Remember that evening when you’ve just had it with the world and you just want to indulge yourself with some quality time alone (or perhaps with a loved one). The weather is beautiful with a clear starry sky, the martini is perfect, and the ambience is surreal. You have this nagging feeling that something is missing? I know the answer - Paris Combo’s motif CD!
Who are they? Unless you are French or European (or aspiring to be one), or just love Jazz in any avatar, you probably haven’t heard them…

Any mention of French Cinema is incomplete without the mention of its two icons – Jean Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut – who have been known to experiment and come up with some truly ground-breaking films, starting with Breathless. It is a result of not just one, but both of these geniuses at work (although Truffaut didn’t stick till the end). It was a deviation from typically conservative approach back then, with its chutzpah and impulsiveness that is more rebellious than bourgeois. Supposedly one of its kind, it is credited to have initiated the nouvelle French new wave genre, and it’s a dubious salute to its elder sibling, Hollywood.

When remorse becomes the fatal venom that rushes through our veins, slowly and silently killing our conscience, shrinking the skeleton of our souls- seeking redemption through goodness remains the only way to recovery. Khaled Hosseini pens his first novel with poignant strokes of brotherly bonding, unconditional love, agonizing betrayal, ingrained guilt and final redemption.

“There is a way to be good again” were the words that offered Amir, the protagonist of this novel his one chance to atone for his penitent past, to recover from the truth of his childhood culpability, to deliver him from the heavy shadows of life-long guilt, into a glint of light and liberation.

Rules, especially those that are conceived when religion fornicates with extremism or orthodoxy, become the arrows that mutilate the heart and soul of love. Perhaps as many are killed by heart-breaks as they are by the evil of religious extremism.
Rivka and her husband Meir are childless, a curse that has caused them their happiness, [...]

Many would have seen the devastating account of the Brazillian slums and the juvenile violence breeding within them in Fernando Meirelles’ brilliant feature City of God (2002). However, a similar themed documentary film, Onibus 174 (2002) (aka Bus 174), does not get the same attention and credit as City of God. Released late in the [...]

Killer of Sheep (1977) is an American neorealist film by African American filmmaker Charles Burnett. American Neorealism – Does it sound like an oxymoron? Apparently it isn’t. Charles Burnett’s portrayal of the life and times in the Los Angeles slums has been hailed as one of the greatest truly-American films and even compared to the works of Italian stalwarts Rosselini and Visconti.The film is a shrine of inspiration to independent filmmakers around the world and teaches them that good cinema is not about how sensational your visions are, but how well you connect yourself to the world around…

For a large part of the world Majid Majidi’s filmography begins with the disarmingly charming Children of Heaven (1997). But the Iranian auteur had already struck gold a year before the first Oscar nomination from Iran. The themes, style and idiosyncrasies that were to mesmerize the world in the years following Children of Heaven clearly [...]

I’ve sometimes assumed that Rushdie is more in the news for the supernumerary amount of death threats that are leveled against him rather than for his literary talents. But Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the only book I’ve read by him (supposedly a children’s book!) is one that I read, enjoyed and kept aside [...]

They say experience is the best teacher. And a teacher who says that must have seen a lot in her life. Sudha Murty’s Wise and Otherwise: A Salute to Life (Revised Edition, Penguin Books) is a collection of 51 stories all narrating her experience with various kinds of people she meets during her philanthropic work [...]

Love is not merely blind; it is also deaf to the susurrating ticks of the clocks of time. If it weren’t, how could a 90 year old man, a river meandering through the delta of life, ready to merge with the sea of death, find himself head-over-heels in love with a girl, who’s young enough [...]