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I watched Satyajit Ray’s Kapurush few weeks back and it brought back nice memories and interesting thoughts. While watching the movie I was reminded of a telefilm I watched on DD long back. I think it was based on a story by Chekhov (and no it was not a part of the lovely series ‘Chekhov ki kahaniyaan’ which used to be on DD long time back. Whatever happened to our good old DD?).
The plots of both of the films are strikingly similar. A married couple, an outsider and a secluded place. What is interesting is that although both the films conclude on the same note, the entire narration and characterizations are so completely different!

Kapurush starts with Amitabh Roy (Soumitra Chatterjee), a screenwriter by profession, whose car has broken down and he is left stranded in the middle of nowhere. A rich tea-estate manager comes to rescue and takes …

That’s what my mother asked me over phone few days back which made me realize that it was almost 5 months into 2008 and I was still playing songs from No Smoking, TZP, Life in a Metro etc. along with the regular old classics. The only song from 2008 in my playlist was ‘khwaja mere khwaja’ from JA.

So I decided to update myself and now that I look around everyone is talking about music here. Aamir, Jaane tu Ya Jaane Na and a lot of other albums released recently.
Some thoughts on the first two before I go on to discuss the only neglected album here.

Haara and Mehfooz from Aamir are excellent tracks. Ek lau didn’t really click for me but then I have only heard it once and I don’t want to pass the judgement as yet. I also liked the ‘climax theme’. I always liked the …

About a year back I was shocked to realize that I couldn’t recall a hindi word for ‘creativity’. This was perhaps a consequence of staying out of touch of hindi literature and hindi speaking people. Even though I make it a point to read hindi whenever I go back home, I do not feel the same command over the language as I felt few years back. The words seem to be slipping away faster and faster from my shrinking vocabulary.

But there is another important thing in a language, its grammar. I must admit that I have never studied hindi grammar formally (except in school which I never took seriously) but I have a good intuition about it and thus far my intuition has never failed me. I have spent my childhood in the heartland of hindi speaking area.
And I have rarely come across wrong hindi in literarature or old …

This Friday evening, I climbed onto the plane to Paris. The take off was so bad that to take off my mind from the uneasy sensation in my stomach and head, I picked up the Air-france magazine. I was turning pages looking at pictures, cursing the pilot and the weather when I stumbled upon advertisements of these two interesting film festivals.

Unfortunately the first one is over by now but I guess there’s no harm in mentioning it:
10th Aisan Fim Festival in Deauville(www.deauvilleasia.com) featuring movies by Im Kwon-Taek, Jiang Wen, Jia Zhang. The small write-up said that the festival was to pay tribute to Chinese, Japanese and South Korean cinema through the works of aforementioned directors.
Where was India? Are we not a part of Asia? A part where the biggest movie industry resides!

Quickly coming to other one. The 19th french film festival is going on in Aurtralia. It started on …