Browsing All Posts filed under »Society«

The Last Empire – A Short History of Twentieth Century Russia

August 13, 2020

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A plug for G Waugh’s book version of his essays on Russia… I would like to announce the launching of my first book – THE LAST EMPIRE – A Short History of Twentieth Century Russia. It is a collection of fifteen essays that chronicle the history of Russia/USSR from 1917 till 1991. The origin and […]

Readers Write In #241: When Lord Krishna and Woody Allen met on my account!

August 11, 2020

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(by G Waugh) Arjuna, the warrior felt deeply uncomfortable about taking on his rivals, the Gauravas who were his siblings after all. He was much worried about fighting is own Guru Dronacharya who treated him like a son. It was a deep dilemma for Arjuna. He simply couldn’t pick his bow and begin fighting the […]

Readers Write In #236: A quick guide to Darwin and Marx

August 1, 2020

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(by G Waugh) The focus of the essay will be on how new species of life are created through Darwinian concepts of evolution and how the same concepts were applied to concepts of socio-economic theory by Karl Marx. Every generation of a species tends to produce the same kind of offspring with characteristics identical or […]

Readers Write In #234: Sushant Singh Rajput and AR Rahman

July 29, 2020

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(by Reane Taara) On June 14th, 2020; Sushant Singh Rajput ‘allegedly’ took his own life. This created quite a stir. To the people of the South, he was reel life Dhoni,which meant he was as loved as MSD. The time he visited Chennai with MS is proof that he was accepted by the people here. […]

Readers Write In #225: Keeping Up With Vanitha Vijaykumar

July 22, 2020

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(by H Prasanna) Vanitha, who began her career as an actress, has cemented herself as a true maverick of reality TV in Tamil Nadu with her new YouTube channel and (now closed) Insta account. This is decidedly not reality television in terms of production and narrative control. It is a gossip column news story elevated […]

Films may be on a break, but our obsession with film news clearly isn’t, thanks to Kangana Ranaut and Vanitha Vijayakumar

July 21, 2020

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If we do want to fight Systemic inequality, why waste that fight on something as insignificant as the film industry, which has so little bearing on our daily lives?  This period was supposed to be a breather from the movies. A scary virus struck and locked the world down, and we were meant to be […]

Readers Write In #223: You and me are stars!! Wait. What?

July 17, 2020

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(by G Waugh) Linklater’s films give me an easy start to plunge into a theme reducing the time I spend on staring at a blank sheet of paper. “You are both stars, don’t forget. When the stars exploded billions of years ago, they formed everything in this world” The first time I heard these lines […]

Readers Write In #222: Was man made only to survive and accumulate?

July 15, 2020

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(by G Waugh) “The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and of mundane considerations ceases” This was Karl Marx as early as the 1800s. Marx wanted to divest labour from its criticality in ensuring survival and its indispensability in the pursuits of acquiring one’s own basic requirements for […]

Readers Write In #221: Why there are so many rapes in today’s India?

July 11, 2020

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(by G Waugh) Pick any social or cultural phenomenon of today and try to analyze it. If your analysis does not involve the economic aspect underlying it, you are probably not analyzing it enough. The world of today was not the world we saw a couple of decades ago. The Chennai I grew up in […]

Panel discussion on ‘Cinema in the time of Corona’

July 11, 2020

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Was a part of Deccan Herald’s new webinar series, DH Sparks: “In our first discussion, we focus on the surge in content and consumption on OTT platforms… Is the shift from big screen to small screen here to stay? What are the implications for movie halls and multiplexes, actors, directors and technicians? And what can […]

Readers Write In #216: Why hasn’t technology solved poverty yet?

July 5, 2020

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(by G Waugh) “It’s all these people talking about how technology is and how it saves all this time. But what good is saved time, if nobody uses it? If it just turns into more busy work. You never hear somebody say, ‘With the time I have saved by using my word processor, I am gonna […]

Readers Write In #213: The real purpose of education is the joy of discovery

June 25, 2020

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(by G Waugh) Virtually every single thing in the universe – trees, bikes, nails, eyes, watches, paints, planes, fishes are all essentially made up of the same constituents. You can theoretically, get almost all elements occurring in nature if you are given with a sufficient supply of protons, electrons and neutrons. And breaking down of […]

Readers Write In #210: Sushant Singh Rajput and the curse of introversion

June 23, 2020

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(by Madan Mohan) Seeing as everyone, including myself, has only been talking about Sushant Singh Rajput for the last week or so, I didn’t want to compose a write up that would pile on. Until I saw something today that hit a raw nerve… The first time I watched Sushant Singh Rajput in a film […]

Federico Fellini’s ‘La Dolce Vita’ depicts the suicide of an intellectual and the death of everything he stands for

June 20, 2020

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How prescient this film seems from today, from this world around us where sensationalism is everything. Fittingly, ‘La Dolce Vita’ also gave us the word “paparazzi” in the intrusive, invasive sense we recognise it today. … Ingmar Bergman died the best possible way, in 2007: peacefully, in his sleep. But seven years earlier, a report […]

Readers Write In #207: Sushant Singh Rajput and the cutthroat world of cinema

June 17, 2020

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(by Hariharasudhen Nagarajan) I am still not over Sushant Singh Rajput’s death. It sends a signal to those looking to pursue a career in the movie industry that no matter how many successful films you give, no matter how many successful directors you work with, if you are an outsider, you will eventually consider yourself […]

Readers Write In #205: Sushant Singh Rajput: An innings that deserved a winning result

June 15, 2020

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(by N Madhusudhan) I woke up from my afternoon nap hearing the news of Sushant Singh Rajput’s death. It was not just shocking.It was just too bizarre to believe.It took a few hours to realize how it was really affecting me.Every time I thought of MS Dhoni, Sushant’s is the second face that still comes […]

Sushant Singh Rajput: He lived the dream, but he also seems to have paid a price

June 15, 2020

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The actor’s death is making people talk about mental health issues. The renewed ‘visibility’ he’s brought to this topic may be his lasting legacy. Our cinema coverage is so omnipresent — even more so in this digital age — that the movies matter beyond their ability to entertain us.  Millions of people battle dyslexia, but […]

The unshackling of Tamil film music from the Carnatic idiom happened long before Ilaiyaraaja (addenda)

June 12, 2020

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The unshackling of Tamil film music from the Carnatic idiom happened long before Ilaiyaraaja

June 8, 2020

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The maestro is a talent that comes along once in the bluest of moons. My point is simply that his genius doesn’t need the negation of everyone who came before him. June 2 came and went. And with the day, Ilaiyaraja’s birthday, a hundred tribute pieces came and went into the Internet’s memory. If someone […]

Readers Write In #202: Of Cinema, television and depression

June 7, 2020

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(by Amit Joki) Cinema and television are such wonderful artistic expressions, no? They make you laugh, they make you cry, they astonish you, they make you feel alive, they make you feel included, they make you feel love, all the wonderful things. But one thing that doesn’t get talked about much is, how they cause […]

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