"Maiki"

Economist and author of the popular book ‘Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy’, Shrayana Bhattacharya breaks down her findings on romantic desire and freedom, fantasising as a form of self-care and how the Bollywood superstar’s icon interacts with the socio-economic structures that define our deeply capitalistic notions of romantic love
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Film-maker Jyoti Nisha scripts bittersweet scenes from her past as she traces the early loss of the innocence that once guided her younger self – a girl who loved commercial Hindi films and dreamed of one day making them – until she became keenly aware of the wilfully ignorant patriarchy and caste prejudice that sustains them and the world they represent
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When Vanya Lochan thinks back to the time she felt the flicker of first love, she is transported to her school days, specifically to her one-sided infatuation with a 15-year-old classmate she reveals only as “M”. Now 25, the writer is learning how to make space for his friendship in the present as their old dynamic lurks in her subconscious (CW: Contains instances of fatphobia and internalised fatphobia)
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Taking inspiration from Kalidasa’s long poem ‘Ritusamhara’, in which specific elements of nature are personified as lovers, South-Goa-based Vivekananda uses the practice of psychic automatism to draw up feelings that live in the depths of their being, translating them into colours, patterns and bodies that come together in sensorial self-portraits. These multimedia works that represent the act of creating art are accompanied by the interdisciplinary artist’s poetic musings
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S. S. Rajamouli is known for his fantasy and adventure films that are derived as much from Amar Chitra Katha as they are from Westerns like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Prathyush Parasuraman examines the defining elements of the Telugu director’s filmography, as well as the controversies of representation which have plagued the Baahubali series, which catapulted Rajamouli to the status of a pan-Indian icon
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The ever-present questions about love and heartbreak confront three college-age friends catching up in a Kolkata cafe as the presence of Virginia Woolf looms large in this semi-autobiographical vignette
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The mercurial director, known for indulging his love of the opulent, orchestrates spectacular cinematic realities but populates them with characters who are perpetual prisoners. On the heels of Bhansali’s latest release, Gangubai Kathiawadi, critic and writer Anuj Malhotra pauses frames from five of his iconic films to analyse how a shift in film-making sensibilities has affected his portrayal of tragic, inner worlds.
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Five young Indian artists, experimenting with forming spaces, silhouettes and textures, speak of the very process of creating in clay and its influence on developing an individualistic worldview and style sensibility
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