Dehlavi

  Satyajit Ray once remarked in an interview that Indian audiences are still “unsophisticated” and “fairly backward.” Watching the film Phule yesterday, I couldn’t help but be reminded of that observation. The cinema hall was almost empty. Apart from a handful of people, there was no one else in the evening show. In a way, it felt like a private screening just for me. But the silence in the theatre was less a luxury and more a cause for sadness—sadness for the filmmakers who will likely bear the burden of commercial loss, and sadness for us as a society. What troubled me more was the deeper question: In 21st-century India, is there truly no audience for a film that tells the story of Mahatma Jyotirao Phule and Savitribai Phule—their vast contributions, struggles, and dreams? Just a few months ago, a hyper-dramatised, masala-history film about a medieval Hindu king battling a foreign invader shattered box office records. But when a film grounded in real, uncomfortable history...

It took me almost 16 years to come back to Shimla. The number may not sound as remarkable unless put this way: “the last time I visited Shimla, I was in the fourth standard at school.” Memories from the previous visit were very vague. I remembered our hotel room was very small and not too cozy, the hill station was royally crowded, and that we had been to the Hanuman Temple thay featured hordes of monkeys inside the temple premises! Of course these memories had not painted a very rosy picture of Shimla in my mind. And yet, I was ready and excited to embrace the city once again. Revisiting a place was not something new or unusual to me. However, this time it made more sense to revisit Shimla.  Shimla, as one is aware, has always served as the summertime refuge for the inhabitants of the plains, that keeps swelling up with more people every year, in tune with the burgeoning population of the plains. Having lived in Delhi for all these years now, I wanted to experience how it fel...

  The following is from an old Facebook post that I had written about 6 years back. While scrolling down my own wall in search of an old post, I chanced upon this. While I couldn’t find the post I was initially looking for, I thought let’s revisit this forgotten piece of writing. Imagine Safdar Jung  Safdar Jung must be some 270 years old now. How long has he been buried in Delhi? He wonders, why Delhi? Why did his son have to associate his last memory with the later Mughal tradition? Why did he not get buried in Awadh? Safdar Jung is not very impressed with the bulbous domes sheltering him. These are nothing new--a seventeenth century Mughal emperor had already used these forms for a monument in Agra, more popular than his tomb site. What is so unique about them? He is disgusted with the lack of symmetry and proportions at places. Couldn't his son commission a better group of architects? Why was the mosque built at the eastern end? He does not know. He feels helpless and sad....