The Sense of an Ending

Sometimes you read a book or watch a movie at a point in your life when you’re just not in the right mood for it, or when it’s just the wrong time for you, and that book or film either overwhelms you, making you feel things you didn’t want to, or you come away from […]

Lion

In 1986, in Khandwa, Madhya Pradesh, teenager Guddu and his five-year-old brother Saroo became separated when out to do some manual labor. The boys were from a poor, single-parent family, where mother Kamla would go off to work in construction and the older children would have to look after the younger ones. Tiny Saroo fell […]

Riz Ahmed: I get pulled aside every time I come here

As part of the press junket for The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a group of seven of us had a roundtable interview with Riz Ahmed (who plays Changez Khan) and Kate Hudson (who plays his girlfriend, Erica). On a purely gossipy notes, one could not help but notice that Ms. Hudson was wearing this massive emerald-cut rock. […]

Midnight’s Children

You gotta give it to Deepa Mehta – the director has guts by the truckload. After having incurred the ire of Hindu conservatives for her film Fire and then again almost a decade later for Water (during the filming of which she had to ditch India and instead shoot in Sri Lanka), she then had […]

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Last time I was back in dear Madras, I visited a huge sari and fabric emporium (“shop” just doesn’t begin to describe it) in search of material to have some clothes made for a wedding.  In all my visits to India, this was my first time examining any saris with much attention. As the salesman […]