Vijay Marur Many years ago, one of my cameramen, who had been trained by some of the black & white legends of the Indian Celluloid Industry told me about a shot that his guru had masterminded. Apparently, the shot required the hero to walk out of a room, walk along the balcony, come to the grand, curving staircase, walk down it and walk through the rather large curtain draped drawing room into the portico area where a car was waiting. All the while delivering a dialog. I was told about the difficulties of lighting the sequence because as we all know, lighting up for B & W films... 

By Ratnakar Tripathy Ashis Nandy: literally! If familiar with Indian politics and society, here is an IQ test for you. This is what Nandy said during a panel discussion as transcribed from a video clip doing the rounds in the media. Read it as carelessly as you wish and see if you can get the sarcasm. I bet you will, unless you are a towering intellectual or a star media analyst-panelist-commentator. Here it goes: ‘It is a fact that most of the corrupt come from the OBCs and the scheduled castes, and now increasingly the schedule tribes. And as long as this is the case, the Indian republic will... 

    Welcome Bhojpuri TV! Mumbai:  Media firm Reliance Broadcast Network (RBNL) today announced the launch of a new channel, ’BIG Magic Bihar and Jharkhand’, to reach out to the Bhojpuri population. While more channels devoted to Bihar languages, Magahi, Maithil and Bhojpuri etc are welcome on their own, there is an additional reason why Cable TV may be the answer to the burning issue of ‘vulgarization’ of cinema and music that the middle classes in Bihar and Jharkhand complain of. The main reason behind it is the middle class will have no part of its own music and cinema... 

    Dhyan Chand: the glorious days of Indian Hockey! New Delhi:  India’s obsession with cricket has been moving at a rapid rate from wide-eyed fascination to disgust in the eyes of many. The national idiosyncrasy now seems like a pathological monomania to many who back away from the endless and forever ongoing national conversation on cricket. Forget about the players or the performers as they seem to matter the least, except as the newly emerging heroes from the newly emerging towns, Kasbahs and villages of India. It is the spectator who is the king in a ‘karaoke-ized’ world of... 

  When a goonda hallucinates! Mumbai: the denizens of Mumbai, whether Maharashtrians or non- Maharashtrians, it would seem are now losing the right to despise or laugh at the Bihar, UP culture of small town rowdyism. Just because your goonda is a big man and more powerful doesn’t mean, your culture is any superior or you are any better as a civil society or a political system, is what a common man from other parts of the country will now say. Indeed the bigger the goonda a society obeys, the less culture and civility it may claim for itself! ‘The great goonda has given the permission –... 

    Amir; Making it here and there! Delhi: the ultimate achievement for any Indian, it seems is to figure on the front page of Time – a reward bigger than any other hype or hysteria. Now superstar Aamir Khan has made it to the cover of the iconic Time Magazine for dealing with social issues on his TV show ‘Satyamev Jayate’. The recently-concluded TV show saw Khan taking up several social malaise and offering certain solutions through discussions at some times and debate at others.   Aamir Khan becomes the first male Indian actor to have made it to the cover of Time.... 

A new Bhojpuri TV channel is born: Bhojpuria TV to enter the market this September! Editor’s comment: it is interesting to note that with a second TV channel dedicated to Bhojpuri, Bhojpuri language programmes are now likely to make serious inroads into the middle class homes of Bhojpuri speaking families. Thus far Bhojpuri music and film industry have failed to break the resistance of the middle classes in the region, whatever the reasons given. Bhojpuri TV may provide a bridge between the classes and the masses, a task that Bhojpuri cinema and music have clearly failed to perform. Whereas the... 

Occidentally Yours Somnath Batabyal How I became a television expert Somnath Batabyal It was an uneventful sort of day. I must have done the usual things; go to the University in the morning, read in the library for a while, and then in the late afternoon after a game of squash, come back to the room, hoping to get some writing done. London was freezing and the thought of going out in the evening was hardly inviting. I had settled down with a book when my mother called on the phone, hysterical. Have you seen the news? No, I replied, slightly panicky. Mumbai is being attacked, she said. The present... 

Somnath Batabyal Occidentally Yours Indian TV caters to [and monitors] only affluent audience By Somnath Batabyal For or a country obsessed with big numbers – largest democracy, oldest civilisation, double digit growth rates in economy – here is a startlingly small one: there are only 7,000 television viewing households in India. Households that matter, that is. You might have heard other numbers. There are more than 75 million families that have cable connections, and more than a hundred million own television sets in this almost super power nation. Yet television content,especially news,... 

Big boss: scripted? Are reality shows ‘real’?  Well, Indian reality shows are rockier than ever. If you find a couple of girls from Patna Women’s College knocking on your door with a questionnaire, it’s only to assess the Bihar teenager’s responses to reality shows. The exercise is part of a Department of CEMS mini-research project, say Ashalata, Anjali Ananad, and Anusha, second year students. Meanwhile, Fitness trainer and aspiring actor Rahul Bhatt, who is the latest evictee from Bigg Boss 4, says his ousting was scripted by the channel as he was not a TRP generator. “I...