I have been an admirer of Ramachandra Guha since some time. I have been a regular reader of his columns in the Hindu and also read his Cricket Anthology and his Wickets in the East/ Spin and other Turns. His "Corner of a Foreign Field" has also been critically received, though i never got round to read it. India After Gandhi is Ram Guha's first history book, though he has written some other books in the niche of environmental history (available as a compendium in Oxford paperback). The book covers Indian history from around the time of Independence till date. Most history we are taught in schools ends at around Independence which is a bit of travesty but we can't expect it to change soon as the post-independence history is too controversial to have a uniformly accepted version of the truth. The syllabus will have to keep changing whenever the Congress and BJP come to power after the other. India After Gandhi is an impressive achievement offering th...

The Lives of Others got the Best Foreign Film award at the 2006 Oscars and I have rarely seen an award which was as richly deserved. The Lives of Others is set in the final years of East Germany amidst the paranoia and corruption which the communist regime had sunk into. Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) is an ace investigator and interrogator in the Stasi, who has been assigned the role of surveillance of a top dramatist Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) to ascertain his political leanings. Dreyman is suspected of having anti-left beliefs and Muhe’s boss wants to lock him up at the slightest hint of being anti-left. Muhe’s boss is also sleeping with Dreyman’s girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), a decent if struggling actress, using his coercion and influence in getting her roles in government funded plays and letting her have her daily dose of amphetamines/ drugs. Wiesler, in the first scene, is shown as a canny, relentless and ruthless interrogator who has completely bought int...

Black Friday Last February, Black Friday was finally released after a delay of over 2 years. I felt that at least in this one instance, the delay was justified in a way and not due to some censor board member’s whims or minister’s fancies. The objection to the movie was that it pronounced the accused as guilty even before the court has passed their judgement in the 1993 Bombay blasts case. Finally the movie was released in February 2007 after the court had passed their final judgement. I happened to miss it in the theatre due to some pressures at work and it did not have a long run. Finally I saw it on DVD. Black Friday got some good reviews and justifiably so. But there was something in the movie which did not work for me, something which made the movie fall short of being a truly good work. The story, as is well known by now, is about the investigation and arrest of the culprits behind the Bombay bomb blasts in 1993. The movie starts off like a police procedural unti...

Prologue: Bowing to the moral police gaining ground our country, I have decided to give a guidance rating to the movies. Love in a Metro gets a 15 (in a green circle) for a long and longing display of Shilpa Shetty’s belly, liberal images of promiscuous activity in urban middle and upper middle classes and especially call centres (much to the chagrin and wistfulness of my friends in BPOs) and above all gratuitous scenes of women drinking and smoking purely for pleasure and without remorse. Now that I have given you three reasons for seeing the movie, let’s go to the rest. The Story Well actually there are 4-5 stories. Aakash (Shiney Ahuja) is a theatre actor playing to empty halls and struggling to make ends meet while Shikha (Shilpa Shetty) is a lady struggling with her husband’s silences, absences and distances. They have a brief encounter at a bus-stop and the inevitable happens and then does not happen. Shikha’s husband Ranjeet (Kay Kay Menon) is a top exe...

It has been over three months since the movie was released and I just got to see it on a flight from Frankfurt to India . Agreed that it was not the best location to see a movie but what the heck. One inescapable conclusion - Mani has added business naivete to his already well recognized political naivete (Dil Se, Yuva, Bombay ..). What was he thinking? The story in brief – Gurukanth Desai is a failure in academics, goes to Turkey and earns a decent work reputation there but comes back to India to start his own business here. He marries Sujata (Aishwarya), who has a failed elopement plan on her resume, for dowry to start his business. He comes to Mumbai, makes it big in the textile trade and over time becomes one of the largest industrialists in the country. But this is not at the cost of creating enemies – personally and professionally and is finally hauled up before the court for violating some license era regulations. A lot about the direction The movie could as w...