Art & Culture

The Film Reporter’s Viewfinder

Haima Deshpande

A brief history of Indian film journalism through the eyes of those who’ve lived it

Dee Saturday Night

Sonali Kokra

The life of an Indian porn star who has moved up to C-grade cinema

Go Figure

Suhit Kelkar

Quasar Thakore Padamsee challenges his audience to piece together his play on Tibetan identity

The Vibes of Deepika

Rajeev Masand

Controlled aggression, sporting spirit and playful camaraderie. One of the guys? A superhot actress, actually

What’s common to Band Baaja Baraat, Gangs of Wasseypur and Ek Tha Tiger? Nothing, except that they all got a lot of attention. As Bollywood comes out of its formula phase, what does a scriptwriter do?

The Last Days of Freedom

Gauri Gill

What a photo stall at a fair in rural Rajasthan for adolescent girls tells us about those who posed for its camera

The Irony of Iconography

Aastha Atray Banan

A former sketch artist for the Mumbai Police does an Andy Warhol on Vidya Balan

100 Years of Karim’s

Sohini Chattopadhyay

The rise and rise of Karimuddin’s unusual business idea

Life in a Dream

Trisha Gupta

Project Cinema City excavates quirky connections between the Hindi film industry and the city of Bombay

The 3 am Nannies

Shaikh Ayaz

As talent management agencies wrest control of a major chunk of Bollywood talent, the old-world secretaries, once the backbone of the star system, are fading away