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Back in the last millenium, when I was still figuring out whom I wanted to work under for my doctoral thesis, I asked my friend and mentor Sridev for advice. I was leaning towards working with his advisor, Professor Asim Kumar Pal, so I figured he’d be able to tell me what the experience was…
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A black woman in a plaid dress walks into a room full of white men in starched white shirts. She is Katherine Goble, a child prodigy who has been assigned to the Space Task Group at NASA owing to her skills at analytic geometry. In an ideal world, the first of these two sentences would…
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There’s a quiet exchange between Mahavir Singh Phogat and his wife where talks about the difficulty of being a coach and a parent. I can’t be a parent when I’m being a coach, he says. That the world expects him to be a parent and not a coach matters little to him. He is clear-eyed…
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By far the most refreshing thing about Moana is what it does not have: gender politics. The heroine, a plucky little girl born to the leader of a tribal chief on an island paradise, is expected to succeed her father. There’s no resentment on the part of anyone in the village on this count, nothing…
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There is a scene at the beginning of the third act of Kodi when Dhanush’s mother, played by Saranya (she must, by now, consider this role about as routine as brushing her teeth) has a conversation with a major character. She starts off saying that she is not happy with what her son has become,…
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One of the most affecting scenes in Twelve Angry Men is one where one of the jurors goes on a rant about “these people”, and the others respond to it by simply getting up and walking away and turning their backs on him. The verbal response that comes at the end of the scene is effective…
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Warning: Here be spoilers After a more-or-less obligatory, yet absolutely rousing introduction to its eponymous hero (Rajni pretty much defines the word ‘swag’), Kabali parachutes us into the middle of a plot that has been unfolding for over twenty five years. We hear names of characters, get snatches of dialogue and flashback scenes that tell…
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Airlift ends with a surprisingly affecting song: Tu bhoola jisse. It begins with the tricolour being hoisted in Jordan. And when I saw this film in the movie theater, I found myself wanting to applaud. This doesn’t happen often. The only other flag hoisting scene in the movies that has well and truly worked for me…
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I started thinking about this post because of this song: Aside: The version in the film is sung by Shahid Mallya — this version is a reprise on YouTube, sung by Diljit Dosanjh (who is part of the film’s cast) and tells part of the Alia Bhatt character’s back-story. It’s an interesting idea. In one…
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Udta Punjab is an absorbing cerebral journey, a hyperlinked story that follows multiple characters through the labyrinth that is the drug business. Some are users in one form or another, some do their best to stop the abuse, and some others are simply collateral damage. And sometimes, the same person falls into all of these…
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