When she goes out with her Indian husband, she’s taken to be a foreign prostitute. When they holiday in Goa, they’re busted for drugs. Yet neighbours line up to meet her, coolly ignoring her husband. The curiosity of what it means to be a white woman married to a brown man.
Cycling 10 hours a day, travelling across 13 countries, from Ireland to India, he realised that everyday irritants like the traffic and the weather colonise too much of our time. Life, after all, comes with bumps and all, and we should enjoy the ride. Wobbly or not.
He ran away from home to Bombay and landed the lead in Mira Nair’s Academy award-nominated Salaam Bombay! But after years of looking for another role, any role, he’s back home in Bangalore driving an auto.
What happens when you live the early part of your life in a ‘small town’, move out as you grow up, and eventually return, only to find that the small town has moved on?
It was on a stolen trip to the cinema that he met his hero, Charlie Chaplin. And a chance encounter that got him the Cherry Blossom ad. So many years, so many gigs, yet he still isn’t done being Chaplin.
She doesn’t live the life of a cloistered nun, but renunciation of sex was key to the spiritual journey she embarked upon in her late teens.
She entered the house as a temporary domestic help, wordlessly captured everyone’s hearts, and then disappeared. I shared nothing more than a few silent smiles, and tears, with this woman, but found it held more meaning than words could ever do.
She’s the girl whose head is mercilessly hacked in a shot, the faceless girl who merges into the background. But Shubhangi Swarup trains rigorously and breathes professionalism. Because she believes in putting in that little bit extra.
She is the author of many autobiographies, none of them her own. She’ll never win the Booker for no one will know the words are hers. The ghostwriter whooshes out of the cupboard to tell her side of the story.
Cinematographer VK Murthy grew up dreaming of being a matinee idol. Guru Dutt, though, had other ideas. Thanks to which, we got that magical, ethereal beam of light in Waqt Ne Kiya...