Shoojit Sircar, prominent Indian film director and producer, films his character’s landscape with an eye that is at once joyful and marvellous. His latest Gulabo Sitabo, one of the first Bollywood films released digitally this June on Amazon Prime Video worldwide, is testimony to that, yet again. Be it Baankey Rastogi (played by Ayushman Khurana), a young man struggling to look after his mother and educate his three younger sisters or Mirza (played by the legendary Amitabh Bachchan) who quite steals the show as the grumpy, greedy old man obsessed with Fatima Mahal, the 100-year-old palace he and his wife Begum (Farrukh Jafar) own, Sircar combines his signature mix of theatre influence and intellectual pith. You have to watch the film to understand it. Sircar’s films, in his own words, ‘are an outburst of expression and not made to convince anyone’. But because they peer deep into life around us, he has become a filmmaker that allows viewers to resonate with his films and connect. Tak
I am thinking dirty. Don’t get me otherwise. It’s just one of those memories you can’t help erasing. And it stems from a conversation my husband and I shared a few days ago. Well, inane conversations that often crop up in between long serious talks about life, career and finance. I’d threatened to blog about it and here I am reliving it again! But we all need that comic relief once in a while. Years ago, when I was living in Delhi I always, invariably, had one reflex action – that of bowing my head in front of temples, churches or any places of worship. I am not religious but it’s perhaps a gesture of respect for the places that are deemed sacred by others. Respect is a great virtue to inculcate. Anyway, Delhi’s architecture is funny, you have dilapidated temples (some under reconstruction) and you have state-of-the-art toilets which are thankfully cropping up everywhere, you know the paid toilets where you can always do the needful, if you can’t help it. I was once passin