In his memoirs, Obama writes about the time when his friends confronted him when they saw him reading Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’. I tossed the book into my backpack. “Actually, he’s right,” I said. “It is a racist book. The way Conrad sees it, Africa’s the cesspool of the world, black folks are savages, … Continue reading Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
In his latest work ‘The Age of Revolutions’, Fareed Zakaria argues that the world’s first revolution that transformed the relations between the state and its citizens and ushered in the modern ideas of liberalism was not the American, French or the English revolutions. It was instead the Dutch Golden Age. Feudalism never took root in … Continue reading England’s debt to the Dutch
Every ten years, Sight and Sound, under the British Film Institute carries a poll to identify the greatest movies of all time. In the last edition of 2022, the movie that topped the list was ‘Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’ by the Belgian auteur Chantal Akerman. Akerman was a Jew born to … Continue reading Chantal Akerman
Adrian Tomine is one of my favorite comic writers. His art has a Hopperesque feature. With a minimalist style, his work often focuses on the themes of urban alienation, the complexity of human relationships, identity and heartbreak. His art also frequently appears on the cover of the New Yorker. The French movie Les Olympiades (Paris, … Continue reading Adrian Tomine, Les Olympiades…
I’m the person who is generally unmoved when I read about the ‘looming climate apocalypse’, the probabilities of an asteroid collision with the earth or say, a future pandemic. I’ve always been a rational optimist when it comes to human progress and the belief in man’s ingenuity. Despite this, I was shaken, spent a few … Continue reading Nuclear Armageddon
Writing about happiness is probably one of the hardest things to do. Writing about trauma is far easier and also cathartic. For Rushdie: Happiness writes in white ink on white pages. In other words, you can’t make it appear on the page. It’s invisible. It doesn’t show up. Twenty-three years after the Fatwa, Rushdie was … Continue reading Rushdie’s ‘Knife’
The 2022 Iranian-French movie ‘Holy Spider’ was a treat at multiple levels. The movie is based on a real-life serial killer who murdered sixteen women in the late 90s in the city of Mashhad, Iran. The pull of world cinema is that it immerses you in geographies and historical periods that create a vivid impression, … Continue reading Holy Spider
