Jabberwock

Some love for Ohh My Dog

2026-08-13T18:12:07.648+05:30

It was interesting to see a poster for Amit Rai’s new film Ohh My Dog on a wall just across the road from my flat, near the Malviya Nagar metro station. I have never seen this space used for such promotions – wonder if it has anything to do with the good work done by Stray Buddy across Saket (and other colonies).

I am not usually keen to watch dog films (for too many reasons to get into here), but I went for Ohh My Dog and liked it a great deal. For the first two-thirds or so, anyway. The cross-cutting between stories (one about a boy searching for a lost dog, the other about a dog leading the search for a lost boy) was well done and moving, but I thought the film became protracted and too expository in the last stretch (with an overlong semi-comedic track involving Pawan Malhotra and a precocious kid). Also, at some point, it turned the main dog Oscar into a super-hero, which didn’t quite work for me.

But there are many good things overall in this very well-intentioned film (good intentions aren’t normally a big criterion for me as a viewer, and as readers might have gathered I tend to be suspicious of virtuous/affirmative cinema and the discourses around it; but I’m happy to make an exception for a film that champions street dogs). Also there was a nifty little performance by Pankaj Tripathi, whom I hadn’t much liked in the last 2-3 things I saw him in. He and Sulakhyana Baruah play two teachers who diligently aid the rescue efforts (in the two separate stories which never intersect) – their reassuring presence being an important counterpoint to the film’s depiction of cops, which isn’t complimentary.

P.S. a small thing that struck me as being off in the opening scene – a nice, sentimental scene where a deceased service dog is being given state honours. There are three other (living) dogs, standing in attendance, and when the loud gunshots begin as part of the tribute, there is no reaction from them – no flinching, nothing. Maybe I’m over-triggered by my horrendous Diwali experiences with street dogs, but I couldn’t help flinching myself in anticipation at those sounds.
(Much later in the film, there is also a scene where loud firecrackers are flung out of a car with the intention of disorienting a dog – but again, the canine’s reaction seemed too placid to me.)

P.P.S. I had heard beforehand that this "small" film is gaining attention through word of mouth, but it was still very nice to see firsthand that the hall was packed - and the audience, though I didn't get the impression it was made up of dog-obsessives, was receptive and sympathetic.

Short take: One, Two, Three

2026-08-09T09:25:04.145+05:30

As a big James Cagney fan, I can’t believe it took me so long to get around to One, Two, Three – a crazy, breathless political comedy that is everything you might expect from the only ever collaboration between Cagney and Billy Wilder. This story about a middle-aged Coca-Cola executive in West Berlin – and a ditzy 17-year-old girl in his charge who crosses the border and falls in love with an East German Commie – is chockful of verbal digs at Capitalism and Communism, and everything in between. And Cagney, even in his sixties, is that tremendous force of nature – rat-a-tatting his way through the Wilder-IAL Diamond screenplay, and probably making those two writers feel slow for the only time in their careers. (No one in any Wilder film has tossed off so many lines so quickly. This is stuff to equal the best of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. And some of the situations are as deadpan-absurd and chaotic as the ones in another Grant-starrer, Arsenic and Old Lace.)

Of added interest: here you see Horst Buchholz, who played Nathuram Godse on screen two years later (in Nine Hours to Rama), as the fiery young America-loathing Otto.

Also, Cagney pays tribute to one of his most famous scenes from 30 years earlier – the grapefruit-smashing in The Public Enemy.

P.S. those two commas in the film’s title feel like a sly joke – this film’s script plays like it is from a universe where commas never existed and can only cause unnecessary trouble.

Shades of nostalgia, from 1920s Minions to 1980s henchmen

2026-08-07T20:49:09.204+05:30

(from my Economic Times column. Don't miss my profile illustration, further down in the post – I'm quite chuffed with it)
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Sometime last month I was sitting in a fancy auditorium watching what, in common parlance, is a “children’s movie” – with more than a dozen kids (and a few adults) at a birthday screening for my nine-year-old. It was an animated feature, wonderfully imagined and realised, and perfectly suited to the 3D format we watched it in. Laughs and titters emanated from the seats around me. And yet I’m certain that I appreciated Minions & Monsters more than any of the younglings in the room.

Because apart from being perfectly enjoyable on its own terms, this film is also a reverential, homage-drenched fever dream for anyone who loves deep cinema history. The plot has the squawking yellow Minions stumbling onto a movie shoot in silent-era Hollywood, getting employed in films, and having to negotiate the transition to the sound era – and this is rich ground for many cinematic references.

I was spellbound by the opening moments, where the present-day Universal Pictures logo transforms – in reverse chronology – into its earlier iterations, bright colour yielding to grainy black and white. After which we get vignettes ranging from Eardweard Muybridge’s 1870s series “The Horse in Motion” (which heralded the “motion pictures” we know) to the Lumiere Brothers’s train arriving at a station. And the legendary “moon gets it in the eye” shot from Georges Melies’s 1903 film Le Voyage dans la Lune (with a Minion-face in place of the Moon-face).

A kid in the hall made whimpering sounds as all this happened: “I hope this won’t be a black and white film!” he said. If this plebeian wretch had been sitting next to me, I would have emptied a sack of hot buttery popcorn over his head, but I ignored him, much as I have done undergrad students who say monochrome makes their eyes hurt.

Meanwhile, onscreen, there were recreations of classic scenes featuring Chaplin, Keaton and Harold Lloyd: from Steamboat Bill Jr, Safety Last, Modern Times. And later, films like The Maltese Falcon, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Citizen Kane (with a Minion as the dying Kane in the opening scene, saying everything but the required “Rosebud”).

Watching all this as someone who fell in love with early cinema as an adolescent, it was magic. If this movie had come out when I was teaching a film-history course a few years ago, I would have shown these scenes alongside the originals.

For many grown-ups, watching a good (contemporary) animated film is like a time-machine ride to a past when they loved such movies without filters, without the terrible burden of being an indulgent “adult” (or having to perform adultness, for themselves or for others). Minions & Monsters gave me that sensation (a memory of being rapt by the 1960s version of The Jungle Book, for instance) as well as a different form of nostalgia – "Anemoia", a wistful yearning for a time and place that one never actually knew firsthand (in this case, early Hollywood at the dawn of movie-making).

But a month ago I also experienced a nostalgia that had to do with my training in mainstream Hindi films as a child. And again, it involved a henchman. If the Minions universe gets laughs from its audacious premise – cute little yellow creatures who end up serving the most evil masters they can find – 1980s Hindi cinema was populated by sidekicks who stood by, drinks in hand, smirking at every booming proclamation made by Amrish Puri or Kader Khan, leering at the heroines as they performed the climactic dance number (before the heroes showed up to save the day).

Those films were my pop-cultural wellsprings, and so it was gratifying to encounter Dan Dhanoa – who was one of those minions in beloved films like Tridev and Zalzala – in Chandigarh. “Captain Dan”, as he is widely known, runs a homestay called Anchorage42, a warm space filled with photos from his stint in films.

Walking through this shrine was as exciting for me as those Old Hollywood scenes in Minions & Monsters had been. But there was nothing silent-movie-ish about this experience. For days afterwards, I watched song sequences like “Gajar ne kiya hai ishaara” – with Dan and other rogues jiggling along in the background – on loop. Oye Oye, went my cinephile heart.

Ways of seeing, and not seeing: on Shoma Chatterji's The Male Gaze Redefined

2026-08-01T20:32:01.143+05:30

(Wrote a version of this review for The Hindu's Sunday paper)

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A book reviewer – or a film reviewer – often falls into the trap of judging a work by pre-set notions of what it ought to be, fixating on exclusions rather than what it contains. This is something any serious critic should be mindful of. Yet I must confess that some of my reservations about Shoma Chatterji’s The Male Gaze Redefined are along those lines.

Subtitled “Through Mother India and Other Classics of Indian Cinema”, this book examines the works of nine major male directors in terms of the attitudes to women revealed in their films (spanning several decades). To elucidate her points about ways of looking and depicting, Chatterji also discusses – and occasionally argues with – Western film theory by Laura Mulvey and others.

This is an unquestionably worthy project, and Chatterji, like any writer, is free to choose her area of study and to stay within its limits. In actual practice, though, things get trickier, because here is a freshly published book – not a reprint or a revised edition – which makes many broad-based statements about Indian cinema, and doesn’t define itself as dealing only with distant history. That being the case, one might raise an eyebrow at the datedness of some of its content.

For instance: right at the end of a generally insightful chapter touching on idealised goddess representations of women, as well as the suppressing of the voices of flesh-and-blood female characters, comes an observation about trends changing for the better. “The final note comes from two young directors,” writes Chatterji, “[whose films] speak of women, and for women, in a language we all understand but are afraid to speak.”

