Arts & Letters

The Elephant Whisperer

Mitali Parekh

What started as a photography assignment to capture a festival of pachyderms soon turned into a passion project for Anand Shinde

The Sage

Ritesh Uttamchandani

At the age of 84, S Paul, the man who shaped Indian photojournalism, still takes his camera out for a daily shoot

Writer’s Bloc

Indrajit Hazra

Hanif Kureishi’s sharp new novel is not only a riff on the Naipaul-French saga, but also an exploration of his own fascination for writers and their habits

Drink in Peace

Michael Edison Hayden

On the dive bar as a haven for the trend-bucking citydweller

Suchitra Sen signified the acme of modernity to the Bengali middle-class of the 1950s and 1960s playing characters who speak English with apparent ease, wear chic clothes, and have careers which they usually choose to put on hold. She was not an actress; her greatest performance was in playing herself: Suchitra Sen, the luminous superstar. And with her reclusiveness, she cannily created a legend of herself