Category: Essay
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Queen: What Madhuri Dixit did next
“What did you choose? The coffee?” There is such a thing as a very Andheri office. One building away from Mainland China, one alley away from a horrid little advertising agency I worked in for a few weeks when I first moved to Bombay, stands a functionally grey monolith. It houses, among many others, an…
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The Salman Khan Interview
You can tell a lot about a megastar by the way he throws his punch. A Hindi film hero might routinely fell over seven with one blow, but each has their own approach. Aamir Khan, all bloodshot eyes and biceps rippling with the fury of thousands of killed wives to avenge, brings both physical intensity…
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Read a book with legs
A couple of days ago, I was forwarded a piece called ‘Date A Girl Who Reads,’ doing the usual rounds all over the Internet. Affectionate at first glance, this was a rather offensive piece of simplistic drivel that assumed women who read don’t do anything but live within paragraphs of their beloved books, books they…
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Ram Gopal Varma and his Al Qaeda
The most influential Hindi filmmaker of the 90s, Ram Gopal Varma isn’t what he used to be — or so say we, embittered critics unimpressed by pandering, and disgruntled audiences unimpressed by waferthin storylines and disastrous remakes. You can’t blame us, to be fair. Just a few years ago, Ramu lied about me on his…
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Watching Amitabh Bachchan act
Amitabh Bachchan defies description. We’ve read and written so much, apocryphal exaggeration and gossip combining with lanky fact and box office numbers to make up the myth of the megastar, that none of us knows exactly what to believe. I’ve interacted with Mr Bachchan on a few occasions, coming away with strikingly different impressions each…
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Boylespotting: A profile
A blurry peek into the work of our current favourite Englishman. Danny Boyle never wanted to make a zombie movie. After a rushed prologue, 28 Days Later opens with a long, haunting scene showing Cillian Murphy’s haplessly normal character Jim wandering through London. He walks through Westminster Bridge, Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Bridge, staring confoundedly…
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