Reviews

It’s nice to be taken by surprise, once in a while, you know. Of course, one only has the pleasant kind in mind here. And better so, if this surprise comes in and through the form of a book. Fiction, if you please. There were many reasons for the surprise that I am talking of. For one, I hadn’t heard of the book itself. Nor did I know a fig about the author or the publisher. And the query (whether I would like to read and possibly write about it too) came from someone who I barely knew at the...

Books by Indophiles make for tedious reading. They are usually unreadable and insufferable. Much as they try not to, they are invariably condescending and take the reader on a journey of cultural tourism that Indian readers are never interested in. Such books need to be read only to ascertain what perception outsiders hold of India. Mark Tully is an exception. Tully is no Indophile, as we know them. He was born in India and has lived and worked here for 40 years. He is probably as Indian as any...

There are films that you wouldn't want to see a second time. There are ones that you would like to walk out of. And there are those that you should give a go-by after reading a review. Hisss is one such film. And you should thank the reviewer too for having endured it in the first place and passed on the good word to you. Hisss is indisputably the worst film I have seen in recent times. Wait, make that "in a long time." Yes, the much-awaited snake-flick is as bad as that. I am not getting paid...

Ideas, perspectives are usually the domain of the elite. Certainly, in terms of finding a space. But a new anthology is breaking ground. It has urban planners, washermen, and even a maid discussing what sort of city Delhi could or should be. Delhi, most agree willy-nilly, is in a mess. The glitz created by the Commonwealth Games is grossly superficial; it glosses over the hardships that the Games have caused to many. Too many, for comfort. As the city is re-imagined, dug up and built upon, the...

Any film slugged "based on a true story" never fails to kindle one's interest. And if it is a film about armed conflict where journalists are the protagonists, you know it is going to be a political thriller. So it is with Balibo. But writer-director Robert Connolly's ambitious work fails. Miserably. It is a true story that is largely fictitious. Anyone who does not have the background knowledge will fall for it. Balibo is a 2009 Australian feature film that follows the story of the Balibo Five...

With a title as seemingly trite as The Bank Job and a cast spearheaded by B-films action hero Jason Statham, one might have expected this to be a routine bank caper involving a Transporter pulling off something of an Italian Job. But it isn’t – it is a film that goes far beyond your simplistic expectations. You would have seen scores, even hundreds, of bank heist films, but this one seems real. It does, because it is a fictionalised account of a real event. But there have been others too of the...

After every Oscar announcement, there are the perfunctory exchanges between those who think the best picture award ought to have gone to this film, and those who reckon it should not to have gone to that. Splitting cinematic hairs makes for good debate. So, that is what we will do this day out. But, we will take only two films into consideration for this blog post – Crash and Munich. Not because one happened to like one and not the other. But, because cinematically the two films throw up a lot...

1921. America was preparing for Armageddon against the British. In the Congress, Great Britain was dubbed "a red pox spreading across the Pacific". There were calls for the United States to "seize maritime control of the world". " As war frenzy mounted, someone said, "We were Britain's colony once. She will be our colony before she is done." For the uninitiated, it may sound confounding, unbelievable. But this Anglophobia was a reality in the US between the two wars. The deadlock did break and...

Few short-fought wars have evoked so much of heat, debate and self-criticism (read, justified criticism of the party/parties at the helm of affairs) as the Kargil War did this summer. That too in the very country that ostensibly won the war. The facts are there for all to acknowledge: Pakistan-backed fundamentalist-terrorists had indeed intruded into Indian territory; many of these intruders were Pakistan army regulars in the guise of plain-clothed militants; the Indian authorities had been...

The past two decades have seen two potent but disparate movements - those of gender and participation. Each has generated writings and major implications for each other. Yet, ironically, as Robert Chambers (widely recognised as one of the main driving forces behind the great surge of interest in the use of participatory rural appraisals the globe over) contends, this is perhaps the first book to thoroughly explore the overlaps, linkages, contradictions and synergies between the two. The two...