‘Kids are the real stars’

With his Independence Day release Satyamev Jayate in cinema halls now, Manoj Bajpayee has much to smile about Born in a farmer’s family in Belwa, a small village in Bihar, Manoj Bajpayee is a well-known actor today, with two National Awards and four Filmfare Awards in his kitty. Aspiring to be an actor since childhood, […]

Glow of success

As her career hums along nicely, Huma Qureshi gets another feather in her cap – a Tamil movie with Rajnikanth. What more could a girl from Delhi want? Huma’s mother, a Kashmiri, and her father Saleem Qureshi, who runs a chain of restaurants in Delhi, fell in love and got married despite family opposition. And […]

The hit man

Rajkumar Hirani has done it again with his biopic Sanju, not only by casting Ranbir Kapoor as Sanjay Dutt but by making it a top grosser Director of superhit films, Rajkumar Hirani has added another big feather in his cap with Sanju, based on the life and style of Bollywood veteran Sanjay Dutt. He not […]

Love fest goes on

The streets of Russia project its connection with india. its people speak of Bollywood influence, leaders and poets India is not unknown to most Russians, who still adore Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. And, of course, the Bollywood movies. A 25-year university student Nikita Mikhalkov, on duty as a security steward at the […]

The Bard of Bollywood

A young boy from Meerut had a dream of becoming a famous cricketer. Unfortunately, (or maybe fortunately), when studying at Delhi University, his thumb broke just a day before an inter-university tournament. Soon after, he lost his father. These two developments made him give up his dream of playing cricket for the country. Clearly, destiny […]

Pied Piper of CP

Alim Khan sits every day in A Block of Delhi’s iconic Connaught Place playing his heart out on his flute, hiding his sorrows behind those tunes and dreaming of making it big in Bollywood Connaught Place, the capital’s favourite hangout spot, will greet you with its maze of white buildings, the buzz of the crowd […]

Amazon unfriends outspoken actor

Swara Bhaskar is intelligent and doesn’t fit the pliant-flexible role that neo-liberalism assigns to women celebrities There is something freaky about the hysteria surrounding upcoming actress Swara Bhaskar’s utterances. The wrath directed at her is unforgiving, intolerant, and seeks to discipline. A young actress cannot cross lines without her career suffering, and certainly cannot use […]

No paeans to ‘jaan’

Film-makers seem to have fallen out of love with Mumbai, the city in which they live and work. No ode has been sung to ‘Bambai’ in the last two decades As home to Hindi film industry, Mumbai has hogged the space as backdrop of many films.The romanticisation of the city and various stereotypes that it […]