The Young India

Kartikey Sehgal
My mother and I made fun of Chinese babies while watching the film ‘Christmas in August’. Then we discovered that the film is Korean and we promptly implied all Chinese jokes to Koreans.

In this film, actor Suk-kyu Han plays the role of Jung-won, a terminally ill photographer who owns and manages a photo studio. We laughed whenever Jung-won smiled; he smiled almost all the time. We laughed when his father, who knows about the illness, stared passively or solemnly at people and things.

Kartikey Sehgal

I went to the sea and the waves were eager to meet me.

A Marathi television channel crew was shooting an entertainment program near the sea. A crowd of men had gathered to look at the shoot and the girl in green who is the anchor of the program.

The anchor sat on a rock.

Ananth Venkatesh

Terrorism has scourged India uncontrollably ever since the inception of anti-national militancy in Jammu and Kashmir in the late 1980s. The ineffectual rejoinder of the Indian polity to terrorism has intensified the misery of the victims here. The ineffectual response stems from:

* The inability to arrive at a feasible consensus on the issue of anti-terror laws
* The incapacity to steadfastly enact appropriately harsh laws against terrorism.

Terrorism, abetted by the brazenly divisive communalism of some political outfits such as the Congress, the Left front, etc, has become such a common phenomenon in India that people have accepted it to be an immanent constituent of their lives.

Kartikey Sehgal
If you have read the articles on Jammu and Kashmir (here and here), then you’d know that the Kashmir land issue was political fabrication. While political parties were wasting time in preparing for elections in the state, and provoking people to kill, a bunch of people were preparing to plant some bombs in Delhi.

The politicians and the bomb planters achieved their aim.

The politicians succeeded in dividing people in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) along religious lines but the bomb planters united many religions on September 13 when the survivors and family of victims cursed terrorism despite any prior religious bias.

Santa Singh
“Just because modern physics doesn’t say so, doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”

–Vikram Bhatt (director of 1920) with his deep insight on ghosts

The following story is probably better than all those films you’ll watch in plush multiplexes.
With this confidence, I present some films that you think would try to aim high and achieve some milestone. But I have a feeling that you’ll still have to rely on the popcorn for that ultimate movie experience.

Kartikey Sehgal

Violence in Orissa is largely a backlash against the murder of a Hindu leader who ran a local campaign against Christian conversion. Maoist rebels said they had killed him but Hindus blamed Christians.” (Reuters)

The people of one religious group should stop killing people
of another religious group.
And supporters of the other religious group
should organise petitions for floods, droughts and other issues; not just
when they are affected.

Kartikey Sehgal
The film Lagaan has a captivating screenplay. It mixes reality with fantasy and entertains while projecting the plight of the villagers.

The men of this village wear ironed clothes of different colours.
The women are healthy despite subsisting on a sukhi roti. Festivals
are celebrated with élan and the dances are passionately synchronised.
The village is happier than you would expect it to be under the economically cruel British rule.

Let’s remove fantasy from the realm of tangibility and see it as dream and imagination.

Kartikey Sehgal
Shows like Dadagiri make me wonder why nudity is banned in Indian cinema halls.

The image of a naked woman clasping a naked man under a satin sheet of a colour opposite to that of the bodies is less likely to make you violent than the image of a television crew member asking a contestant to get his sister so that he can rape her.

The host of this show is a skimpily clad girl with a whip in her hand who fights with one of the contestants and they talk in obscenities. The girl slaps the contestant and he slaps her back. This irks ‘the man’, the archetype of the modern muscular youth, whose latent sexuality is awakened by the slaps and who decides to express his self in generous physical and verbal abuses.