National treasure Naseeruddin Shah turns 76 this year, his 51st in film and a particular rich one with his cathartic turn in Main Vapas Aunga and his uncanny channeling of the towering six-footer JRD Tata in the Titan web series. In celebration, here is a list of the most memorable songs filmed on him. The song is Hindi film’s most…
Author: sohinichattopadhyay
Turn of Calcutta
We are selling the pieces in my late grandfather’s turn-of-the-century Armenian-built apartment in central Calcutta. The pieces have been assessed by furniture designers Mann Singh and Dr Rebecca Reubens. Singh’s work is displayed at the Kasturbhai Lalbhai museum in Ahmedabad among others, and is known in particular for his ergonomic design for seating. Reubens runs Rhizome studio, known for its…
Memories of Another Calcutta Re-incarnation
Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye carries echoes of Satyajit Ray’s 1971 Feluda thriller Sonar Kella A book cover (left) and film poster for Sonar Kella Though I rarely read beyond Bengali novels in recent years, I was drawn to Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye because it seemed to reverse the central premise of Satyajit Ray’s Sonar Kella. A beloved film for many Bengalis of…
The Song of the Market: Benegal, Bhansali and the Tryst with the Performing Woman
Tracing the obsession of the two filmmakers with the figure of the courtesan, actor, and sex-worker, often rolled into one lonely, headstrong character type Notice the similarity in posture in the poster for Mandi (Benegal, 1983, top photo) and Gangubai Kathiawadi (Bhansali, 2022). What else do you notice? Although the web series Heeramandi was all over our screens in the…
My dear Smita,
It is half a century since you made your debut on the Hindi film screen with Shyam Benegal’s Nishant. And 39 years since you are gone. Was it only 11 years that you worked in film? Why does it feel like you have been here with us ever since? That you see us, and show us what we are and…
Ritwik Ghatak at 100: The Many Re-incarnations of Ritwik in Bollywood
From Subhash Ghai to “Bidhu” Vinod Chopra to Sanjay Leela Bhansali, the unlikely ‘filmi’ students of the Film and Television Institute of India where Ghatak taught for all of two years, keep his legacy alive in unmissable ways. There is also Payal Kapadia, as non-Bollywood as it can get, who mentions his influence on her work The film lovers’ conventional…
50 years and counting: The magnificent reign of Naseeruddin Shah
It is half a century since Shyam Benegal’s Nishant in 1975 where Shah made his debut proper. (He had a walk-on part in the 1967 film Aman, that featured philosopher Bertrand Russell in a cameo.) In the years since, Shah has acted in an astounding 274 films listed on IMDb, with at least one film releasing every calendar year across this half century. A fan’s list of her favourite Naseer films using Bharata’s rasa theory
The Grandson Who Made Me Fall in Love with Ila Mitra
Now that you are up there, Riten, tell your thakma how much you admired her Dear Riten, I first met Ila Mitra through you in March 2021, deep in the global panic of Covid19, although she was already gone 19 years then. I had glimpsed her in disparate blogs and some newspaper articles in Bengali online but she was the…
The Seedling That Birthed a Tree of New Storytelling
50 years of Ankur. 50 years of Shyam Benegal, the anchor of the New Wave movement in Hindi cinema In that last light of day before it is all gone and the crickets have begun calling, a man hurries through paddy fields swollen with the rain that has fallen all day to a hovel that stands across his sturdy home,…
Of our 33 crore gods, only the goddess Shakti can be called a true sports hero
In our two epics, Ram, Lakshman, Arjun are star warriors, but battles are not won on their skill alone. Divine intervention and deception are needed. The story of Durga’s 10-day marathon battle that cemented her place among the top of the gods underlines her strength, willpower and stamina—all the things that count in sport The story about physical exercise that…