Love, Life and Happiness

I have been a child. I have been an only child. I have been through a major part of my life believing, it doesn’t matter. Loneliness is not a function of number of people in your life. It is a matter of attitude . So I have been telling myself all those years. I would sleep through the summer afternoons as a child, waiting for the evening to descend . I would read magazines and little Pocket-books much to annoyance of parents through the days, haunted by loneliness. I would tell myself, brotherhood or brotherly love is something that can be won over by kindness, charm and what not. I would learn later that you cannot argue with nature. I, in later life, took to writing. Sometimes I wonder why? When my health suffered, I was to take to some physical exercise. I tried gyms, but with absence higher than the attendance, gave up. Then I took up long distance running and it stayed. Why? What is the common theme between writing and running and why it links to my own solitary exi

Kangana Ranawat as Datto and As Tanu Released: 22nd May, 2015 Director: Anand L. Rai Writer: Himanshu Sharma Cast: Kangana Ranawat, R. Madhavan, Swara Bhaskar Rating: 4/5 (Enjoyable Watch, one point lost on unnecessary love angle of Puppy and needless kidnapping plot)   In a very famous TED talk, Elizabeth Gilbert  , famed author of 'Eat, Pray, Love' speaks about the artists often crashing under the heavy load of their own earlier success. While the talk is on a different subject regarding how an artist who gets an early success of such stupendous proportion should handle the enormous stress such a success puts on the artist by expecting further greatness from him, by considering Talent as some outside force, beyond the Artist's mortal persona, I bring it up here for a totally different reason. I was trying to understand the phenomenon which Tanu Weds Manu Returns seems to be on the way to make and contrary to the general fate of any follow up work, how it

  Piku: Released: 8th of May, 2015 Script and Screenplay: Juhi Chaturvedi Director: Shoojit Sircar Actors: Amitabh Bachchan, Deepika, Irrfan, Maushumi Chatterjee   All great works of art bring out strong emotions. You cannot stay lukewarm about them. They will either be loved greatly or hated thoroughly. I watched Piku yesterday. Shoojit Sircar comes out with a winner. Well, he crafts and weaves a world of Bengali mind and paints masterly how a Bengali views the world. Every state has its own nuances and Shoojit captures the Bengali perspective masterly. But that is not a credit. What would a Bengali do, if not capture a Bengali character well? Kolkata has largely stayed stuck in the time-warp with its old world charm intact, if you leave Salt Lake part out of it. Even in the New Kolkata part, the character of old Kolkata lingers on as at the first hint of cold monkey caps come out. This makes it easier to invent older time Kolkata on the screen, especially if the d

There are some events which cuts through one’s life, distinctly breaking it off into two parts like a ripe fruit which has just fallen from the tree. Fatherhood is one such before-after event. The day is bright one, still bearable for this time of the summer, blessed by unseasonal rains yesterday. Nonu, my daughter, otherwise known as Sanskriti, turns seven today. I still go back seven years back this day. The cool, benign hospital room, her mother slept tired, having brought in a new life into this world. The weather was kind that year as well. Sun was bright, splendid, but kinder than the usual harsh summer day of Delhi. Still remember, walking into the nursery, in a small world of tiny kids, yet unknown to this world, walking into it a stranger. They would open their eyes, tired, somewhat unhappy, out of the safe, comforting womb of their mothers and look a while, disenchanted and go back to sleep. I went around and saw the third bed and the little one there, held a band

“Orlando sat so still that you could have heard a pin drop. Would, indeed, that a pin had dropped! That would have been life of a kind. Or if a butterfly had fluttered through the window and settled on her chair, one could write about that. Or suppose she had got up and killed a wasp. Then, at once, we could out with our pens and write. For there would be blood shed, if only the blood of a wasp. Where there is blood, there is life.- Virginia Woolf. This paragraph picked out of wonderful masterpiece of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando as she explains the predicament of Orlando, the man turned woman, struggling to write a poem, a novel is something every writer faces. Ms. Woolf mentions this as a challenge thrown at a novelist every waking day. But I would presume, the challenge extends in even graver proportions to a new set of writer, which is a journalist. A modern day journalist needs not only blood, she needs a fresh blood, a blood which is not many day old. She writes not as a r