Rajesh Talwar

MASKA, BUN MASKA AND ELON MUSK

November 19, 2022

PAPA: So, what is the news today, Piya? And what’s that stuff you’re eating for breakfast?PIYA: It’s bun maska, Papa, and the news in the paper is that Elon Musk the new owner of Twitter is now asking everyone to pay eight dollars for a blue tick.PAPA: Is that a...

Accepting and celebrating diversity on this International Day of Tolerance

November 10, 2022

We have so many international days every year, and it is good that we have them, for they draw our collective attention to important issues and themes, but sometimes the themes themselves are ill chosen, or perhaps, it would be better to say that they could have been better chosen....

LESSONS FOR AUTHORS FROM THIS YEAR’S BOOKER PRIZES

October 31, 2022

The news came in a few days ago that this year’s Man Booker Prize has been awarded to Shehan Karunatilaka, the Sri Lankan author of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, which explores the civil war in his country. It appears to be a good time for South Asian writing...

The controversial depiction of Lord Ram in ‘Adipurush’

October 17, 2022

A big budget film Adipurush is slated to hit the screens in January next year. The publicity for the film started a little before Dussehra this year to build up hype. The lead actor Prabhas even flew down to attend Ram Leela at Red Fort, together with the President of...

The reason Mahatma Gandhi travelled third class

October 3, 2022

On this Gandhi Jayanti on 2 October, also known as the International Day of Non-Violence following a 2007 resolution passed by the UN General Assembly, let’s pause to remember the Mahatma in a less serious, almost light-hearted fashion.Anyone familiar with Gandhi’s life and writings would know that he possessed a...

What the war in Ukraine and our love for dogs can tell us about ourselves

August 29, 2022

On 24 August, the war in Ukraine entered its sixth month, with no end in sight. Two days later, on 26 August, we celebrated International Dog Day. Two seemingly disparate events, the first an unfolding tragedy, the second a celebration and yet there are important, related lessons we may derive...

The fault, dear Bollywood, is not in our stars, but in our content

August 16, 2022

The performance at the box office of both Aamir Khan’s Laal Singh Chaddha and Akshay Kumar’s Raksha Bandhan has been underwhelming to say the least. Producers, distributors, actors, cinema owners, everyone connected to the film industry in one way or the other are lamenting the successive box office failures of...

Will the Chancellor of the Exchequer be checking into Number Ten?

July 26, 2022

Speaking in a lighter vein, the news is that India has entered the finals. Not of the cricket World Cup, which is still a while away, but the finals of something even diehard cricket fans should concede, is equally, if not more momentous. Rishi Sunak, a British national of Indian...

The Nepo kids of Bollywood and beyond

July 13, 2022

A little over two years ago, on 14 June, actor Sushant Singh Rajput committed suicide, sparking a nationwide debate on nepotism within the film industry. In an interview published in a newspaperlast month, actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui wondered why there was so much focus on the so-called nepo kids of Bollywood....

The Subjectivity Of Success

February 25, 2022

There are several reasons why the creative spirit can be disturbed by success. The phenomenon itself is well documented, but philosophers and psychologists either have not considered the issue important enough to investigate or have not, in any event, provided a satisfactory explanation for why it happens. I can think...

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