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 After
the wave
The
people of the tsunami and
quake-affected regions of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and the Andaman and
Nicobar islands take stock a year after the disaster that killed
2,30,000 people across several nations. A.J.
Philip reflects on that tumultuous day and the immediate
aftermath of the tragedy, while Sridhar K.
Chari finds that affected families are still in the process
of locating firm ground under their feet.
What do you do at the Chandigarh airport on a Sunday afternoon waiting
for a flight? Visit the BBC site on the mobile. The news had just come
in: hundreds feared killed as "tidal waves" hit Indonesia.
Every two minutes or so, the BBC was updating the news. The toll
figures were going up and among the countries hit was India. The BBC
was consistently referring to "tidal waves" or "sea
surge" till late afternoon that day, which means neither its
editors in London nor its correspondents in the countries concerned,
knew the word tsunami.
Madonna
& Mughal art
Far from capitulating to
western cultural superiority, Mughals took European material culture
and put it to work for themselves, writes Dhananjaya
Bhat
In
the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu
Sangrahalaya in Mumbai, also known as the Prince of Wales Museum of
western India, there is an unattributed 17th century Mughal miniature
of Madonna with Infant Jesus, with priests of different religions,
especially Hinduism revering the Child.
Darbar
on Christmas
Ramesh & Asha Seth
Every
year on December 25,
Darbar -e-Khalsa is organised by the International Institute for
Gurmat Studies of Los Angeles to celebrate the birthday of the
10th Guru Gobind Singh. Since December 25 is a public holiday in
America, therefore people are free to attend the Darbar with their
families.
City
of churches
Harinder Singh Bedi recounts his visit to Vilnius where the old
jostles with the new
Nestled
on top of Poland and
Belarus and below Latvia and sandwiched between two parts of
Russia—on the East being Russia proper and to the West being the
Kalingrad region of Russia—is the lovely state of Lithuania.
Yuletide yarns
Optimism, goodwill and
bonhomie, that’s what Christmas is all about, and that’s what the
best Christmas movies of Hollywood have celebrated, writes Vikramdeep
Johal
Being
the ultimate feel-good
festival, Christmas has always appealed to film-makers in Hollywood.
Scores of family dramas and comedies have been set in "the most
wonderful time of the year."
TRIBUTE
Sagar:
A writer’s sensibility
Despite
the numerous box office
hits that he delivered as a producer and director, Ramanand Sagar did
not probably craft any film that came remotely close to going down in
the history of popular Hindi movies as an epochal cinematic creation.
An epic drama
The Weeping Meadow is
set against the backdrop of World War II and the Greek civil war. It
is an example of visually evocative filmmaking, observes Ervell
E. Menezes
Theo
Angelopoulos’ The
Weeping Meadow is set in most part in a tiny Greek village of
Thessaloniki and is centred on Elini (Alexandra Aidini), a Greek
immigrant from Russia who elopes with an unnamed man (Nikos Poursnidis),
son of her much older fiance, Spyros (Vasili Kalovos).
A neat little
film
A 30-minute documentary on Shimla
is a lesson in ecology
Urbanisation
and development takes its
toll on a good number of quaint old places and they are never what
they used to be. Shimla is one of them and Vivek Mohan, who was born
and grew up there, bemoans this aspect in For Whom the Jingle Bells
Toll?
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