Who are these “young directors”? One is Mahesh Manjrekar, now aged 68, and the other is Rituparno Ghosh, who passed away 13 years ago.

In fairness, the chapter containing this assertion does specify a timeline of “1935 to 2000” for its study. But in all other respects, The Male Gaze Redefined asks to be assessed as a 2026 publication, and there is a randomness in what it chooses to include or leave out. In one sub-section about political films, Chatterji refers to recent works such as Indu Sarkar (2017) and Thalaivi (2021). Shyam Benegal’s Zubaida (2001) is one of the films selected for close study. But otherwise the 21st century rarely impinges on this canvas. Some passages feel like they were excerpted from papers written decades ago. The Mother India analysis cites a couple of later films that attempted to follow in the tracks of Nargis’s iconic role as Radha – but even here the films mentioned (two Smita Patil-starrers) are from the 1980s. A section titled “Silent Submission in Some Contemporary Films” boldly ventures to the mid-1990s (Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge), but no further.

This created a conflict for me as a reader. As someone whose most intense engagement has been with very old films, made decades before he was born, I can relate to and appreciate Chatterji’s study of classics. But even a reader who is invested in deep film history (neglected or treated patronisingly at a time when so much current “content” is always vying for our attention) may be perplexed about this book’s unwillingness to engage with more recent developments in feminist (or pseudo-feminist) cinema.

Timelines aside, there are other exclusions. In a work that makes generalisations about “Indian cinema” (and even observes that some Western pedagogy may not be applicable to our filmic culture), the focus is almost exclusively on Hindi and Bengali films – with only a few quick notes at the very end about directors like Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Jabbar Patel and Girish Kasaravalli.

Further, Chatterji’s main engagement is with a certain type of cinema: the filmmakers discussed are largely auteurs who come from relatively progressive, modern backgrounds (e.g. Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen) or those who worked in what is called parallel/art or Middle cinema (Benegal, Gulzar). These are directors who can be seen as essentially sympathetic to and interested in their women characters – even if there are some inevitable blind spots in their work, since they are to varying degrees affected by patriarchal conditioning.

Notwithstanding the inclusion of Vijay Anand’s Guide (and observations about his other big-budget work, such as Jewel Thief and Teesri Manzil), there is not much effort here to discuss the many ways in which “male lens” cinema operates within the truly popular or mainstream. Or to engage with the more openly or unapologetically “male” directors. A case can be made that a comprehensive analysis of this subject would have to consider the myriad ways in which women have been depicted in commercial films too – especially since these films, more than self-consciously “serious” cinema, are open to many conflicting readings. Internationally, for instance, there have been many cases of filmmakers who have been widely dismissed as objectifying women, but whose work is subsequently reassessed in other terms. Camille Paglia – always a deeply divisive figure herself in feminist studies – responded with both verve and nuance to allegations that Alfred Hitchcock was a misogynist. Brian De Palma, often derided for sleazy content in his films, has been passionately defended by women critics such as Stephanie Zacharek or Pauline Kael. Closer home, writers like Paromita Vohra and Madhavi Menon have offered layered analyses of aspects of the work of, say, Sanjay Leela Bhansali or Karan Johar, which have by and large been treated with derision by other liberal commentators.

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How best, then, to approach The Male Gaze Redefined? By reading the individual essays on specific films, entirely on their own terms – without bothering much about the larger picture. Seen this way, the book contains some thoughtful analysis and attention to detail, as you’d expect from a scholar of Chatterji’s standing. Writing about Mehboob Khan’s Mother India, she compares it with his earlier treatment of the same story, Aurat (1940), noting that the older film treats the protagonist Radha’s story in more personal terms while the later one, made a decade after Independence, places on her the additional burden of being a symbolic village-mother and nation-mother. Elsewhere, she looks at the treatment of women characters by the Bengali masters Ritwik Ghatak and Satyajit Ray, with an emphasis on the “cannibalising” of the hard-working Nita in Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara by her own family (all of whom are, in their own ways, also victims of circumstance), or Ray’s treatment of the friendship between Arati, the protagonist of Mahanagar, and her Anglo-Indian colleague Edith who can be seen as a victim of racism in reverse (at the hands of a male boss).

As she has done in her earlier work, including The Woman at the Window, Chatterji writes about objects as signifiers and markers: a scarf in Zubeida, a lipstick in Mahanagar. She celebrates the revitalising power of Waheeda Rehman’s great snake dance at a pivotal point in Guide, and remarks on the ambivalence that a viewer may feel about the attitudes of the guide Raju, played by Dev Anand. And she raises interesting questions, allowing them to hang in the air: does Mother India’s heroine, for all her framing as an inspirational figure, really have any agency when it comes to the important things (including the killing of her own errant son)? What is the purpose – and what conflicting feelings might it evoke in a viewer – of the very brief close-ups of “the naked breast of a nursing woman” in Nabyendu Chatterjee’s Parasuramer Kuthar (1989)?

Inevitably, with a work like this, a reader’s interest will vary based on his familiarity with the films being discussed. Having re-watched Meghe Dhaka Tara, Guide and Mahanagar recently (all on big screens in excellent prints), I was better equipped to appreciate the segments on those films. On the other hand, not having seen Budhadeb Dasgupta’s Andhi Gali, reading that section was an abstracted process (though Chatterji’s observations made me keen to seek the film out).

As for the writing itself, some of it is dry and repetitive. In one passage, listing the different layers of meaning carried by Radha’s kangans (bangles) in Mother India, the author says exactly the same thing in points one and two: “First, they symbolize her uncertain marital status” followed by “Second, she does not know whether she is married, widowed, or a deserted wife; the kangans are a sign of this flux”. There are other examples of such tautology, a problem that has long afflicted much cinema writing in India (in both the academic and general spheres).

Regardless of my overall reservations, though, one thing I appreciated here is Chatterji’s open-endedness and handling of complexity. At one point she suggests that though writer-director Gulzar is sensitive to his women characters, and careful not to subject them to an objectifying gaze even when the narrative might offer such opportunities, he does also seem conservative about the idea of the working woman or the woman in a position of power. That these contrary impulses exist in all artists, and often create conflicting energies in a film – this is something that Chatterji, unlike many other analysts, is attentive to. And that attitude is important when it comes to a subject as contentious and polarising as gender politics in cinema. You can disagree with some of her analyses while also appreciating the seriousness that lies behind them.

A shout-out for The Poisoned Chocolates Case (Anthony Berkeley, 1929)

2026-07-27T21:09:09.043+05:30

Most of my fiction reading in the past 3-4 months has been in the form of short stories, but I returned to a full-fledged crime novel (Golden Age, naturally) after a while, and it was a very good choice – Anthony Berkeley’s The Poisoned Chocolates Case, which had been high on my to-read pile.

“In the pantheon of detective fiction, there is nothing quite like [this book],” writes Martin Edwards in his Introduction (this is in the British Library Crime Classics edition), and while that’s the sort of claim one takes with a pinch of salt, I think it can reasonably be made here – especially when you consider that The Poisoned Chocolates Case was written nearly a hundred years ago. This book manages to be a cosy, drawing-room mystery typical of the period (with an easy-to-follow crime and a limited cast of characters) *but is also* a meta-novel that examines and comments on the process of detection and what it might reveal about the person(s) doing the mystery-solving.

This is ingrained in the playful, self-reflexive structure: six members of the Crimes Circle, a group of amateur detectives, apply themselves to the task of solving a real-life mystery, a fatal poisoning, that has lately baffled the police. The salient facts of the case are laid out for them (and for us readers) in the first couple of chapters, then lots are drawn to decide the order in which the members will present their case. The chapters that follow give us the (usually self-important) disquisitions of each member in turn, the method for arriving at their pet solution, the solution itself (with the murderer’s identity often dramatically concealed for as long as possible)… and then the wind is taken out of the speaker’s sails by a counter-point or two showing flaws in the deduction.

For me, the book – though engrossing all the way through – really picked up steam around the halfway mark. The first two or three solutions, though well-thought-out (and interspersed with some entertaining banter amongst the rival characters), also felt a little long-winded in the telling, perhaps because of the personalities involved: the first “detective” to speak is a pedantic barrister, the second is a lady playwright much concerned with the Eternal Triangle as a dramatic trope. But around the time that Roger Sheringham (president of the Crimes Circle, and one of Anthony Berkeley’s regular sleuths) begins his own investigation – which involves a certain degree of legwork – things get more interesting; and even more so when Sheringham’s proposed solution (which is the one I had been expecting to see and had vaguely worked out in my own mind) is debunked as well! (This isn’t a spoiler: we know from the start that Sheringham will be the fourth to present his case, meaning that two more solutions are to follow his.)

