Raison d’etre. Like a hovering bee, the French word raison d’etre kept buzzing in our mind during a meal at Aangan Indian restaurant in Freehold, New Jersey. Just in case you are curious, the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th edition, P.1028) defines raison d’etre as ‘reason or justification for existence.’ The smart ones amongst you have […]
(via iPhone) Update: 8.38PM – Just allowed into the hall. Movie should start at about 8:45PM ET. Usual whistles and loud howls. Noisy inside the hall. ************** It’s 8.15 PM here on the U.S. East Coast. We are outside a theatre in the mid-Atlantic region waiting to be let in for the Kanthasamy movie. The […]
Long years ago, when the summer heat beat far less fiercely than it does these punishing days on our bent backs, we discovered Henry Miller. A wily, dark, amoral character and semi-friend, then doing MBA at a two-bit institute of management on the West Coast (in India) and now living on the West Coast (U.S.), […]
Great news, folks. Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan, who has made no secret of his dislike for our nation America, was stopped for additional questioning by U.S. immigration authorities at Newark airport in New Jersey yesterday. No sooner was Shahrukh Khan out of U.S. immigration interrogation than the arrogant star promptly lashed out at the U.S. […]
(Recommended by SI reader Boopalanj) Preoccupied as Indian film-makers are with regurgitating trash, the documentary as an art form is virtually absent in Bollywood or any of its smaller regional siblings. That’s odd when you know the cornucopia of material available to Indian film-makers. Given that the blighted land is rife with corruption, rampant cruelty, […]
Many years ago as we were desultorily walking down Gerard St W in Toronto, we espied an used bookstore (not far from the intersection with Yonge St). We stepped into the tiny store and to our surprise, the first book we picked up was a collection of short stories by Rabindranath Tagore. Titled Hungry Stones […]