There is deep sense of loss setting in about the Parsis, a vanishing Indian community, who originally migrated from Persia to protect Zoroastrianism. Their settlement in India is one of the greatest examples of fusion of two cultures and exemplary peaceful coexistence of two starkly different religions in the history of mankind.
Here was a small tribe that migrated to one corner of the Indian subcontinent and for more than 1300 years faced not one conflict or discrimination in their adopted land. However, the long journey of this happiest amalgamation of two different societies may have tragically entered its final lap.
Kabir Bedi in Sandokan (1976) | Radiotelevisione Italiana Kabir Bedi’s recently published memoir
Stories I Must Tell (Westland Books) has prominent sections on an Italian television show from 1976. That’s hardly surprising: titled Sandokan, the mini-series made the Indian actor a sensation in Italy and the rest of Europe and paved his path to Hollywood.
Sandokan is the dashing pirate hero from nineteenth-century Italian writer Emilio Salgari’s novels. Sandokan’s wealthy parents have been killed by the East India Company, which is seeking to expand its control of South East Asia.
Sandokan leads a group of rebellious sea raiders and frequently torments the British colonialists, earning him the title “Tiger of Malaysia”. Among Sandokan’s chief adversaries is the Rajah of Sarawak, based on the real-life British soldier James Brooke. Sandokan later falls in love with an Englishwoman named Marianna and marries her.
How Kabir Bedi interviewed The Beatles in 1966 (and asked John Lennon if he took drugs)
Edited excerpts from the actor’s memoir ‘Stories I Must Tell’. Kabir Bedi
In 1966, while returning from a tour in Manila to London, The Beatles made a three-day layover in Delhi. Kabir Bedi, a 20-year-old-freelance reporter with All India Radio at the time, managed to get an exclusive interview with the Fab Four. In his memoir Stories I Must Tell
(Westland Books), Bedi wrote that he spoke to John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr for 30 minutes by bluffing to their manager, Brian Epstein, that the government had asked for the interview.
Dr Nandini Murali
By Simi Mehta, Anshula Mehta
According to World Health Organization (WHO), every 40 seconds, a person dies by suicide. Globally, the number of men dying by suicide is much higher than women, which means that most women are left behind to bear the suicide loss. The gendered nature of the impact of suicide experiences is still a new territory to explore. Society, including the mental health fraternity, is not entirely aware of the effects that suicide can have on the people left behind.
To deliberate further upon this issue, Gender Impact Studies Center (GISC), IMPRI Impact and Policy Research Institute, and WestLand Books organized a Special Lecture on Gendered Dimensions and Impacts of Suicide Bereavement: Exploring Lived Experiences by Dr Nandini Murali, who had experienced the similar trauma when she lost her husband, Dr T.R. Murali, to suicide in 2017. Dr Nandini Murali is a suicide prevention and mental health activist and author.
Origins of Love and
Sea of Innocence. The three novels has been optioned for a web series. Desai is in the middle of negotiations for a screen adaptation of
The Longest Kiss too, she told
Scroll.in. In an interview, the writer revealed how she distilled over 4,000 documents into a chronicle of the actor whom she describes as “a pioneer, then and now”.
How did your impressions of Devika Rani change as you conducted your research over a 15-year period?
To begin with, there wasn’t very much written on her except for a few write-ups or brief biographies. They had a lot of inaccuracies.