It’s just about possible that The Poisoned Chocolates Case won’t work too well for some Golden Age readers who want a pure mystery with a single clear-cut solution (minus quasi-academic reflections on inductive and deductive processes) – but there would be very few such readers, in my view. Most mystery buffs should have a very good time with this book’s multiple false solutions, culminating in the sly “real” solution.

Ah, but IS that the real solution after all? By the very nature of this narrative, you feel the deductions could carry on and on (if there had been more than six members in the circle). And as it happens, this British Crime Classics Library edition includes two Epilogues – further solutions provided by other writers many decades after the book was published. The first of these is a short solution, written in 1979 by Christianna Brand, whom I have become a big fan of over the past year. Perhaps because I have very high expectations of her now, I wasn’t bowled over by her contribution (though it has some of her characteristic wicked humour). The second epilogue, very well done I thought, is by Martin Edwards himself – a solution that takes the mystery in a fresh but plausible new direction, *and yet* stays faithful to the tone and the terms of the original novel.

Purists might suggest, though, that you should forget about those two add-ons and just concentrate on the book itself, as it was originally written – in which case you’d have a perfectly satisfying ending (satisfying for the reader, I mean – not so much for the sleuths, who find themselves in a state of limbo at the end). Meanwhile I’m looking forward to reading a few more Berkeleys soon (once I have finished a couple of Brands and Josephine Teys on my list).

[A few earlier posts on crime fiction are here]

Mango-hunting in Rataul

2026-07-11T11:10:06.022+05:30

Scenes from last week's day-trip to nearby Rataul, to visit the mango orchards (with a few friends who were more experienced in this sort of thing than I was). The walk was led by the mighty Sohail Hashmi, who has been doing this for many years, and who cautioned us beforehand that Rataul hadn’t had a good crop this year. This didn’t affect the quality and variety of the mangoes we encountered, though. After a traditional monsoon lunch (it being advisable to not have the mangoes on an empty stomach) at the Salma Public School (proceeds from the walk go here), we dug into the fruit. I hadn’t expected to sample more than two or three mangoes – mainly from the local Anwar Rataul variety – but as ambition and courage grew I ended up having many other types too, including the Gulab Jamun, the Laziz Baksh, the Doodhiya Gola and others whose names have slipped my mind.

We ate them with our hands after peeling the skin off from the top, the best way – and I suspect that having liberated myself thus from the tyranny of cutlery, this is how I will have mangoes at home too from now on; at least the ones that aren’t too big. I also brought back 3 kg of the Anwar Rataul mangoes, which then vanished very fast.

Pics include the start of the trip, on Safdar Hashmi Marg (where my friends Nikhil Kumar and Eshan Sharma diligently helped Sohail keep track of the more than 100 people piling into three coaches). Others encountered included long-time acquaintances Shivam Vij, Amitava Sanyal and the excellently erudite Ambarish Satwik.

P.S. more about Sohail’s Rataul walks (including the rudely named Haramzada mango) in this report.

From Hitchcock to Shyamalan – on logic, plausibility, and the joys of being manipulated

2026-07-09T17:37:36.722+05:30

(From my Economic Times column)
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Reading a book about Alfred Hitchcock recently, I saw one of his quotable quotes, a response to viewers who demand plausibility in every scene. “Film should be stronger than logic,” Hitch said.

People who have low tolerance for “escapist” films, or for exciting genres like suspense, horror or fantasy, might see this as an artistic cop-out – a sign that a massy filmmaker is taking the “anything goes if I can provide easy thrills” route, and mounting a cheap defence of his approach. (“My films aren’t slices of life, they are slices of cake,” Hitchcock also glibly said once.)

But for some of us, this makes perfect sense: when we put ourselves in the hands of a director who is in control of his material, we are willing to be “played like an organ” (to cite yet another Hitchcock quote!) in the dark hall. By the way, I’m also waggling my eyebrows now at dull champions of subdued realism who disapprove of lush background music in a film – even if it’s a gorgeous score – because it manipulates their emotions. As if such manipulation hasn’t always been one of the many functions of cinema, or of any art.

These things don’t follow an easily quantifiable pattern, of course – we all have deal-breakers. One of my favourite Hitchcock films is the 1951 Strangers on a Train**, but I am conflicted about its famous climactic scene where the hero and the villain battle on an out-of-control fairground carousel. The first time I watched that scene, I felt an adrenaline rush, but the effect only lasted that one time. On subsequent viewings I have cringed at the shot when a cop fires randomly in the direction of the round-about (which has plenty of people, including children, on it!) and plugs the fairground attendant by mistake – which is what sets the action going. That crazy act took me out of the narrative, and it wasn’t helped by the shaky back-projection that followed.

In recent weeks, though, I had some very good experiences with suspension-of-disbelief movies – including three different types of horror films, each requiring that you submit to a particular improbability. The horror-romance Obsession gives us a new spin on the Monkey’s Paw trope (your biggest wish is granted, in a horribly twisted way), the creepy Hokum offers the possibility of a witch haunting an Irish hotel (in an otherwise realist narrative), and the agoraphobia-inducing Backrooms is about mysterious endless liminal spaces on the other side of a basement wall.

I happily succumbed to these conceits, went along for the ride. But my viewing highlight of last month was by a director many of us are ambivalent about (not least because he is one of “us”, who made a name for himself in Hollywood – and invited some brickbats, amidst scattered successes). Watching M Night Shyamalan’s 2024 thriller Trap alone, on a big home screen, I was riveted despite its loony premise (no spoiler: this is revealed in the first 10 minutes) of a serial-killer-cum-family-man learning that a trap has been set for him at a pop concert where he is accompanying his adolescent daughter.

As is the case with most of Shyamalan’s films, there is some clunky dialogue in Trap, and a case of unbelievably stupid behaviour by a character, in a scene that’s essential for the narrative to proceed. But awareness of these flaws didn’t affect my response to the film. I loved the pacing, the sense of claustrophobia, Josh Hartnett’s performance, the music score by Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka, who also plays the narrative’s pop-star, Lady Raven. And the sly little touches, such as the casting of 80-year-old Hayley Mills – who had played the twins in Parent Trap (1961) – in a story about a trapped parent.

With films that have a kinetic, emotional effect on you while you’re watching them – but which are sketchy in matters of logic or character behaviour – you often feel sheepish later in the cold light of day. But tellingly, I was just as engaged by Trap on a second viewing, and am still thinking about the film after weeks. Emotion overrode rationality, and that’s how it stayed. It’s great when that happens.

(More about Trap here.)

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**The book I mentioned at the start of the piece was about Strangers on a Train too - Criss-Cross, by Stephen Rebello. Rebello’s book about Psycho was another favourite back in the day, and this one is just as detailed, and perhaps even more personal. In his Author’s Note, Rebello mentions watching Strangers on a Train at a time of his own sexual awakening and being fascinated by the Bruno character – coded gay – and how the film views him. This bit reminded me of that great personal essay by Robin Wood in his Hitchcock book, about watching Rope in 1948 as a teenager and identifying with the John Dall character at a time when he was still trying to come to terms with his own homosexuality.

Among other things, this new book has some good stuff about the artistic clashes between Hitch and Raymond Chandler, who was initially hired to do the screenplay. A sample below.

An encounter with Dan the man

2026-06-24T12:38:15.471+05:30

Guess who. (Fans of 1980s mainstream Hindi cinema *might* get it.)

See pic below for the answer…👇

I had a short but very pleasant Chandigarh stay at (Captain) Dan Dhanoa’s homestay, Anchorage42 – filled with artworks, artefacts from his sailing days, and photos from his stint in the film industry (when he played villain’s henchman in such classics of my childhood as Mard, Tridev, Zalzala, and Vishwatma). Chatted with Captain Dan for 15-20 minutes: he was never really a film-watcher, he said – mainly an army kid who enjoyed horse-riding and sports – but he did form close friendships in Bombay, and spoke about his recently deceased pals Pankaj Dheer and Satish Shah, as well as others: Jackie Shroff, Sham Kaushal. And about the “old girls” whom he still keeps in touch with – including Kimi Katkar, Anita Raaj, and Sangeeta Bijlani.

Also met him briefly at breakfast the next day, where he was chatting with a few other guests his age, and exchanging stories about their boarding schools (including Doon, where Dan went). Just a sweet, bearish man, chuckling gently, worlds removed from the sleazy-rapey bad guys of 1980s cinema. But I did spend the rest of the day with Tridev’s “Gazar ne kiya hai ishaara” playing in my head….

