The Sai Baba controversy is utterly irrelevant and merely proves that Indian newspapers and magazine are hard put to finding topic worthy of discussion. An article on the occasion if Satya Sai Baba’s 50th birthday which was celebrated on November 23. “I Wonder,” remarked a Professor of Political Science at an American university when I…
Dozens of olympiads and years of discussion and disappointments later, India is still athletically a huge zero, says Chaitanya Kalbag. 1976 promises to be a year to remember: with five Sundays in February, America’s Bicentennial, and the Olympics in Montreal. Right now, July’s looming up on the horizon. The Olympic Games are scheduled to begin…
You’re a member of the Hindi film audience. You see most of the films in town. You listen to the songs regularly on the radio. And you try humming a few bars in your bathroom. How long do you actually remember the words, or the music, of a Hindi film song? Agreed there are…
Authoritarianism may have professedly ended with the Emergency, but it continues to afflict many walks of our life. It has raised its ugly head, from time to time, in the country’s premier educational institutions. Young people, supposedly “tomorrow’s leaders”, are systematically subjected to stifling control, unenlightened concepts of discipline, and any protests they raise are…
Fourteen years younger than VS Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul was born in 1945 in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and was educated in Trinidad and Oxford. He began writing in college, and his short stories were accepted for Penguin Modern Stories 4. His first novel, Fireflies, was published at the end of 1971. and his second, The Chip-Chip Gatherers,…
The badmen in films only make good punching-bags for the heroes and fight-composers, says CHAITANYA KALBAG. Picture Little Red Riding Hood, seated in a cinema house looking at a Hindi movie. When the drums growl and the shadows lengthen, when the script says it’s time for evil, when the hoi polloi shift to the edge of…