April 9, 2021, 5:27 a.m. ET
Credit.Sébastien Thibault
In 2019, more than 80 young Pakistani artists came together to work on a small-budget independent film about a man and his daughter, “Zindagi Tamasha.” Since then, the film has been cleared for release in Pakistan several times, was selected to be the country’s official entry for the 2020 Academy Awards foreign language film category and has won prizes in international festivals. Yet it still can’t be shown in Pakistan not because of the pandemic, but because it offends some people who haven’t even seen it.
One evening late last January, the Pakistani filmmaker Sarmad Khoosat, a friend of mine, sat on a stage in the British Council’s library in Karachi to introduce “Zindagi Tamasha.” During the talk, he received a Twitter notification accusing his movie of being disrespectful to Islam and the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him).
Book Review | Worlds within worlds in Dhumketu’s best classic short stories
Updated Mar 14, 2021, 2:16 am IST
In this collection of stories, you go back in time to the age of Bimbisaar, move to Darjeeling just before and after a world war, and more
Ratno Dholi: The Best Stories of Dhumketu, translated by Jenny Bhatt.
The title story of
Ratno Dholi: The Best Stories of Dhumketu, translated from the Gujarati by Jenny Bhatt, is by no means the only one in the book that grabbed my attention and kept it.
In fact, I liked the opening story in the collection the best, though less because it’s better than the rest than because it was my introduction to Dhumketu (Gaurishankar Govardhanram Joshi), a writer I had never heard of before, though he was a contemporary of Munshi Premchand, Rabindranath Tagore and Saadat Hasan Manto.
LAHORE: Sahir Ludhianvi never compromised on his ideology despite the Indian cinema compromising with him.
This was stated by journalist Raza Rumi in a conference held in connection with the birth centenary celebrations of the famous Urdu poet and lyricist organised by the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) at the Research and Publication Centre in Lahore on Saturday.
The conference was hosted by Javed Aftab, the central secretary of the PWA.
Rumi said though Sahir wrote for films but all his songs assumed high standards of poetry and his political consciousness was apparent in his songs.
“Sahir’s film songs are neither political slogans nor parts of a speech from some rally, they are eternal part of the cinema and social consciousness of millions of fans associated with it,” he added,