Faces and facets (as presented by the bug on Satyajit Ray's windowsill)

2026-06-24T10:40:56.776+05:30

(Did this short piece for Reader’s Digest, about the new Nemai Ghosh-Satyajit Ray exhibition. Some photos from my walkthrough last month are here. And here is my "50 Shades of Ray" essay from an earlier DAG catalogue)
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A cliched way of describing the relationship between photographer Nemai Ghosh and legendary filmmaker Satyajit Ray is that the former was a “Boswell” – working with camera rather than pen – to the latter. From their first collaboration in 1968, on the sets of Ray’s classic fantasy Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, a kinship formed: Ray appreciated the shooting stills taken by Ghosh, and for the next twenty-four years Ghosh would devotedly chronicle the life and art of the man he admired so much.

But a more amusing description of their working relationship can be found in the book Faces and Facets: Satyajit Ray in Colour, published by DAG (formerly Delhi Art Gallery) to accompany an ongoing exhibition of Ghosh’s photos. Ray – no doubt with great affection – once said, “Nemai is like a bug on my windowsill.” It’s a droll image that makes sense when you look at these images, which are intimate and expansive at the same time, effortlessly bringing together Ray the person and Ray the multi-talented artist.

Though many of Ghosh’s Ray photos have been displayed before, this exhibition presents a series of carefully restored colour photographs, divided into two broad categories. The first comprises solo images of the maestro in various moods, ranging from pensive to busy to goofy, as well as family photos; the second category centres on the films themselves, capturing behind-the scenes vignettes from such works as Shatranj ke Khiladi, Sonar Kella, Ashani Sanket, Agantuk, and Sadgati.

We see Ray at work, as well as in quotidian situations. Here he is, consulting the rough-bound notebook – or the kheror khata – that he maintained for each film, full of his storyboards, scribbled ideas and stated intentions for each scene. In another photo he is painting, with his own hand, the opening title of Joy Baba Felunath on a Varanasi ghat – a reminder that he wanted to be involved in every possible aspect of his cinema, even making the promotional posters and booklets. There are images with Hindi-film actors such as Sanjeev Kumar, Amjad Khan, Smita Patil and Om Puri, who were among the few Bombay stars who got to work with him. Elsewhere, he rehearses with an orchestra, supervising musical arrangements for a film.

One striking image from the Ghare Bhaire shoot has Ray seated by a river bank, having walked away to be by himself; in his notes, Ghosh said he was like a rishi in meditation here, but this might also be a view of a troubled artist in a predicament, trying to find a solitary space away from the hurly-burly, even as he practised a collaborative art.

There are location photos too, such as a group shot with the great dancer Balasaraswati during a beach shoot in Tamil Nadu for Ray’s documentary Bala – evidence of the director’s admiration for artistes in other fields, including classical music. Or a shoot in Rajasthan with camels in the background, where Ray apparently joked – alluding to his budget constraints – that he had to make do with one camera set-up for an adventure film like this, while someone like Akira Kurosawa would have used nine cameras.

And then there are the more personal photos, including the wedding-anniversary pictures that Ghosh took of Ray and his wife Bijoya over the years – images which Ray was reticent about, asking that they not be published at the time.

Worshipful as Ghosh was towards his subject, much of his work also performs the function of demythologising an artist whose very name can be daunting for some people (especially those who have only grappled with the reputation of “Satyajit Ray” without experiencing his work, which is usually tender and accessible). For instance, in some photos, taken just months before Ray’s death in 1992, we see him at a point when his health was deteriorating fast. One poignant photo has him walking in his verandah to get the exercise he needed because of his health problems – an unusual image, given that most shots of him at home show him at his desk, surrounded by creative tools. To see him older and frailer is to be reminded that everyone slows down, and even the greatest achievers eventually do only a fraction of what they set out to do.

Many film buffs are familiar with the phenomenon of a second-hand “nostalgia” for a place and time that they never actually lived through: certainly, many of us have wondered what it would be like to be a fly on the wall – or a bug on a windowsill! – when Satyajit Ray was in full flow in his study, or on set. These photos give us many iconic moments frozen in time, with much to relish and revisit – not just for the Ray fan but for anyone who worries about the carelessness and neglect that has marked cultural documentation in India.

[The Faces and Facets exhibition is on at DAG, Janpath Road, till July 4]

On M Night Shyamalan’s delicious thriller-musical Trap (and emotional vs logical viewing)

2026-06-18T17:12:05.431+05:30

A couple of weeks ago I made the time to go to my (generally neglected) screening room in Panchshila Park for a few evenings, and watch some films by myself – after carefully picking titles from my OTT watchlists that I thought might fit my mood. This worked out quite well – the films watched included Send Help (mentioned in this post), Richard Linklater's Hit Man, A Different Man, and the 1956 adaptation of one of my favourite novels, A Kiss Before Dying. But possibly the most riveting experience for me during this stretch was M Night Shyamalan’s 2024 thriller Trap, with its premise (no spoiler: this is revealed in the first 10-15 minutes) of a serial-killer-cum-family-man learning that a trap has been set for him at a pop concert. Cooper (Josh Hartnett) is accompanying his adolescent daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to the show, the star of which – and the cynosure of teen eyes – is Lady Raven (played by Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka, who wrote and performed the film’s soundtrack). Then things happen to make him feel very paranoid.

What was really unusual (for me) is that I was sucked into the world of Trap within the opening seconds by its music – as the song “Don’t Wanna Be Yours” (one of Saleka’s many compositions) plays over the stylishly designed opening credits. It normally takes me some time, and some re-listening, to appreciate a music track, but the effect was immediate here. And I enjoyed the aural segue at the end of the titles, with young Riley (in the car with her dad on their way to the concert) singing the same number in a shakier, quavering, excited-teen way.

It is silly to assume a film will be great because it begins well, but at this point I was already feeling the familiar, visceral excitement that I have felt with some favourite films by other directors – Brian De Palma being an obvious example – whose tradition Shyamalan sort-of follows in. I had a sixth sense that this was going to go well. And it did.

As I have probably said in earlier write-ups on Shyamalan’s films (especially Unbreakable and Split), even his “flawed” or bordering-on-ludicrous work can be more stimulating (in some ways at least) than the solid, Consistently Good work of many other directors. As is the case with practically all his films, there is some clunky dialogue in Trap, and at least one case of seriously implausible (if not outright stupid) behaviour by a character, in an early scene that’s essential for the narrative to proceed – but even as I was aware of this convenience-device, it didn’t affect my engagement with the film; emotion overrode rationality. I loved the pacing, the sense of claustrophobia, and Josh Hartnett’s performance – the old trope of creating some anxiety for the bad guy by putting us in his shoes is well executed here. For me the film was at its best in the first 50 or so minutes when the setting is the concert, but it maintained the overall momentum, even if the intensity sags for a while in the second half.

I also liked Saleka’s music *a lot*, and thought it worked very well within the story; I don't agree with the criticism that this was purely an ego project or a “concert movie” that Shyamalan made as a showcase for his daughter (presumably at the expense of the narrative).

And, small as Hayley Mills’s role was, it was nice to see her after a long time – witty casting of an actress still perhaps best known for The Parent Trap, in a film about a trapped parent.

Looking it up online, Trap seems to have been a polarising film, which again is usually the case with MNS. But I wasn’t too surprised to see that Cahiers du Cinema (which still has a tradition of bold/off-kilter choices and certain forms of auteur-worship) had it on their top 10 films list for 2024. Also that it was one of Luca Guadagnini’s favourites that year.

Tellingly, I am still thinking in very positive terms about Trap many days later. This was interesting, because with films that have a kinetic, emotional effect on you while you’re watching them – but which are also sketchy in matters of logic or character behaviour – you tend to feel sheepish when thinking about them later in the cold light of day; you dwell more on the implausibilities/plot holes. But that wasn’t the case here – Trap actually grew in stature for me, and I revisited a couple of the more affecting moments, such as a scene where Lady Raven asks her audience to think of someone they need to forgive, and to put their phone lights on if they have “released” them. This leads to a lovely hushed moment where hundreds of lights in the darkened hall go on, while Cooper (who is being a fond dad, saying “Wow” at the right moments to please his little girl, but is obviously also preoccupied) looks around at the transformed setting. Followed by another good, gentle song, “Release”.

(Incidentally, this scene - the visuals, the music, the use of lights in a dim setting - reminded me of the lovely moment in De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise where Jessica Harper sings “Old Souls” in her resonant voice.)

P.S. even Shyamalan’s cameo was bearable this time, not annoying like it sometimes has been in the past.

(Related post: about Shyamalan's Split)

Quick notes: Targets (1968)

2026-06-17T21:08:24.210+05:30

“All the good movies have been made.” “The world belongs to the young.”

