Ah! Tamannaah!

Tamannaah Bhatia’s musical number ‘Aaj ki Raat’ from the director Amar Kaushik’s movie Stree 2 has become the most watched song of 2024 on YouTube in India. ‘Aaj ki Raat’ has over 750 million views on YouTube, and has been streamed more than 139 million times on Spotify. Much like the iconic song ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’, from Mani Ratnam’s 1998 film Dil Se, its lyrics defy its moves, and suggest a new kind of embrace, with the eyes rather than the arms. Tamannaah’s lack of inhibition and her pure joy in the performance during the song is what makes her stand apart from her peers. Coming up this year, Tamannaah has the OTT series Daring Partners with Diana Penty, and the movie Odela 2 in Telugu.

The Royal

In real life, Padmanabh Singh or Pacho, the unofficial Maharaja of Jaipur, is quite the clotheshorse for designers. On screen, Ishaan Khatter is playing a version of him, the polo-playing Aviraj Singh, the Maharaja of Morpur, in Netflix’s forthcoming series, The Royals.

In Great Company

The self-taught film­maker Ravi Varman has been inducted into the American Society of Cinematographers, and rightly so. His brilliant work for a varied set of great masters has always been striking and colourful. From Mani Ratnam’s Ponniyin Selvan 1 and 2, to Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela, he has used film as a univer­sal language. Oddly, two films Varman has loved, which didn’t do well at the box office when they were released, are considered classics now. One of these is the Tamil movie Kaatru Veliyidai (2017), which was the first time Varman worked with Ratnam. The other was the Hindi movie Tamasha (2015), where he collabo­rated with Imtiaz Ali.

BollywoodcinemaIshaan KhatterRavi VarmanTamannaah