Year 2008 was surely an eventful one for the literary world. Salman Rushdie won the Best of the Booker award early this year and Aravind Adiga bagged the Booker Prize for his debut The White Tiger. American author Stephanie Meyer stole J.K Rowling’s coveted place to become the queen of teenage fantasy. Great authors emerged and grand writers were lost. We shall miss the inspirations of Randy Paush and the techno thriller novels of Michael Crichton after they died this year, but we have a roll of other great novels to relish! Let’s take a look…

Shakespeare’s plays have become an endless pool of resource for the filmmakers of the world. Their universality of themes and emotions has intrigued a range of directors and has prompted so many adaptations and retellings. One of them, King Lear, distinctly stands out. Romeo and Juliet may have become one for the classrooms and Macbeth may still be classified as a terrifying legend, but King Lear seems to grow with age and feels immensely relevant and profound now more than ever.

The year was 1984, when following the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the anti Sikh riots were started in the capital of the Indian country. Twenty three years after the massacre, Shonali Bose’s critically acclaimed film Amu, was released to retell the ghastly story of the Sikh community. The “engineered” carnage, that the bureaucracy, the authorities, the dignitaries, the politicians, the police - the entire state was a part of, had killed more than 5000 people from the community. The story opens with Kaju (Konkana Sen), a twenty one year old Indian-American

In After the Wedding, you won’t find a lot to appreciate if you are a die-hard soaps aficionado who’s “been there, seen that” (Of course, it is a hardly a maudlin drama full of cheesy dialogues or rivers of tears). Also, because of the first ten minutes, if you think you are going to watch a film on India, you are in for some disappointment - There are few shots during the beginning and the end where dozens of destitute kids are cramped together in the few square inches of the screen. But if you are in for some some touching drama..

In Sebastian Barry’s 2008 Booker Shortlist, The Secret Scripture, Barry is engrossed in Ireland’s most chaotic time - when the First World War, the 1916 rebellion, the 1920s War of Independence and Irish Civil War smoked through the skies of the old country. Here we find Roseanne McNulty, an ancient woman stepping close to her 100th birthday. In a mental hospital of Roscommon County, this Roseanne, old and very much enchanting secretly puts down on paper the days of her that were spent in the small town of Sligo…

The Proposition, which could easily qualify as one of the best Australian movies ever made and a terrific deconstructionist Western, is a darkly visceral poetry on violence and a philosophical study on human and societal decadence. The movie is a brilliant study of the contrasts – the beauty as well as the brutal, and in the process has become both mesmerizing and menacing. One of the best films from down under…

At a time when the country was deemed unfit for old men and there was too much blood flowing around, one man sought to break away from it all, literally – Sean Penn, or rather Christopher McCandless. Adapted from Jon Krakauer’s book on McCandless’ journey of the same name, Into the Wild is the definite heir to the throne of Easy Rider (1969) and my candidate of the best movie of 2007.

If you thought Salvador Dali and Walt Disney had nothing in common except the ‘D’ in their surnames, get prepared to be proven wrong. Destino – a five-minute animated short film was the child of Dali’s feverish imagination and Disney’s singular storytelling. But it’s one of those rare cases where the story behind the film is almost as surreal as the film itself. Welcome to arid plains, vicious eyeballs, melting clocks, unrequited love and a wait that lasted 58 years. Read about a “Destino” 58 years in the making…

The third installment of Deepa Mehta’s Trilogy, after Fire and Earth, was her conflict ridden film Water. The film begins with an absurd belief quoted from the Sacred Hindu Texts – “A widow should be long suffering until death, self restrained and chaste. A virtuous wife, who remains chaste when her husband has died, goes to heaven. A woman who is unfaithful to her husband is reborn in the womb of a jackal.” You read the quote in the first few seconds of the film and know for certain that you’re in for a few hours of powerful voicing…

If you’re an Indian, there are few revelations in The White Tiger that come as a surprise to you – remnants of a feudal system, the corruption, the politics, the desperation of the poor, life in a big city, et al. But it’s not in these small details that we find a story worthy of, let’s say the Booker Prize. The evolution of human nature, the psychological metamorphosis of an individual, the transcendental aspirations of an ambitious entrepreneur who is desperate to break the cages of servitude and escape into the “light”…