Dance like a man
Actor Kay Kay Menon is all legs and arms these days. In Calcutta recently for Anjan Dutt’s Hindi film, BBD, Menon did a dance shot with Rituparna Sengupta and, seemingly, quite enjoyed the experience. “It was a spontaneous act and I did not have to take any lessons,” he told reporters. Menon added that he accepted the role in the film even before he had finished reading the script. “Anjanda is a sensitive director. He has been an actor himself and understands the various issues involved.” Including, quite possibly, the joys of doing the tango with Sengupta.
Manto magic
Theatre personality Usha Ganguli has always had a soft spot for Saadat Hasan Manto, the Urdu short story writer often considered a legend in himself. “There is something different about Manto’s thought process,” says the Rangakarmee chief. So despite having staged two productions, Sarhad Paar Manto, which zeroed in on two of Manto’s short stories, and Manto aur Manto, an encounter with the writer whose pen effectively brought out the anguish of Partition, Ganguli isn’t quite content. “I have a request,” she told the audience who went to watch the first day, first show of Manto aur Manto. “Would you be willing to spare four hours for Manto?” The learned audience was game. Ganguli looked happy as she elaborated on her ambitious plan — staging the two productions at one go, in the process journeying into Manto’s mind through his works.
Tech specs
First, Chetan Bhagat kept investment banking in the backburner to try his hand at writing, and Five Point Someone, his debut novel, went on to become a smash hit. And now, after four long years, Amitabha Bagchi — another chip off the IIT block — is looking forward to cashing in on the IIT experience all over again. But with a difference. The book Above Average, says Bagchi, now assistant professor at the institute itself, is not just a nostalgic recollection of life within the walls of the premier technical institution. “It focuses on the issue of aspiration, and how the middle class in India is constantly pushing the limits of ambition further to try and go one up on their parents,” he says. And now that the book has hit the shelves, Bagchi says he’s already begun work on a second project that draws from his experiences in Baltimore, US, where he went to earn his Ph.D after his IIT years. This, we presume, will not be about his thesis, but the days around it.
Breaking news
Mira Nair, undoubtedly, is ahead of her times. So much so that the director happily jumbles up years in her new film, The Namesake, starring the beauteous Tabu. Or could it be that Nair can’t think of Calcutta without associating it with The Telegraph? Why else would the opening scene of the film show a busy Calcutta street in 1977 with a signboard of the unputdownable newspaper beaming at the human melee all around? Nice shot, but for the fact that The Telegraph was born on July 7, 1982. Wish she’d done a Gogol, oops, Google search.
Uprising in verse
Call it what you will — the first war of liberation or the Mutiny. But 1857, clearly, is the buzzword for 2007. The 150th anniversary of the ground-breaking year is being marked all over India, and poets from across the border are not going to be left behind either. So the much sought-after Shankar Shad Mushaira, revived after a gap of a few years, decided to devote an entire evening to the uprising. ‘The Mood of 1857’ was the theme at the poetry-reading session in New Delhi on Saturday, attended by some 17 poets from India and Pakistan, and a thousand fans. Not surprisingly, poet Javed Akhtar, who did the lyrics for Ketan Mehta’s film, The Rising, was among those invited by the organisers to the mushaira. The crowds rose to cheer the poets — and the poets rose to the occasion.