Originally posted on Cafe Dissensus Everyday:
By Sadiq Zafar After overpowering Ibrahim Lodi and Rana Sanga, Babur established the Mughal Empire in Delhi. Since Babur was busy fighting his rivals, his nomadic life of warfare necessitated all those things, which were required for a longer stay. The Mughals came to India with their distinctive tradition,…
That Darjeeling hides in its folds a town called ‘Ghoom’ came as a revelation to me while growing up in a small town in UP in the late eighties. I don’t know what Ghoom means in Nepali, the language largely spoken in Bengal’s hill district, but in Bengali it means sleep. For a boy who… Read More Ghoom Station
My apologies. This tribute to Om Puri is so late now that perhaps it’s already time for him to be reborn! But do read for legends never die and it’s never too late to write about them… That pockmarked face with blazing eyes had dared to dream of becoming an actor in an industry that… Read More Jaane bhi do yaaron…
I know it’s a clichéd headline, but what else can you say for the owner of a made-in-heaven voice? For me, the essence of Manna Dey is captured in his two songs that are linguistically, musically and emotionally poles apart but cover two ends of the melody spectrum he ruled for nearly 50 years. The… Read More Manna from heaven
It wasn’t just the murder, he decided. Everything else seemed to have conspired to ruin his day. Even the cat. “Shoooh!” he cried, but the cat ignored him and continued to stare at the bloodied mess on the floor, then looked at him and purred as if to ask, “Well, What now?” “You have any… Read More John Doe
It was the stylish way in which he was spotted putting a pan in his mouth and chewing it with relish that got him his first role as a villain in his debut 1940 film Yamla Jat. From that moment onwards Pran Krishan Sikand aka Pran never looked back. This anecdote comes from film journalist… Read More Bollywood’s Gentleman Villain takes his final bow
If at first you fail try again because you are neither Chuck Norris nor Rajnikanth… …and I am neither. So I am ready to fail and try again!
What is wrong with the world? Some madcap, two-bit porn filmmaker makes a worthless movie which no one had heard of till another loony posts it on YouTube and the whole Islamic world explodes. From Libya to Bangladesh in nearly every Muslim country people just go on the rampage burning public property in protest against… Read More Innocence of Muslims
Originally posted on Coalemus's Column:
Mehdi Hassan first revealed himself to me through one of my friends in college. I may have heard him before as a kid at home but my fascination with the Emperor of Ghazals began one lazy late afternoon in my first year in college. We were through with our…
Stranger in the town Judging by the curious looks I was getting, I had this nagging suspicion that this 13th-century Baltic sea town doesn’t get too many foreign visitors. Walking around in this medieval town of Stralsund, I failed to spot a single face that looked like an outsider apart from my own that occasionally… Read More Tales from the Baltic
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