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Biases in movie-watching: two views of John Ford (and Kai Po Che) 19 Aug 2013 | 06:08 pm
[Did a version of this for my DNA column] In an age of nonstop information and opinion-mongering, the cognitive bias called the hostile media effect probably plays a bigger role in our lives than we ...
Fox troth - a column about hidden senses 17 Aug 2013 | 12:33 pm
[Did a version of this piece for Kindle magazine’s anniversary issue about sensory experiences that sometimes remain hidden from us, or that we don’t open ourselves to. I hadn’t intended to write abou...
Death and the heroine: Vinod Mehta does Meena Kumari 14 Aug 2013 | 03:46 pm
Two years ago, an excerpt from Vinod Mehta’s 1972 biography of Meena Kumari appeared in the anthology The Greatest Show on Earth. Reading it without context, I assumed Mehta’s book was a very personal...
The bureaucrat in his jungle – on Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome 8 Aug 2013 | 02:57 pm
In this piece I wrote for The Big Indian Picture, I mentioned the importance of 1973 in Hindi cinema. Another key year for modern Indian film was 1969, sometimes regarded as the first drum-roll for th...
The strange case of Deepak Dobriyal and an unsavoury samosa 3 Aug 2013 | 11:58 pm
Why does Deepak Dobriyal not have a higher profile? Having been a fan ever since I saw his dialogue-less performance as a Mumbai commuter in the Kundan Shah short “Hero”, I often wonder what keeps thi...
Links for Movie buffs 1 Aug 2013 | 11:07 am
Almost anyone with an interest in the history of film criticism knows about the great debates that took place around the auteur theory in the 1960s, with publications like Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight ...
Cold water for Devdas - song sequences in Biwi aur Makaan 31 Jul 2013 | 12:00 am
[Part of a series of posts about musical sequences in old Hindi films. Earlier entries here and here] As you can probably tell from the last post (where I got myself into a muddy rabbit-hole populate...
Response to a column (and more thoughts on Ship of Theseus) 27 Jul 2013 | 01:22 pm
Mihir Sharma wrote this piece about Ship of Theseus – and by extension, about Hindi cinema – in today’s Business Standard. To say everything I want to say in response would take up several thousand wo...
Crossed connections: love in Madhumati and Vertigo 23 Jul 2013 | 11:45 am
[From an on-off series about little connections between generally unrelated movies that happened to be made around the same time] The films: Bimal Roy’s Madhumati and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, both...
Thoughts on D-Day 20 Jul 2013 | 02:20 pm
Early in Nikhil Advani’s D-Day, people in high positions in national security and intelligence discuss the difficult matter of infiltrating another country, and someone points out that Pakistan isn’t ...
