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Ten of my favourite Dharmendra songs
Happy birthday, Dharmendra! Considering I am so fond of Dharmendra (and I’ve reviewed so many of his films—including his debut film, the forgettable Dil Bhi Tera Hum Bhi Tere), it seems odd that I’ve...
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Restaurant (Home Delivery) Review: Tamura
Tamura has been around for a long time (or so I was told by various people who recommended it to me), and in various locations. There is one in Green Park Extension, and one in New Friends Colony...
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Book Review: Gautam Chintamani’s Dark Star: The Loneliness of Being Rajesh...
I was born in an odd generation that somehow missed the Rajesh Khanna euphoria. I missed inheriting it from my parents, who had been young and film-crazy when Ashok Kumar, Shammi Kapoor and Dev Anand...
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A Quick Guide to Mosque Architecture
In my not-too-recent posts about the impact of the Revolt of 1857 on Delhi’s monuments, I’d dwelt quite a bit on the mosques of the city. The many masjids, which are among Delhi’s most visible...
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3 Godfathers (1948)
There are two traditions I’ve maintained on this blog ever since I began blogging. One is to celebrate my birthday with a pertinent post (coming up in two weeks’ time). The other is to, for Christmas,...
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Gustakhi Maaf (1969)
Happy New Year! The other day, someone mentioned that after Omkara, Maqbool and Haider—based respectively on Othello, MacBeth and Hamlet—Vishal Bhardwaj was going to be making a trio of films based on...
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Qila-e-Kohna: The Mosque in the Old Fort
A good way to begin a new year? Launch a series of articles on some of my favourite medieval mosques in Delhi! As is probably obvious from my article on mosque architecture, I find old mosques...
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Kakushi-toride no san-akunin (1958)
Known in English as The Hidden Fortress, though the literal translation is The Three Villains of the Hidden Fortress. One of Akira Kurosawa’s finest samurai films. I’ve made it a blog tradition that,...
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Ten of my favourite C Ramachandra songs
…specifically, songs which he composed, not just songs he sang (since C Ramachandra also lent his voice to some of his best songs). Chitalkar Ramachandra was born 97 years ago—on January 12, 1918, in...
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Home Delivery Food Review: Sangeeta Anand
While I am passionately fond of food, and can cook a decent enough meal (or so possibly biased people have told me), I do tend to get cold feet at the thought of cooking for any number of people. Six …...
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Armaan (1966)
Comments on blog posts here tend to go off on tangents. I don’t have a problem with that (in fact, I often contribute)—and, best of all, sometimes these completely tangential comments give me ideas for...
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Why I love the comforts of old Hindi cinema
There’s this delightful, irreverent new literary journal called AntiSerious. Which, as its name suggests, is all about not being serious. Not being serious about politics, society and its morals, the...
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Begumpuri Masjid, and a bit about the Tughlaqs
A few weeks back, I’d decided to begin a series of articles on some of the more interesting medieval mosques of Delhi. I began with an introduction to mosque architecture, then wrote a piece on one of...
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Parivaar (1956)
Serendipity isn’t something I encounter too frequently while watching Hindi cinema. More often than not, it’s the other way round: I watch a film because I liked the cast, or because the story sounds...
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Sunday in New York (1963)
This is a somewhat belated tribute, to yet another star of the silver screen. Aussie actor Rod Taylor (January 11, 1930 – January 7, 2015) arrived in Hollywood in the 1950s, and though he never...
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Ten of my favourite cloud songs
The other day, thinking over the themes for song lists that I’ve posted over the years I’ve been writing this blog, two came forcibly to mind: rain songs (a list, in fact, which has proved very...
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Tiny but exquisite: the Bada Gumbad Mosque
Some days back, I’d written about one of Delhi’s large but little-known mosques, the massive Begumpuri Masjid, near Malviya Nagar. In a turn-around, this week’s (or fortnight’s, whatever) interesting...
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Gigi (1958)
I have firmly believed, for the past few years, that Hollywood would have been a lot poorer had it not been for its Europeans. All the way from writers and composers to directors—and, of course, the...
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Book Review: Bhaskar Chattopadhyay’s 14 Stories That Inspired Satyajit Ray
Satyajit Ray is a name that appears inevitably on any list of great Indian film directors. And often enough (or at least, it should, as far as I’m concerned) on lists of great film directors,...
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Jalsaghar (1958)
There is a scene well into Satyajit Ray’s Jalsaghar (The Music Room) in which the protagonist, a reclusive and close-to-bankrupt zamindar named Bishwambar Roy (Chhabi Biswas) stands outside his...
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