Laapataa ladies, produced by Kiran Rao, Aamir Khan and Jyoti Deshpande, and directed by Kiran Rao, is India’s official entry to the 97th Academy Awards. This movie is based on a story “Two Brides” by Biplab Goswami. Laapataa Ladies is set in the rural India of 2001. This was the time when Cable TV…
Starting in the early 2003, Shrilal Shukla wrote a column in the Hindi India Today magazine for a period of two years. These columns were a look at the contemporary news and a rumination on them. The book Khabron ki Jugali by Shrilal Shukla collects those columns. My previous post was also on a…
Satire: a way of criticizing people or ideas in a humorous way, especially in order to make a political point, or a piece of writing that uses this style Harishankar Parsai is considered to be one of the greatest satirists in the Hindi language. My previous post on Pagdandiyon ka Zamana was a celebration…
What happens when the normal legal route to get a task done is made difficult and inefficient? Harishankar Parsai Jee answers this question in his essay Pagdandiyon ka Zamana. People start taking the routes which are not normal and not legal, because the task must be done. And what happens when this practice is…
Earlier this year, around the time of new year resolutions, I decided that I want to spend this year reading Hindi literature. I have read a lot of books over the past three decades of my life but a concerted effort on Hindi has not been the case. This year, I want to correct…
This long weekend in India gave me an opportunity to watch a highly acclaimed movie of recent times, 12th Fail starring Vikrant Massey in the lead role. I had heard a lot of praise of this movie and all of that is well deserved. Vikrant Massey has played the role of Manoj Kumar Sharma…
Seth Godin has a podcast called Akimbo. The episodes are in two parts – in the first part Seth talks about what he wants to talk about. The second part is where he answers questions from his listeners. In one of the episodes, a listener asked a very interesting question – “how do you…
In my last post I spoke about reading for the pleasure of reading. Interestingly, my randomizer picked up a children’s book for me. It is the story of the puppet whose nose grows longer whenever he lies. The book Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi adds so much to the well known tale of the sentient…
After a very long time, I read a book which was able to reset my thinking. This is important stuff. Similar to most of us, I struggle to optimize the utilization of my time. Time management, Productivity hacks, Mastering time – all these phrases resonate with me. And in the quest of becoming better…
It has been more than five months since I posted anything here. As it usually happens, when a gap opens up on this blog I start questioning my commitment to the blog. And as it also usually happens, I get the inspiration to continue from somewhere. Today the inspiration came from one of my…