Azamgarh, Review: Saving the honour of a city, and a religion Quite often, the religious minority of Indian Muslims is targetted for producing and harbouring young men who join terrorist groups, both within and outside India. While maybe a hundred or two hundred such misguided souls are either killed in encounters or found guilty of terrorist attacks and accordingly punished by the law of the land, there are an estimated 20 million Muslims whose motherland is India and who live in peace. That...

Nina Mehta’s 6th Death Anniversary (12th April 1942-26th April 2014) They were the earliest ghazal-singing couple I knew, Nina and Rajendra Mehta. Ladies come first, was the rule back in the late 60s. Born into a Baroda-rooted Gujarati business family, Nina Shah studied at Wilson College, Mumbai, where the family had settled. Winning the Inter-Collegiate Singing Competition four times in a row, she made her radio debut in Ovaltine Phulwari, which was a singing talent weekly show anchore...

IPTA’s 48th ICDC: Testament to teenage talent An inter-collegiate short Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu) drama competition (ICDC), introduced by the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) 47 years ago, has captured the imagination of budding talent in Mumbai’s colleges. It was this contest that has given us actors like Aamir Khan, Kunal Khemu, Neha Sharad, Channa Ruparel and Deven Bhojani. The 48th edition took place, as usual, in September, attracting 23 entries from local educa...

Aakhri Shama completes 50 years; film actor Kanwaljit Singh plays Ghalib Nostalgia that tugged at the very core of your heart surfaced on 16 February 2019 at the Rang Sharda auditorium, where I witnessed a show of the play Aakhri Shama (Last Candle), staged by the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA)’s Mumbai unit. With this show, the play completed a mind-boggling 50 years, having been first staged at the Red Fort, Delhi’s Deevaan-e-Aam (public hall), in 1969. That wa...

Manthan and the churning of good cinema: Master Class with Shyam Benegal Standing upright at 82, the one-time swimming champion and one of the foremost directors of Indian cinema, Shyam Benegal, reminisced about the making of his milestone project Manthan (The Churning/1976), in particular, and about films and film-making in general. The occasion was a Master Class, organised on the platform of White Wall Screenings, at the Habitat, Hotel Uni-Continental, Khar, Mumbai.   Founded by...