Kavi 'Das Narayan' Agrawal has hit one of the sweetest spots in the Indian music industry. By placing himself on the hyphen between the Nathpanth-influenced Kabir and the Nathpanth-inspired Sufis, the poet has claimed prime property in what's perhaps the industry's fastest growing sector. Amitava Sanyal writes.
There seems to be a Lounge revival on in this part of the world. And much like the way the genre was reinvented in the 1980s and 90s, it's claiming shelf space in a chilled-out, down-beat, spaced-out manner.
Amitava Sanyal writes.
It can be debated whether Maqbool Fida Husain was the greatest artist India ever produced. But what’s beyond pale is that he was the most successful one.
Amitava Sanyal writes.
DK Bose has stirred a debate, and rightly so. But worryingly, the reaction is more on the hand-wringing side. Several people are holding forth on how 'degrading' such lyrics are to the considerable legacy of Sahir, Gulzar and Javed Akhtar. How absurd!
Amitava Sanyal writes.
Sheikh Lalmohan charts a map around his seat. “There were several houses and roads here... We used to live there.” The unusual bit is that the middle-aged farmer is marking all this out in the muddy waters near the mouth of the Ganga.
Three years ago, I had met a worried father. He was fine with the way the careers of his daughter and younger son were going. But he was dismissive of his elder son’s. “He has a band that plays here and there, earns a few thousand rupees,” he had said.
The year is 1965. A man and his two friends are sitting in a Fiat outside south Mumbai’s Regal theatre, looking for a woman. She’d called to propose an almost-blind date, claiming to have met the man and sought his autograph in Darjeeling not long before.
Delhi’s self-anointed ‘dirty old man’ Khushwant Singh puts forward his reason why men like to sprawl around the Bara Gumbad, the Big Dome at the heart of Lodhi Garden.
There has been for long a large vacuum in Indian art writing. The void has hung roughly between ponderous, academic treatises and lush, zero-gravity reportage.
The Spanish film industry is going aggressively out into the world for the same reason as the Spanish navy sailed out half a millennium ago. The home economy is cash-strapped and the home market isn't big enough. Amitava Sanyal writes.
Earlier there was only one KK in Bollywood: Kishore Kumar, a Bengali boy who grew up in Khandwa and Bombay. Through much of the 1970s he was the king. Amitava Sanyal writes.
Growing up in Calcutta in the 1970s and 80s, it was difficult to avoid the Rafi-Kishore binary. The animosity between the two camps was as potent as between supporters of Mohun Bagan and East Bengal, Amitabh and Mithun, Gavaskar and Kapil. Amitava Sanyal reports.
They operate units of two. Their artistic identities are solely as twosomes. More than their working lives, they often share large swathes of personal space too.
It took Yusuf Arakkal two long decades to give up his dayjob as a technician at Hindustan Aeronautics.
I know I can be disappointed again when I put my tuppence this year on Toy Story 3. But there's reason for hope - reason that can put the film buzzing lightyears ahead of competition.