When trying to explain what motivates me as a physicist, the film
A Passage to India (1984) comes to mind. Based on the play by Santha Rama Rau, adapted from the novel by E M Forster, it describes the fallout from a rape case in the fictional city of Chandrapore, during the British Raj in India in the 1920s. What keeps the viewer’s attention is the subtlety of the relationships between the characters – particularly the fragile friendship between the man accused of the rape, Dr Aziz, and an Englishman, Mr Fielding. Data about identity alone, such as race, class, gender or educational status, can never reveal these dynamics nor capture why they fascinate us. When the case arrives in court, ostensibly similar people behave very differently in relation to the defendant. The dynamics of individual behaviour trump any immutable labels we might apply; yet these static labels also impose constraints on just how far any individual can go. We watch, we theorise, and we update our knowled
Santha Rama Rau: The prolific wordsmith who wrote for the ‘New Yorker’ and was wooed by a mafia don
In her peripatetic life, the accomplished writer got many opportunities to observe major events and changemakers from up close. Courtesy: The Nikhil and Dottie Wagle Family Collection.
When she was six years old, Santha Rama Rau left India for the first time. Her father, Benegal Rama Rau, a civil servant, moved to England as the first Round Table Conference to discuss constitutional reforms in India got underway in 1930. For her, it was the beginning of a lifetime of travel, during which she wrote books and journalistic articles, had a ringside view of global events and met the changemakers of the time. Rau once told a newspaper that she lived in three-year cycles, spending “a year in New York, a city I adore, a year in India, and a year travelling”.
›Strong flavours, history of food rivalry & love for fish: Paying an ode to Bengal’s rich heritage of cooking
Strong flavours, history of food rivalry & love for fish: Paying an ode to Bengal’s rich heritage of cooking
The long tradition of great food from eastern Bengal that is getting its due today.
Synopsis
Eastern Bengal is known for its cooks and cooking. The Foods of the World series published by
Time Life from 1968 was a pioneering attempt to get good writers to describe how the world ate. The Indian volume was written by Santha Rama Rau, but for Pakistan, a separate chapter was written by Mohammed Aftab, a journalist from Rawalpindi. And in this chapter, just one paragraph describes the food of East Pakistan, which we are told is spicy and uses lots of seafood.
March 12, 2021
Actor Adarsh Gourav gets nominated in BAFTA 2021 for The White Tiger | Five Indian films that went to British Academy of Film and Television Arts(Photo Credit – Imdb)
India @ BAFTA: For a filmmaker, the success of a film is not just limited to the Box Office but also that they want their final cut to be critically acclaimed. That’s the acknowledgment they wait for eagerly.
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Indian filmmakers have made their mark in world cinema by showcasing relatable, universal emotions through their content. Indian Cinema is contributing to the growth of the industry for more than 100 years now and it is a great success that they are being acknowledged not only in the homeland but also by the world.
Piece think
Supriya Nair
The essay: what a form. Oldfashioned enough to seem like it was left behind in the nineteenth century, juvenile enough to be associated forever with ‘compositions’ devised on ruled note-paper under the exhausted eyes of language teachers in school. To essay something is to try it, but as the name of an endeavour there’s something unfulfilled about it, like you didn’t accomplish what you meant to do.
That’s why writers have loved essays since the dawn of modernity, at least in English. Essays are quests. They are efforts. They’re not compositions, but the opposite – a methodical unsettling of thoughts and styles, of showing readers the smooth subject of a surface, then plumbing one level deeper and then, just as these readers have grown comfortable with the surprise, to tear open the piece and make it something else again. An essay is a story and its criticism, a description and its contradiction, a voice and its echo.