Spotlight On Oman Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies is the first novel from the Gulf to win the  Man Booker International Prize—a book by a female Omani author at that, a scholar and academic. The judges called…

We have all encountered this—a kid lying on the floor of a store, screaming and throwing a tantrum till the harassed parent gives him (it is invariably a boy) what…

Heart of Darkness: Rating: **** An IPS officer with a wardrobe of natty suits descends on Lalgarh in UP on a punishment posting, and gets a taste of what the…

Toxin Factory: Rating: *** Vandana Kataria’s debut feature Noblemen, is set in an elite boys’ boarding school, and zeroes in accurately on what makes some men so toxic. The strange…

This Odd Couple Qissago’s production Jaana Tha Roshanpura, written by Samta Sagar and directed by Virendra Saxena, has a simple premise—unusual, but also believable—and builds on it with humour and…

Psycho Alert So, this chain-smoking doctor with ‘anger management’ issues, sees a girl, as she is walking single-file with other female medical students, eyes down, demure gait. He falls in…

Akriti Singh named her four-year-old theatre group Storia Senza Storia, which means story-less stories. “There is a writer called Scarlett Thomas, who is my favourite. There is a book by her called Our…

Cooking Up Drama Pakistani film, Cake, was streamed recently to an appreciative audience. The Asim Abbasi film, was released in the UK, and was the country’s entry for the Academy Awards.…

A theatre production, called #Womanologues, is a series of monologues by women, under the broad theme of ‘desire’. Among the stories about a deliriously happy divorcee, and a single woman…

Super Seven The experiment of putting together an evening of monologues worked well in Gujarati. In the first production of Saat Teri Ekvees (7X3=21) by Manhar Gadhia, audiences got to see…