Mounted police are an interesting sight anywhere. In this age of Hummers, BMW and Mercedes Benz cars, the sight of a policeman atop a big horse makes for a nice picture. Horses, once ubiquitous in New York (according to a recent issue of the New Yorker there were 120,000 horses in 1908) are a rarity […]
Watching Shootout at Lokhandwala is cruel punishment for Bollywood fans. By golly, we haven’t seen such a juvenile, amateurish gangster movie – either Bollywood or Hollywood – in 45 years. Shootout at Lokhandwala’s director Apoorva Lakhia has accomplished a feat that we thought was impossible. Lakhia has made a movie worse than his previous disaster […]
Some 50,000 low-caste Hindus and nomadic tribesmen converted to Buddhism at a horse race-track in Mumbai on Sunday in one of the single largest conversions in recent times. For centuries, the stratified caste system has been one of the greatest scourges of India, particularly in the rural hinterlands where those from the lower castes and […]
Cheeni Kum is one of the better movies to come out of the Bollywood stables this summer. Featuring the talented actress Tabu and the budda (old Man of Bollywood) Amitabh Bachchan in key roles, Cheeni Kum is the charming love story of a 34-year-old woman and a 64-year-old man. Eschewing the usual Bollywood trappings of […]
George Orwell is a name familiar to Indians. Besides his prowess as an author, he was after all an Anglo-Indian, born in Motihari, Bihar as Eric Blair (George Orwell was actually his pen name). Some of Orwell’s books like Animal Farm and 1984 have also found favor with the English-speaking literati in India. Much as […]
Of course, there are plenty of nice books. But let’s admit it. There are very few books that move us. And fewer still that move us to tears at the end of it. About Alice is a petite book (just 78 pages). Truly in this case, we can say less is more. Written as a […]