Stanley Donen, who co-directed the famous 1952 Hollywood film Singin’ in the Rain with Gene Kelly, passed away on February 21. Though it released to moderate success at first, the film went on to become a cult classic. The titular song, first composed in 1929 and which “inspired” the film itself, according to its makers, […]
Category: Culture
In an interview to The Wire Science last month, Venki Ramakrishnan, the molecular biologist, acknowledged that Indians had a bizarre relationship with the fact that he was a Nobel laureate: … the business from India was really strange because I’d left India when I was 19. I had almost nothing to do with Indian science […]
Instead of dismissing it with a gracious modesty, I’m going to shamelessly record for posterity that The Master quoted in Anand Venkateswaran’s essay on J.R.R. Tolkien in The Hindu Literary Review is yours truly. The full text of my quote to Anand, who is also a close friend and my first ever editor in journalism, […]
In all the DnD games I’ve played, I’ve felt there’s a tension between allowing the story to progress and the characters all helping each other participate in that progression. For example, we as players play a game because we want to enact a story even while we as a group compose its microscopic details. So […]
An online culture zine called Phantom Sway just discovered Mongolian folk rock and can’t stop raving about it (I found the article because 3 Quarks Daily picked up on it). What the superficial review fails to mention is the depth of this genre – like all genres – and restricts its attention to one band, […]
Can’t believe I’m so late to the party. It seems that a year ago, Steven Erikson put the Kharkhanas Trilogy on hold, delaying the publication of the third book. The second book, Fall of Light, came out two years ago and was a difficult read in many ways. More than anything else, it contained way more plots […]
I found this evocative image on Twitter today. It’s by a Russian artist named Yuri Shwedoff and the image is part of his ‘Space Series’, available to view and appreciate on Behance. I don’t know the provenance of the overlaid text though. At a glance, it’s clear the image depicts a future where we’ve abandoned all space launches and have regressed […]
On May 12, 2014, about half a week before the Lok Sabha election votes were to be counted, ahead of the result that would catapult the BJP to power with an overwhelming majority in the lower house of Parliament, H.R. Giger passed away. I didn’t hear about it until two days later, on May 14. […]
This is the age of the start-up, not megaliths. Remember T-Rex did not survive evolution. It is unlikely that religions organised like T-Rexes – most of the Abrahamic religions fit this description – will survive an era of fast change. The T-Rex did evolve in the first place because the evolutionary pathway existed for it […]
You remember the criticism that former Indian men’s ODI cricket captain M.S. Dhoni received when a member of the press, Sam Ferris, asked him a question about his retirement during a presser, got invited to the front by the sportsman and got snubbed in front of everyone? Shortly after, Arun Venugopal wrote an open letter to […]