A couple of nice meta-scenes between the 80-year-old Boris Karloff and the young Peter Bogdanovich in Bogdanovich’s directorial debut Targets – with Karloff playing a version of himself, a former horror-movie star made weary by the state of the modern and by his own obsolescence; and PB trying to persuade him to do a new film.

Targets is a very strange film (as my friend Satish pointed out after we watched it together in my screening room), and not fully realised in some ways; but it is strange in a good way as far as I’m concerned. In the same sense as many of the nascent films made by that generation of American directors around the same time were (De Palma’s Greetings and Hi Mom! among them). Raw, experimental, cross-cutting between old and new forms of expression - all this during a pivotal transitional period for American cinema where young filmmakers who were movie geeks were simultaneously paying homage to their heroes and trying to push the boundaries of what could be shown onscreen. One moment Targets is paying affectionate tribute to Howard Hawks by showing a scene from The Criminal Code, the next minute there is a guerrilla-style, almost documentary-like sequence built around a sniper targeting vehicles.

Also here: the young Jack Nicholson in the film-within-the-film… a few scenes from Roger Corman’s The Terror.

Meeting Aloka

2026-06-17T20:54:15.298+05:30

At a hotel in Gurgaon yesterday, I had my most satisfying “celebrity” encounter ever – this was a meet-and-greet for Aloka the Peace Dog, organised by the advocate Divyam Khera as well as other kind people. It was a packed hall, with the crème de la crème of animal-welfare groups, but as the hosts pointed out, it was to be understood that Aloka was the only VIP in the room – no special treatment for anyone. So no one got more than 10-15 seconds with Aloka (he has had a busy schedule these last few weeks, and only just made it onto a Kathmandu-Delhi flight in the morning), but fleeting though our time with him was, it was great to see him in person after months of following his journey on Instagram and elsewhere.

It was also good to listen to his monk friends, mainly Bhikkhu Paññākāra, speak about compassion. And to be able to hope that other indie dogs get a fraction of the respect and care that Aloka gets – something that has definitely not been happening here, especially after the Supreme Court orders dating back to August last year, and the many outbreaks of cruelty visited on even the most sedate community dogs. (When I returned to Saket yesterday, I found myself looking more attentively at some of the dogs who live on the fringes, dependent on the occasional kinship of sabzi-wallahs and guards, and noting how much some of them resembled Aloka, in features or in bearing. And how lucky he has been compared to lakhs of his cousins across the country.)

Coincidentally, yesterday’s meeting was on the 14th anniversary of my Foxie’s death – that made it a little more special, and I was glad that Abhilasha could come for the event. Notwithstanding the separation, and everything that went wrong over the years, the shared experience of parenting Fox – and then losing her as traumatically and unexpectedly as we did – will remain a permanent bond.

P.S. these are only a couple of basic/fuzzy pics of yesterday’s event. You’ll find many other better ones online, on Instagram and other social media, and on news websites.

In memory of Awtar Krishna Kaul

2026-05-28T11:45:20.535+05:30

Pleased to see this book, a tribute to the director Awtar Krishna Kaul who died in 1974, aged just 35, shortly after completing his only feature film, the National Award-winner 27 Down. The book is by Vinod Kaul, the director’s nephew, and I contributed an essay to it (a slightly revised and updated version of this piece I wrote more than a decade ago, after watching 27 Down for the first time).

Given the very distinct sensibility of Kaul’s film, and the fact that it was made around the same time as other cornerstones of the Hindi cinema New Wave (e.g. Benegal’s Ankur), his untimely death created one of the great “what ifs” in Hindi-film history. He might have gone on to do some very important work, and this book is a document of a life and career cut short. With some affectionate back-stories about Kaul and his family.

(Available on Amazon, and on Mystore)

Strange and nasty love: films about power games, role reversal... and mush

2026-05-23T17:23:28.171+05:30

(My Economic Times column – about a few good films I watched recently, and the possibly whimsical links I saw between them. As you can see from the image below, they added an octopussy element to my columnist picture, which I’m pleased about)
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Enjoy romantic films? Here are a few that I watched, and liked a great deal, in the past month. There is the recently released Send Help, a gory survival thriller-cum-black comedy wherein the lines “I’m sorry I gouged your eyes out” and “I’m sorry I stabbed you” are immediately followed by “God, I love you”. Then there’s the 2022 two-hander Sanctuary, about a psychological tug-of-war between a corporate heir and the woman he hires for role-playing sexual games – with the pre-written script getting out of control. And finally, the Zendaya-Robert Pattinson-starrer The Drama, in which a man learns something about his bride-to-be that causes panic attacks, near-infidelity, and cringe-inducing wedding toasts.

And no, I’m not joking about these being romantic films; it’s possible to view them as intense love stories (or intense love-hate stories, which may be the same thing). In fact, two of them (I won’t reveal which two) end on a mushy note where we see that the twisted journey may have been essential to the consolidation of a relationship, bringing it to a point of emotional maturity and calm. (Or to a point where the people involved just throw their hands up and say, “Heck, we’re both so messed up, we may as well stay together for eternity.”) Those journeys are a lot of fun, for us viewers anyway, even if you have mixed feelings about how it all ends.

Nor am I saying these films are similar in some overriding sense – maybe it was because I watched them close to each other that I saw these links. While all of them are dark, unpredictable, even deranged (to varying degrees), there are differences based on genre and situation. For instance, Send Help – directed by horror expert Sam Raimi – contains the most explicit violence (physical and psychological) between its protagonists, a social misfit and her cocky young boss who are stranded on an island after a plane crash. In contrast, the unsettling elements in The Drama are mostly confined to brief nightmare scenes; in their real-world interactions, the lovebirds continue to be polite and considerate even after tension has crept into their relationship.

The similarities can be telling, though. Both Sanctuary and Send Help centre on a man and a woman playing power games, taking turns being in control – with the man, in each case, being the scion of a rich family and the woman someone who appears subservient to him… until she is not. Traditional gender roles are reversed: I brought home the bacon, quips the Rachel McAdams character in Send Help, after killing a boar for dinner; in Sanctuary, Margaret Qualley’s Rebecca goes from being a glorified sex worker to demanding a large stake in a company.

Compared to these films, another one I recently watched – the 2024 production Paradise, starring the talented Darshana Rajendran and Roshan Mathew as a couple who get into trouble while vacationing in Sri Lanka – is strait-laced in its depiction of people under stress. But again, there is a sense of a woman – subdued and quiet early on – coming into her own, and the overturning of conventional roles. Here, this is done through the subverting of mythological templates, with some (perhaps overdone) Ramayana commentary – the Darshana character responds to an earnest Lankan tour guide by mentioning that there are hundreds of versions of the epic, many with significant variants.

But now, since my editor is looking at me askance, I should mention that if the above films are not lovey-dovey enough for your tastes, consider a couple of other recent releases, sweeter and friendlier in tone. Both involve inter-species love: in The Sheep Detectives, shepherd Hugh Jackman looks after his flock with such devotion – even reading them detective novels – that they set out to solve the mystery of his death; and in Remarkably Bright Creatures, Sally Field, still wonderful at age eighty, plays an aquarium cleaner who bonds with a wise, sometimes pedantic old octopus.

All this has been a way of saying: broaden your definition of “love story” and you’ll have many more good films to choose from. You might also have fun locating other connections between them. A hint to get you started: Send Help has an octopus too, but one that’s used to create a paralysing toxin. Nothing mushy about that scene.

A new exhibition of Nemai Ghosh’s (all-colour) Satyajit Ray photos

2026-05-21T19:35:58.822+05:30

I had a nice time conducting the walkthrough for the (very elegant) Nemai Ghosh-Satyajit Ray colour-photo exhibition at DAG (formerly Delhi Art Gallery). I can never assess how well or badly these talks are going when I’m in the middle of one, but a few people told me later that it went well. There was a very large crowd, which was a bit scary at first (the idea of all these people moving around together to view the photos in a compact exhibition space… I was thinking of those videos of enormous clusters of birds performing synchronised flight), but everyone was attentive and there were some warm interactions. A few photos are here, and below.

Having previously seen these Nemai-Ray photos only on a PDF on my laptop, I was very impressed both by their innate quality and by the careful restoration and display. As I said during the walkthrough, it was particularly moving to see the photos of a frailer Ray in his final years, after the heart attacks, including one of him dutifully walking up and down his verandah because the doctor had told him to (and looking like he would much rather be sitting in his favourite chair, writing, drawing, composing, intently chalking out the next film). A reminder that everyone slows down, and even the greatest multi-tasking achievers eventually do only a fraction of everything that they wanted to do. Got a chance to speak about his work after a long time, and to revisit some books about him.

