As the new Sara Paretsky novel, Dead Land, is released (and immediately picked up), it leads to musings about the female detective in fiction. Paretsky created the wonderful character, V.I.…

This day in 1973, Prakash Mehra’s Zanjeer was released, a film that that is indisputably a mainstream trendsetter.   There is movielore attached to the old film– which does not…

Mother’s Day : The original Marathi play, Aai Retire Hotey by Ashok Patole, was written over thirty years ago, and has had several productions since then, in multiple languages. Many aspects…

On May 3, 1913, Dadasaheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra, India’s first feature film, was released in Mumbai, at the Coronation Cinematograph and Variety Hall, Girgaon.  To mark the occasion, here’s revisiting…

The term ‘male gaze’ was coined by Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema—which, to put it simply, meant that visual media are created for a heterosexual male’s point…

Mystery Of The Missing Girls: The Sundown Motel by Simone St. James moves between dual time frames as two intrepid young women set out find out just what is going…

Once Upon A Time In Mumbai:   The textile mills strike in Mumbai, that led to a lockout and mass unemployment in the early eighties, had a long term impact…

The Mark Of  Classic: It’s 41 years since the release of  the original Golmaal (1979), Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s no-frills comedy, that remains a Bollywood classic. Starring Amol Palekar, Utpal Dutt, Dina Pathak,…

The Count Of Hotel Metropol: If a book remains on the bestseller charts for so long, it demands to be read. And after completing Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow…

 In a currently popular web series, Panchayat,  set in a village in Uttar Pradesh, the Pradhan of the gram panchayat is Manju Devi (played by Neena Gupta), but the actual work is…