Seventy years ago, in August 1947, British colonial rule in India came to an end. The country was divided into two independent states – Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Using letters and diaries sourced from the world’s first Partition Museum which opens in Amritsar on 17 August, Soutik Biswas pieces together the extraordinary story of four friends who were separated by the traumatic event and reunited 30 years later. “Our […]

If the flop-ridden Hindi film industry had its hopes pinned on the new Shah Rukh Khan starrer for salvation, then it’s time to unpin those hopes. Imtiaz Ali’s eagerly awaited “Jab Harry Met Sejal” is a lengthy, lumbering, baggy and pointless love story. As lengthy and lumbering as his earlier “Tamasha” where two grown-up individuals behaved like a bratty unpleasant couple on a reality show pretending to be people they […]

The trailer of Luca Guadagnino’s coming-of-age film Call Me By Your Name is out and it literally screams perfection. The trailer is crowded by reviews from international publications and adjectives are peppered all over the trailer, which takes away from the logical flow of the narrative. The story, as much as this writer could deduce from the trailer, revolves around the relationship shared by a boy Elio Perlman (played by Timothee Chalamet) and […]

Munshi Premchand is considered to be among the greatest writers of Hindi-Urdu fiction in the early twentieth century. Born Dhanpat Rai Srivastava (on July 31, 1880) in Varanasi, UP, he began writing novels and short stories under the pseudonym Nawab Rai. In 1909, he changed his pen name from Nawab Rai to Premchand after he was censured by the British government for the “seditious” content of his short story collection […]

The teaser of Telugu superstar Naga Chaitanya’s upcoming blockbuster Yuddham Sharanam has been unveiled, and it has already got us excited. Earlier this month, on 2 July, the first look of Yuddham Sharanam was revealed. The teaser starts with Chaitanya’s character shown enjoying with his family — mother (Revathy), father (Rao Ramesh) and Lavanya Tripathi, who plays either his girlfriend or wife. It’s evident that his family is supposed to […]

US space agency NASA is opening up an opportunity where eclipse viewers around the country can participate in a nation-wide science experiment by collecting cloud and temperature data from their phones. The Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment, or GLOBE, Program is a NASA-supported research and education program that encourages students and citizen scientists to collect and analyze environmental observations. GLOBE Observer is a free, easy-to-use app that […]

The turret rises amid lines of shops selling clothes. Its thick bricks are proof it was constructed during the colonial era. Hundreds of visitors glance at the children’s clothes hanging at the shops here, oblivious to the turret behind. This is one of the several monuments in this area, an essential part of this historical market of Lahore – Anarkali Bazaar. A vendor looks at me suspiciously as I photograph […]

With the kind of publicity and controversies it attracted, almost everyone knows the basic premise of Madhur Bhandarkar’s film. Indu Sarkar, that hits theatres on Friday, is a political drama set against the backdrop of the Emergency. Indu Sarkar opens with the announcement of the Emergency blaring from radio sets and glaring on front pages of newspapers. It then takes us to a fictitious village in Delhi-Haryana border area, Mubipura, […]

On every weekend afternoon, the village centre of Ankapur in Nizamabad sees people thronging from Hyderabad, the neighbouring Karimnagar and Medak districts. Ankapur, also known as ‘mini USA’, due to its facilities, is located in Armoor mandal in NH-63, 20 kilometres away from the district headquarters. The rush of all the vehicles halts at a man who is seen busy preparing masalas or soaking nicely snipped chicken pieces into a […]

As Facebook chases business and enterprise customers for its popular instant messaging and voice calling app WhatsApp, Microsoft may have just beaten the social juggernaut to the punch. On Wednesday at an event in New Delhi, the Skype-owner launched Kaizala, a messaging app designed to ‘get work done’ that has already garnered interest from several state governments and businesses in India. A messaging app in 2017 ought to do more […]