The exhibition is on till July 4 – if you’re in Delhi anytime in the next month and a half, please do go for it when you can.

P.S. here is the essay I did for DAG's earlier Nemai Ghosh book, for an exhibition of mostly black-and-white photos.

P.P.S. a personal highlight after the event: an elderly lady brought along her copy of the Hrishikesh Mukherjee book, asked me to sign it, *and* hesitantly pointed out a mistake after specifying the page number: I had referred to the actress playing Saeed Jaffrey’s wife in Kisi se na Kehna as Usha Kiran, when it was actually Lalita Kumari. This was quite a blooper, considering that I was something of an Usha Kiran fan, including back when she was much younger, playing opposite Dilip Kumar in Musafir.
It was a bit embarrassing, obviously (though this woman was being very apologetic about even mentioning the error to me) but it made me happy for another reason: this, and a couple of other observations she made, indicated that she had read the book closely and carefully. Which is something that doesn’t often happen. Too many readers are skimmers and dabblers.

Hail, divine psychedelic motorcycle: why I dug Dug Dug

2026-05-14T19:09:03.362+05:30

Another film I greatly enjoyed in a hall (late-night show, very few people around, just the right environment) is Ritwik Pareek’s Dug Dug, wherein a “miracle-performing” motorcycle becomes a deity and is plied with offerings of liquor and cigarettes in honour of its late owner. (It was pretty funny to see the “tobacco and liquor harmful” caution on the corner of the screen almost throughout, considering that the film itself was treating these things as markers of piety.) Right from the mesmeric opening sequence involving neon lights, a creepy billboard, acid music and an almost-deserted road, Dug Dug creates a distinct mood, largely through sound and set design that evoke the heydays of psychedelia (Hunter Thompson on a Rajasthani highway, if you will). An echoing effect accompanies some of the dialogue too, creating a sense of things heard and seen as if through glass, or underwater. (This also fits the narrative, since much of the talk involves people who are either drunk on hooch or seeing mirages and miracles in the desert – the kind of setting where religions do tend to take birth.)

I wasn’t sure that the film found the best balance between the two modes it operates in: on one hand there are the abstract, minimal-dialogue passages driven by montage and numbing repetition (these portions felt more organic to me, more apt to a story about zeal and delusion) – on the other hand, there were exposition scenes towards the end that felt a bit overdone. The creation of mood would have been enough, I felt. But this wasn’t a big issue. A very singular film. Jai Shree Luna.

P.S. and the ending reminded me of the Alan Moore quote “The one place Gods inarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity”.

Brief notes on recently enjoyed films: The Drama, Patriot, The Sheep Detectives

2026-05-13T12:25:45.582+05:30

Following a few months where I had spent much more of my time (and eye-strain time) on reading as opposed to watching, I ended up seeing quite a few good films, including some in the hall. Vastly different sorts of films too. Listing a few here:

The Drama: a jet-black comedy that ends up, almost in spite of itself, as something akin to an aww-sho-shweet romance. I was engaged all the way through. Though in some obvious ways this is an often morbid and morose film - with the key plot point touching on a subject that many people felt mustn't be treated frivolously as a MacGuffin - I thought it was also very funny... and in the end, mushier than many conventional love stories.

Also, when you have a wedding day like the one the Zendaya and Robert Patinson characters have, your relationship can only go uphill from there (opposite also true).

Patriot: a rare recent instance of a three-hour film that kept me gripped all the way through - though the loud action scenes in the second half could have been a bit shorter. I also felt uncharacteristically patriotic when I saw the scene where Mammootty uses the Delhi Metro.

For all the whoops and cheers around the onscreen reunion of mega-superstars Mammootty and Mohan Lal, there is also a poignant nod here to the old world-vs-hi-tech-new world theme. With the veterans doing things like communicating through street-lamp codes and eye-blink messages, stuff that can’t be compromised in the way that modern digital technology can. And a more general sense that people who came of age in that older world are more robust and resourceful than those who are over-dependent on current technology.

Fahadh Faasil’s role was weirdly generic – standard-issue corporate bad guy yelling and scowling at his employees – but it was pretty funny to see Fifi doing his famous “eye acting” in the flying scene, at full thrust and zero visibility.

I also enjoyed the 52-minute "Patriot: Legends Hangout", a jokey, scripted promotional skit where Fahadh and Kunchacko pretend to have issues with their roles being shortened. FF seemed to be enjoying himself more than he did in the actual film.

The Sheep Detectives: a lovely little ovine whodunit, which somehow manages to be a feel-good film *despite* centring on the death of a very likable character, a shepherd (Hugh Jackman) who reads murder mysteries aloud to his flock. I’m ambivalent about many CGI-generated cute animals in movies, but this worked well for me. And some of the humans are quite fun too, not least Nicholas Braun as an awkward village policeman and Emma Thompson as a waspish lawyer.

Other films I enjoyed recently, maybe more on them another time: Aattam, Sanctuary (2022), Ullozhukku, La Chimera, Rifle Club, Paradise (2023), Night Drive. And some terrific re-watches: The Thin Man (1934), Aashiq Abu’s Virus, Midnight in Paris, Midnight Cowboy.

About Ticket to Kerala, a very engrossing primer to Malayalam cinema

2026-05-01T08:15:00.000+05:30

(Wrote this review for Mint Lounge. A couple of my earlier essays about the contemporary Malayalam cinema are here and here)
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Dileesh Pothan and Lijo Jose Pellissery, Rima Kallingal and Aashiq Abu, Syam Pushkaran, Don Palathara… I had barely heard of these names seven or eight years ago, and never imagined they would become part of my cultural landscape. Then, around Covid time, the floodgates opened. Since then, my closest engagement with contemporary films has been not with Hindi or English or “world” cinema (as was once clearly the case) but with the new Malayalam wave – thoughtful, whimsical, often unpredictable and detour-laden films that erase the distinction between “mainstream” and “serious”.

To gradually feel my way around this world, making little connections between the oeuvres and career arcs of this or that actor, screenwriter, cinematographer or director, was to replicate an adolescent excitement, when similar discoveries had taken place around international films. This included the thrill of becoming used to subtitles while consciously or subconsciously processing little things about the cadences of the language spoken onscreen; and feeling like one had been allowed entry into a culture that might otherwise have stayed remote.

For viewers like me, besotted by current Malayalam cinema but untutored in the rich history of this film industry (perhaps only maintaining a link with that history through one-off screenings of important works like Yavanika or Chemmeen – seen in poor prints decades ago – or an occasional G Aravindan or Adoor Gopalakrishnan film), SR Praveen’s Ticket to Kerala is a welcome comfort read. The book begins with an overview of the ongoing wave and how it reached non-Keralite viewers in an era of OTT, superior curation, and lockdown-dictated viewing shifts. I spent the first few dozen pages nodding at this or that reference, glad about my familiarity with many of the works discussed – but also feeling enlightened when the author provided an insight into a film I thought I knew well. Discussing the superb Kumbalangi Nights, for example, Praveen notes that the smarmy alpha-male figure played by Fahadh Faasil (and exposed as unhinged by the story’s end) could easily have been the much-hailed hero of a 1990s mainstream film; while the four brothers living and squabbling in a rundown village house, whose stories we are most invested in, might have been stereotyped goons in that earlier work.

In this first section, Praveen also goes back to the early 2000s when mainstream Malayalam cinema, then in the doldrums, began to find tentative new directions through films like Ritu, Traffic and Nayakan. Only after this does the book, in its second half, travel to the very distant past, with a haunting vignette from the dawn of Kerala’s cinema: a little boy is playfully burning the negative of a film made by his father JC Daniel, unaware that he is destroying a historical artefact, the first ever Malayalam feature. More than eighty years later, the author speaks to the old man who remembers his childish vandalism, and even recalls one of the images from that doomed film – Vigathakumaran (1930) – when he had looked at the negative.

This mood-establishing start to the book’s “post-interval” section is followed by plenty of historical information: about the studio rivalries of the 1950s, the initial new wave of the 1970s (which was clearly non-mainstream), the Middle Cinema, and the ever-evolving links between Kerala’s society, politics and cinema. Analysis and reportage go together – interspersed with the narrative chapters are a few interviews, presented in question-and-answer format, with prominent figures such as Adoor, Lijo, Rajeev Ravi and Bahul Ramesh (who has doubled up as screenwriter and cinematographer – an unusual combination – for such powerful films as Eko and Kishkindha Kaandam).

