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Friday, August 28, 2026

"I'd rather not know" - Kate Hepburn and MJ (and the old Spencer Tracy cottage)

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My feelings about Katharine Hepburn shifted a bit over the decades, from adolescent hero-worship to something more cautious (among other thi...
Thursday, August 20, 2026

Ray Bradbury, an automated house in 2026, and Hemingway's parrot

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Here's something I should have remembered to post on August 4. Earlier this year I bought an Everyman’s Library edition of a Ray Bradbur...
Thursday, August 13, 2026

Some love for Ohh My Dog

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It was interesting to see a poster for Amit Rai’s new film Ohh My Dog on a wall just across the road from my flat, near the Malviya Nagar m...
Sunday, August 09, 2026

Short take: One, Two, Three

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As a big James Cagney fan, I can’t believe it took me so long to get around to One, Two, Three – a crazy, breathless political comedy that ...
Friday, August 07, 2026

Shades of nostalgia, from 1920s Minions to 1980s henchmen

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(from my Economic Times column. Don't miss my profile illustration, further down in the post  – I'm quite chuffed with it) --------...
Saturday, August 01, 2026

Ways of seeing, and not seeing: on Shoma Chatterji's The Male Gaze Redefined

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(Wrote a version of this review for The Hindu's Sunday paper) ---------------------------------------- A book reviewer – or a film revie...
Monday, July 27, 2026

A shout-out for The Poisoned Chocolates Case (Anthony Berkeley, 1929)

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Most of my fiction reading in the past 3-4 months has been in the form of short stories, but I returned to a full-fledged crime novel (Golde...
Saturday, July 11, 2026

Mango-hunting in Rataul

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Scenes from last week's day-trip to nearby Rataul, to visit the mango orchards (with a few friends who were more experienced in this sor...
Thursday, July 09, 2026

From Hitchcock to Shyamalan – on logic, plausibility, and the joys of being manipulated

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(From my Economic Times column) ----------------------------- Reading a book about Alfred Hitchcock recently, I saw one of his quotable quot...
Wednesday, June 24, 2026

An encounter with Dan the man

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Guess who. (Fans of 1980s mainstream Hindi cinema * might * get it.)         See pic below for the answer…👇 I had a short but very pleasant...

Faces and facets (as presented by the bug on Satyajit Ray's windowsill)

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(Did this short piece for Reader’s Digest, about the new Nemai Ghosh-Satyajit Ray exhibition. Some photos from my walkthrough last month are...
Thursday, June 18, 2026

On M Night Shyamalan’s delicious thriller-musical Trap (and emotional vs logical viewing)

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A couple of weeks ago I made the time to go to my (generally neglected) screening room in Panchshila Park for a few evenings, and watch some...
Wednesday, June 17, 2026

Quick notes: Targets (1968)

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“All the good movies have been made.” “The world belongs to the young.”  A couple of nice meta-scenes between the 80-year-old Boris Karloff ...