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Behind
The Book
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| "It's
those five meters to the desk that are the hardest to cross every
morning" |
Social
anthropologist turned prose designer Amitav Ghosh had a busy week with
a book reading of his The Glass Palace in Oxford Bookstore in Calcutta
and a "chat show" with college pal and novelist Mukul Kesavan
at the Maurya Sheraton in Delhi. Both venues were chock-full-in Calcutta
filmmaker Gautam Ghose introduced Ghosh saying that he might make a film
of one of his books, while at the Delhi event organised by art impressario
Sanjeev Bhargava, Ghosh himself confronted the question of an Indian writer
using English. "I'm not saying we should write in English or not,"
said Ghosh steering clear of any prescriptive statements. "But an
English writer (in India) can hope to represent the entirety of his existence
in one language." Other sidelights: Ghosh is an unabashed Naipaul
and Satyajit Ray admirer and for him "those five metres to the desk,
are the hardest to cross every morning". Lesson No. 1: Humility will
get you everywhere. Lesson No.2: Make that short journey.
-Anshul
Avijit & Labonita Ghosh
Tollywood
Time
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| Mahesh
Bhatt with Mrinal Sen |
It's
Bengal's Filmfare awards. Last week, when the Bengal Film Journalists'
Association, the oldest association of film critics (born in 1937), organised
its annual awards ceremony, there was a near-total turnout from Tollywood.
The most surprised were the BFJA members themselves. The show had Bengal's
hottest screen pair, Rituparna Sengupta and Prasenjit, shaking a leg,
while top billers like Tapas Paul and Debasree Roy gave out the honours.
BFJA, the only local critics' body to give out awards for Hindi films
too, had also invited Mumbai biggies, including Mahesh Bhatt and Manoj
Bajpai. But behind the scenes, it's not a pretty picture. "It's getting
increasingly difficult to find films worthy of awards," says BFJA
Secretary Nirmal Dhar. With an assembly-line of trashy potboilers, cash-strapped
Tollywood standards are plummeting. A film is a "hit" if it
recovers costs. This year's Sashur Badi Zindabad, which made a profit
of Rs 1 crore (a small fraction of a major Bollywood hit), is being seen
as the biggest grosser in five years. Maybe glitzy shows like this will
make the difference.
-Labonita
Ghosh
Far Pavilion
At
Rajeev Sethi's lec-dem in Delhi's Habitat Centre on his pavilion at Hannover
2000, friend and flatterer Shabana Azmi was impressed. "Oustanding
work," she gushed, "I saw his creativity burst into the most
wondrous creation ... it was the toast of the expo." The glib Ashok
Khosla, a member of the advisory board of the Expo, was also brimming
over with praise ... in fact he even read out an adulatory letter (after
prompting from Sethi) sent by the commissioner of the Expo. So was the
cheer leading worth it? The film showed that his 13,500 sq m pavilion,
Basic Needs, was exceedingly lavish, though cluttered and repetitive (with
a glut of Bastar dhokra). But this does goes to show that Sethi possesses
tremendous energy and the capacity to execute a project that has inputs
from no less than 40 countries. Pity the Expo itself wasn't much of a
hit.
-Anshul
Avijit
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The
stock markets are humming, and it's feel-good time once again, writes
INDIA TODAY Associate Editor V. Shankar Aiyar in 