Some passages about specific films – with brief plot synopses, back-stories and overall relevance as part of a movement or a career – might not be easy going for a reader who hasn’t watched those films yet; this is an occupational hazard while reading any cinema book of this sort. But there is enough else of general interest. I thought two such chapters were particularly notable. The first is about the formation of the Women in Cinema Collective (WCC) after the 2017 sexual assault on an actress who dared – unlike others in the past – to speak up and name her assailants. Praveen tellingly emphasises the contrast between the braggadocio shown by male stars onscreen (including the “punch dialogues” spoken in films for their adoring fans) and their real-world timidity or evasiveness when it came to the sexual-harassment issue; and, conversely, the contrast between quiet or docile women characters and the bold speaking up of women from the industry during this crucial moment.

There have, inevitably, been some simplistic responses along the way: consider the statement made by the actor Prithviraj (quoted here by Praveen) in which he pledged to never participate in films that “glorified or justified the actions of” misogynistic men. Well-intentioned though this may be, it is also symptomatic of a reductively Wokish take on very complex issues, such as the dark places that creative works must go to – and the blurring of the line between honesty and glorification – when they depict the vantage points or inner spaces of problematic characters. At the same time, one has to be glad that the WCC movement got underway and created some change, given the unquestionably male-dominated structures of the industry – in Kerala and elsewhere – and the chapter gave me a better understanding of why so many recent Malayalam films have deliberately (sometimes self-consciously) eschewed gender stereotyping and stressed agency and independence.

The other “pivotal moment” chapter deals with the formation of film clubs and societies, going back to the 1960s, and the advent of the celebrated IFFK festival, known over the years for its egalitarian nature and its refusal to place the regular movie enthusiast in a lower pew than the privileged delegate. As film editor and IFFK artistic director Bina Paul indicates, such festivals are essential for the building of cinematic literacy and to consolidate Malayalam cinema in ways that would make it more appealing to outsiders.

If I had to carp about anything in the book, it’s that it gets too fragmented at times – with facile subheads within a chapter being used to separate one talking point from another – and that it ends on a startlingly abrupt note: the final chapter is a collection of segregated thoughts on some major leading ladies, past and present; and with this Ticket to Kerala simply winds up, as if printer’s ink had gone out of stock or the author had another deadline to meet.

The good considerably outweighs the awkward, though. Most of all, I appreciated the little moments where the author allowed himself to get personal, placing himself in the narrative. Writing about P Padmarajan’s 1990 film Innale, for instance, Praveen mentions his own partiality for narratives built around memory or the fading of it, “as in the recent Kishkindha Kaandam”. As it happened I had watched Kishkindha Kaandam two days before reading this passage, and had enjoyed it for very similar reasons. It was a nice coincidence, and a reminder of how different film-watching journeys – involving people with varied backgrounds and personalities – can intersect serendipitously. That knowledge is also central to one’s enjoyment of a book like this.

(A few of my earlier essays and columns about Malayalam films are here)

Goodbye to scared Hunter (a.k.a. Brownie a.k.a. Lara's dad)

2026-04-13T17:55:00.000+05:30

A little girl whom I knew a few years ago – aged barely three at the time, but bright, perceptive and sensitive to animals – gave me the nicest nickname I have ever had: “Lara-papa” or “Lara-daddy” she called out, whenever she saw me walking Lara in the park. It’s a badge I wear with distinction (though I insist that my feelings are more maternal than paternal, nebulous as these categories can be).

In these photos is my canine counterpart, Lara’s *biological* father – occasionally called Hunter or the generic Brownie – who resembled her both in appearance and in his high-strung, nervous personality. He was mainly being looked after by a family a few houses away (in D-block Saket), though I kept a watch on him when possible and contributed to his daily food. Hunter passed away today, a few days after being hit by a careless driver. Aged around 14, and with a recent history of bad health (I had taken him for an ultrasound a couple of weeks ago), he had become weak and slow in his movements and probably couldn’t get out of the way quickly enough when this car backed up.

Five years ago, something similar had happened with Lara’s mother (whom I have written about in the past, notably in the context of her returning to Saket by herself after running away from Friendicoes Jangpura in 2015) – very old, slow and nearly blind, she was knocked down by a car that shouldn’t have been speeding in our narrow colony lane; I had to eventually take her to the vet to be euthanized.

I could write more about Hunter, but maybe some other time (like many other timid or nervous dogs, he didn’t show much of what Samuel L Jackson called “personality”). For now, here are these pics, including these two that were taken nearly 10 years ago – Lara’s parents having milk and biscuits together, blissfully unaware that they had manufactured one of my greatest sources of joy.

P.S. one memory, from one of the first times I saw Hunter, as a pup, maybe 13 years ago. Abhilasha and I were walking down the colony lane when we heard a desperate shrieking, and found that this skinny little fellow (probably not more than 5-6 months old at the time) had somehow caught his back leg in the bars of a gate nearby – he wasn’t seriously trapped, but was so scared by the sudden feeling of entrapment that he couldn’t free himself. Abhilasha managed to reach out and expand the space, and he bolted out with a prolonged squeal (just as afraid of his saviours) and ran off without looking back.
In his later years too, even after I started feeding him and he seemed glad to see me from a distance, he never stayed still enough to let me pat him. (This was also because he came to associate me with strange men – paravets – showing up to catch him for skin treatments or vaccinations.) That changed, of course, in the past 2-3 weeks, when he became too weak to run away: this was the only period when I could really stroke the back of his neck for some time.

(Earlier goodbye posts: angry Kaalu; Lara's brother Sona; little Kaali; our old Kaali/Prada; and Foxie)

Blue leopards roaring (the pub quiz chronicles contd)

2026-03-25T17:02:00.000+05:30

At risk of turning this space into a monthly “quiz report”... at the Depot48 pub quiz last Sunday, our team (rechristened “Neela Tendua” in a moment of inspiration by young Eshan Sharma) improbably finished second. (The other team members here: Anant Raina, Suman Parmar and Akila Jayaraman. Along with QM Adittya Nath Mubayi.) I say “improbably” because we had made hardly any progress after the first round, and at that stage we were mainly aiming to finish the quiz with no minus points.

My long-time friend and one-time team member Trisha Gupta was a guest quizmaster for this edition, and my moment of glory occurred with the first question she asked (no it wasn’t rigged, but who will believe that now). It involved identifying Dadasaheb Phalke’s daughter Mandakini, who had played baby Krishna in his film Kaliya Mardan (which I have shown in film-history classes).

I was also the only person in the room to get the answer to one of the last questions, about an actress named after a wine, and her famous grandfather. (See pic here.) It was most gratifying to see the wild guesses made by other teams, who seemed to have thought the grandfather was named after a wine too, and came up with suggestions like "Dom Perignon". (And even better, as Mudita Chauhan-Mubayi reminded me on Instagram a while back, "Mel Blanc and Chenin Blanc".)

Very satisfying, all told - despite our underwhelming start to the quiz.

P.S. I am probably sounding like a quizzing nerd now - so just to clarify that I have at no earlier point in my life done these things, and these pub quizzes of the past 2-3 years have mainly been informal, fun gatherings with friends + snacks + cocktails. The one time I took a quiz really seriously, it was a film-themed one which we topped (a post about that here).

Quick notes on Jazz City

2026-03-24T22:37:00.000+05:30

I won’t pretend to be “objective” about anything that Soumik Sen (writer, director, showrunner, musician, many other things) does. We have been friends for a long time, we had some very invigorating (and irreverent) conversations about cinema and literature in the Business Standard ~~dungeon~~ office a thousand years ago, and it’s been inspirational to see how he made things happen for himself after moving to Bombay and bringing some of his countless ideas to the screen (while there must also have been many setbacks and disillusionments along the way).

All that said, I watched the full 10 episodes of his new series Jazz City because I was engaged by it, not out of a sense of loyalty. I was slightly handicapped at first by not knowing enough about the churning history of East Pakistan/Bangladesh (and not having direct emotional investment in the Bengali-nationalism theme), but the storytelling here – bringing the personal and the political together, while moving between Calcutta and East Pakistan in the late 60s/early 70s – made it easy to figure things out.

Arifin Shuvoo is very good and charismatic in the lead – and his Jimmy Roy grows in stature as the show progresses. But there wasn’t really a weak link in the main performances. (I could have done without the guttural, platitude-spouting priest – a character who needed less philosophy and more cough syrup. As I jokingly told Soumik, I’m glad he didn’t cast himself in that role.)

Given a conversation that Soumik and I had in Calcutta a few weeks ago, I think he also managed to be fairly restrained in depicting the brutalities of the Operation Searchlight genocide. I’m not sure if that was wokish self-censorship or peer pressure at play (since any film or series that depicts extreme Islamist violence tends to get jumped on by Indian “liberals” these days), or just the need to keep the gore quotient down for a mainstream series. Either way, I think it was a good tightrope walk.

