Sound of music

Somebody once said that musicians don’t die — they just hang up their instruments. And that is why music and film lovers are waiting for the cinematic tribute being paid to Ustad Bismillah Khan by filmmaker Subhankar Ghosh, son of script writer Nabendu Ghosh. The film, the buzz goes, will focus on the shehnai maestro’s childhood. Bismillah Khan had often said that his music wouldn’t die with his death. Ghosh has ensured that indeed it won’t.

Banking on Banker

After the retelling of the Ramayana, Mumbai-based author Ashok Banker is focusing on his novel, Iron Gods, to be launched next August. Banker, as always, has an interesting story to tell. The protagonists of the novel are an American Catholic, an Indian Hindu, a Pakistani Muslim, a Japanese Buddhist, and a Japanese Shinto follower – who have been commissioned to petition God to give the world a last chance. Banker’s epic is a contemporary one, merging fiction with science and religion. And, yes, the subtext is peace.

Eye on India

For the past four decades or so, he has been training his all-pervading camera on the colourful diversity that is India. And now, after having shared his views by way of thousands of spectacular photographs he has shot over the years, ace photojournalist Raghu Rai is putting it all in the form of a book, to be published by Penguin. “It’s going to be out in a couple of months’ time, and will contain some of the best photographs I have shot over many, many years,” says Rai. That’s called a feast for the eyes.

On your marks

Strength, the wise ones say, is more in the mind than in the body. A young woman called Deepa Malik endorses that. Half paralysed, she has just returned from Malaysia after participating in the paralympic games. The swimmer, who did rehabilitation training at the Indian Spinal Injuries Centre in Delhi for six weeks before the games, also runs a restaurant-cum-catering business in Ahmednagar. A keen cricketer and basketball player even after she was paralysed after a stroke in 1977, and wheelchair bound since in June 1999, she is full of hope about playing for India again. Her paralysis, she holds, is just a practical joke that destiny has played on her legs. And she has anyway forgiven destiny.

Man, alive

An untimely obituary has unleashed a grumble campaign in Kannada filmdom. A photograph of Kannada film director Girish Kasaravalli was published in the posthumous columns of a brochure released at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI), held in Goa last month. The 10 National Awards winning director had to go into a clarifications over-drive. “I’m still alive,” he told all concerned callers.

Although IFFI would like to see the incident as an error, Kasaravalli is now up in arms against the IFFI and the Press Information Bureau. He called the festival a Bollywood “tamasha” where south Indian film-makers are treated “as if they don’t exist”. Kasaravalli wants IFFI out of Goa. Time to write obituaries for the Goa film carnival?