is a rich country, the majority of whose people are so poor…
State & Big Capital As Buddy-Buddy: The Case Of Tata Steel
Writing in the March 26, 2012 issue of Outlook, Arundhati Roy talks of how since the middle of the first decade of this century, wherever Tisco has gone in search…
The Artist In Forlorn Terrritories: Ghatak 95
Ritwik Ghatak was born in 1925 in Dhaka and died in 1976 in Calcutta. Almost his entire adult life was spent working for the stage or the screen in some…
Film & Family – Partition & Thereafter
The idea of ‘return’ holds different meanings for different people caught in different circumstances. Calcutta-based Supriyo Sen’s Abar Ashibo Phirey (Way Back Home, Bangla with English sub-titles, video, colour, 120…
Film & Family–Woman As Provider, Men As Parasites
In 2014, Joshy Joseph directed a long documentary called A Poet, A City & A Footballer which won him the Special Jury Prize at the national awards. The film is…
A Throwback To The Small-Town Puja
In our student days a large part of the year was consumed by three long spells of holidays. The year started after the Christmas vacations which were long, but not…
Sex & The City – Two Shorts, Long On Meaning
Laal Juto (Red Shoes, Bangla, 23 minutes, 35 mm, colour), adapted from a short story by the iconic Bengali writer, artist and intellectual Kamal Kumar Majumdar, is about 15-year-old Nitish…
Between Marx and Christ
This essay is dedicated to the example of Father Stan Swamy, S. J. Briefly and simply put, Liberation Theology is a school of thinking which proclaims that methods of direct…
Film& Family-Making The Face
From the life and times of the State executioner, Nata Mullick (which was the subject of an earlier documentary, One Day From A Hangman’s Life), the Calcutta-based Films Division filmmaker,…
Once There Was A Sad King, Maradona By Name
Diego Armando Maradona turns 60 on October 30. “God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn’t even need to exist.” – Charles Baudelaire. It is with…
Suffering For Their Convictions
It has long been said that the best way to know a person is to know the company he or she keeps. The reasons for the recent persecution of the…
Do You Remember Appan Menon?
Years ago there used to be a pleasant face on Doordarshan by the name of Appan Menon. He very ably and effectively anchored a popular programme called The World This…
Film & Family-Revisiting Thampu
“I planned Thampu as a documentary feature. It was shot in Thirunnavaya on the banks of the Bharathapuzha. I came to this village with ten to fifteen circus artistes who…
Mistaking Cut-Glass For Diamond
Sairat(2016) was a huge commercial success that is still being much talked about. But, whichever way you look at it, Sairat is a far cry from Nagraj Manjule’s debut film,…
A. Ayyappan: The Eighth Horse, Unreined
Scene One: Seated on the cool, polished steps leading to the main entrance of Kairali Theatre in Trivandrum, a small man with a melodious voice was singing with his eyes…
Today’s Anxious Workers Could Do With A Kedar Das
The mind is a winding river, its churning waters both cluttering and cleansing many shores and various ports of call. The broad outlines of the 1958 strike by the steel…
Cinema of Insurrection – Rebels, Gentlemen and Other Players
“Ritwik Ghatak’s stint as Vice-Principal of FTII left something of him in his students. A John Abraham would never have happened were it not for the tutelage of Ghatak. John…
Something’s Rotten About The Republic Of Reaction
(This essay was written in 2015,but remained unpublished. The thing to note is that practically everything it says holds good five years later.) At least three subjects of continuing public…
When Journalists Were Loved, Feared & Respected…
When I was a boy I once heard my father wondering to my mother why “a day did not have more than twenty-four hours”. I know it is difficult to…
Enduring Relevance of Garam Hawa
Mysore Shrinivas Sathyu, who turned ninety on July 6 this year, is an important figure in the annals of New Indian Cinema by virtue of just one film- Garam Hawa…
Manto: Only Politics, No Politicking
Each time, Saadat Hasan Manto changes position in his 65-year-old grave in Lahore, “wondering whether he is a better short story writer than God”, the subcontinent, more than any…
Strangers In Their Own Home
The 24th edition of the Kolkata international film festival, held in November 2018, showed a surprisingly large number of films from Australia, which has never been counted among the foremost…
Parents and Progeny
In my personal calendar of gains and losses, September is a craven, cowardly month. It robbed me, born the same month, of my two closest relatives. I don’t expect everybody…
The Untold Story Of M.D.Madan
The Tatas have all along been opposed to the idea of having a university in Jamshedpur. In fact, Tisco did not want even a college in the city. Which brings…
‘Venom’ Can Be No Honourable Artist’s Middle-Name!
Adoor Gopalakrishnan is, unfortunately, ‘at it’ again. Kerala’s best-known filmmaker was recently at his favourite pastime of hitting a contemporary below the belt; trying to belittle someone with whom he…
Mira Nair As A Documentarist
Some time ago, another edition of International Women’s Day was observed with the right amount of feistiness. Among other things, women-related films were screened and discussed in some places in…
Remembering Dhirendranath Gangopadhyay ( ‘DG’) — Bilet Pherat (England-Returned) Turns 100
A hundred years ago, a silent film called Bilet Pherat (England-Returned) was made. That pioneering work placed its maker by the side of such greats of early Indian cinema as…
Trainloads of Stories
In the days of my early manhood, a south Calcutta theatre called Menoka used to show Malayalam or Tamil films on Sunday mornings. Since the early years of the 20th…
Mrinal Sen: Pioneering A Movement
It is difficult not to miss the irony in the timing of Mrinal Sen’s passing on, roughly coinciding as it did with the fiftieth anniversary of perhaps his best-known film,…
Sivakasi, An Unlimited scourge
Sivakasi is a curse, a blight, an abomination that India could do without. Here, workers, especially children, are routinely killed or scarred for life in fires and explosions while making…
Corporate As Predator, State As Accomplice
W.H. Auden, the British poet, once wrote that many lives have been lived without love, but none without water - or words to that effect. Auden couldn't possibly have written…
Philosophers Of Patience
Fifty two years ago, on 20th August, Russian tanks moved into Prague to suppress what has passed into history as the ‘Spring of 1968’ when artists, intellectuals, public personalities…
The Life & Legacy Of Abdul Bari
Currently, the impression that things can be made to happen even without the participation of the working class is being sought to be furthered by employers and managements. What…
Diaries of Life, Death and Life Anew – Enduring Legacy of Bangladesh Liberation Cinema
(This essay is in commemoration of the birth centenary this year of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s Father of the Nation; and the fiftieth anniversary of the making of Zahir…
Remembering Kamlabai
Not everyone with a family is destined to enjoy all the fruits that the family has to offer. Let us take the case of Kamlabai Raghunath Gokhale, or simply Kamlabai,…
Lorca And A Certain Left Sentiment
About 85 years ago, Spanish fascists murdered Federico Garcia Lorca (1898 – 1936), the most important Spanish dramatist of the twentieth century who said “Spain is the only country in…
Athithi, Sayanam – Stories Of Attractive Misfits
K. P. Kumaran made his first film, Athithi (b/w, 35 mm., 112 mins.) in 1974. I was able to catch up with it in 2017, thanks to a retrospective devoted…
A Nun’s story
One of the most widely-known and deeply-admired of all Indian nuns who gave up the habit after receiving the call of liberation theology, is a daughter of Kerala who goes…
Thank God For The Commune!
The first edition of what began as the Bombay International Film Festival for Documentary & Short Films (there was no mention of animation in the naming then) was held between…
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