The show *did* slacken a bit for me in the middle episodes (a point where it is increasingly possible to ask, of many such 10-episode shows: Did it need to be so stretched out?), but it picked up really well in the end, as all the threads started to come together – I watched the last three episodes pretty much at one go, which is rare for me.

Jazz City is on Sony Liv. If you watch it, please select the original Bengali audio. (There is a fair amount of English, Urdu and Hindi on that track too.)

Parent trap: false memories, catharsis, escape – films as vehicles for dealing with loss

2026-03-23T10:01:00.003+05:30

[Did this for my Economic Times column – continuing with the parent-child theme from last month]
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In episode one of the Ricky Gervais series After Life, which I watched last month, the protagonist Tony visits the grave of his recently deceased wife. The blink-and-miss-it shot of the tombstone didn’t keep me from noting that the death date was February 26, 2018. Which was exactly one day before my mother died – of the same cause, breast cancer, as Tony’s wife.

Much of the show has Gervais watching little videos his wife had conveniently left behind for him. How healthy and upbeat this dying woman looks compared to my mother in her last weeks, I thought bitterly. But these scenes also made me conscious of how few recordings I have of mum’s voice – something that can be even more integral than photographs for keeping a person’s memory alive.

Film-watching has involved many such epiphanies and jolts for me in the past few years. Last week, while watching the wonderful Manipuri film Boong – about a little boy who runs away in search of his absentee father (in much the same way that marginalised parts of India feel orphaned by the Centre) – it struck me that for many of us movie-nerds and nit-pickers, cinema can be a way of excavating things about our parents – the ones who are no longer around, as well as the ones who are still present in some form. I often experience films through the lens of how my mother might have felt about them, or in terms of memories of the things we did together.

Memories are unreliable, though, and we tend to make dramatic movies of our own lives. A vivid demonstration of this is a story my mother once related about her beloved dad, whose untimely death had been the most traumatic incident in her life.

Never having known my nana, but having heard so much about him, I had asked mum once if he had liked Amitabh Bachchan. Yes, my mother replied, he loved some of those early films, Anand and Bombay to Goa and so on. And then, the little detail: my nana cried when Amitabh died in Sholay. During that scene with Jaya Bhaduri’s Radha closing the window as the pyre burnt, she said. “We were watching the film together, I looked at dad from the side and there was a tear running down his cheek.”

The specificity of this recollection still hits me hard. It left no doubt that this was one of the most poignant late memories she had of her father – a heart-breaking onscreen death made more urgent by the fact that this man, who meant everything to her, was soon to depart himself. It makes think of the last two films I watched with her in a hall: Shoojit Sircar’s Piku (another film in which Bachchan dies, forty years after he died in Sholay) and Lenny Abrahamson’s Room – both of which in different ways centre on parent-child relationships, the claustrophobic circumstances in which those relationships can unfold, and the need for escape.

To think of my mother and grandfather, quiet, reserved people in a dark hall together, watching that tragic Sholay scene… it feels right. True, on every level.

Except for this inconvenient detail: Sholay was released in August 1975, and my nana had died in January that year. It was only in adulthood, when I looked closely at the dates, that I realised my mother’s memory had been a manufactured one.

How did this happen? Maybe she went to see Sholay some months after her dad’s death, and was so vulnerable to emotional scenes such as the one of Radha at the window, that it became conflated in her mind with a real-life viewing of another film with her father?

Or was it a conscious mistruth? Parents do create easily digestible tales for their children (and in many cases those children never let go of those stories, long after "rationality" has taken hold of other parts of their brain). Is it possible that my mother had briefly turned into a screenwriter for her own life, processing a real trauma into a fictional nugget involving a scene from a famous film?

I’ll never know. But such is our relationship with films as emotion-generators, catharsis-providers, or as curators to our inner feelings – or all of the above at the same time. Mum did tell me on another occasion that almost the first thing she did after her father died was to go by herself to a nearby hall and watch a film – she had to be alone, she couldn’t bear the thought of participating in communal mourning with extroverted family members and well-wishers. She needed that big dark space, to conceal her own inner darkness in. And today I think I understand why.

(Related post: Rooms and private traps)

A shout-out for Boong

2026-03-10T11:57:00.000+05:30

Good to see a fairly packed hall (at PVR Select Citywalk) for Lakshmipriya Devi’s Boong, about a Manipuri boy setting out to find his missing dad – the recent BAFTA award probably played a part in raising the film’s profile, but hoping word of mouth will take over. It’s a lovely film, quirky and engrossing throughout – right from the opening scene where little Boong recites Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” at his school assembly. Very fluid mix of the personal and the political (the absentee-parent trope can obviously work at both levels, given the treatment of the more marginalised Indian states by the Centre ) – though you don’t consciously have to think of any of that while watching this. Wonderfully performed by Gugun Kipgen, the other children, and Bala Hijam as Boong’s mother.

There’s a good chance it will play for another few days now, what with new shows having been added in Delhi halls mid-week – but either way, try to go for it soon.

P.S. one of the images here is from an amusing scene where a local pradhan surreptitiously watches Hindi films (banned in Manipur) in his screening room - and is threatened with exposure. Ah, the many Indias…

My unexpected life in quizzing continues...

2026-03-06T10:57:00.000+05:30

Last week saw another solidly conducted pub quiz by whysoQrious (Adittya Nath Mubaiyi and Mudita Chauhan-Mubayi), this being the inaugural (and Delhi-themed) quiz at Fort City Brewing in Hauz Khas. I had been invited there as one of eight “mentors” – in the company of such hefty names as my friend Trisha Gupta, young Eshan Sharma, Swapna Liddle, Anant Raina, Saif Mahmood, Vidyun Sabhaney and Nitin Sreedhar – but I don’t think the teams, being mostly made up of avid quizzers, needed our wisdom. (I must shamefacedly admit to knowing/deducing the answers to only two or three of the questions asked.)

There was plenty of buzz in a crowded room, lots of jingle-jangling too – since the “pouncing” here was done not with light-sabres, as at the Depot48 quizzes, but with tambourines that had the team names on them (mine was Mehfil-e Mehrauli).

One entertaining question was about the Rajendra Kumar character from the 1965 film Arzoo claiming to be from “a very improbable place”, as the quizmaster put it. (Keep in mind the questions were all Delhi-centred.) This happens when he is being introduced during a skiing competition, early in the film.

Only one person in the room – a member of my team – knew the correct answer, and this was because he recalled his dad enthusiastically showing him the scene decades earlier. (I was reminded of my Spartacus moment from this quiz a few months ago.)

This is how the Rajendra Kumar character is introduced:

“Mr Sarju, from Okhla Village.”

Mentos! Mentors! Minotaurs!

Anuja Chauhan, the answer to the last question

Snippets: another fine 1940s noir

2026-03-04T12:38:00.000+05:30

A few weeks ago I had a very good time watching the 1948 noir Sorry, Wrong Number (adapted from a successful radio play by Lucille Fletcher) in my Teesri Manzil screening room. I had a dim memory of the film from decades ago, and had mis-remembered that it was a static work, largely set in a single room, with Barbara Stanwyck confined to bed, trying to save herself from murder – but there was a lot more going on in terms of camera movement and location filming. With one phone conversation after another opening up new revelations and relationships, flashbacks within flashbacks, and so on. (My friend Satish Padmanabhan and I had a little chuckle over what contemporary viewers might think about the many scenes that could only have been built around clunky old rotary phones, the phone-operator system, the possibility of crossed connections etc.)

I get the argument made by some people that the film over-expanded (or over-padded) the plot of the 25-minute-long radio play to make a feature film, and that consequently the suspense wasn’t as tight – but I was gripped almost all the way through. One of those terrifically nasty noirs where you can’t root for anyone in the end (even though you think you should be able to). It helped that I have been a big Stanwyck fan forever – she is super, as always. Burt Lancaster, only two years into his film career, is appropriately callow given his role, but already has the physical presence that would serve him so well in years ahead.

(In the interplay between their characters – ambitious small-town boy getting a ticket to a “better” life after meeting the heiress to the pharmacy empire – one sees a recurring trope from the noir/suspense melodrama of that period in American literature and film. Ira Levin’s superb debut novel A Kiss Before Dying, which I wrote about here, came out a few years later, the story centring on an amoral young man pursuing a rich copper magnate’s daughters one by one. But there are many other books and films around the upward-mobility/ticket-out theme.)

P.S. the famous 1943 radio episode of Sorry Wrong Number, with Agnes Moorehead in the lead, can be heard here. I haven't listened to it yet, but Satish did and liked it very much. (It may be time for me to get into this sort of thing + podcasts.)