Most people tend to view autobiographies ambivalently partly because there is something narcissistic about them and partly because you do wonder, from time to time, if you are really interested in all the details of someone else’s life. Also, the best autobiographies are usually insensitive to the people who figure in them and the worst ones are a dead bore because they hold back so much.
In a quasi-romantic and quasi-realist statement, ‘much to my disappointment, the shelves were full of texts on Hollywood and European filmmakers with nothing substantial on contemporary Indian directors’ (p. 10), Tula Goenka states, clearly, her objective behind writing the book, recovers directorial voices that contribute heavily to the process of filmmaking but still remain unheard.
Rang De Basanti (Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, 2006) is a film that unfolds itself through a narrative-within-a-narrative structure where the India of 1920s is juxtaposed with the India of 2005.
Rachel Dwyer’s Picture Abhi Baaki Hai is a de-tailed account of the films produced in India from 1991 to 2001 and the nuanced ways in which the imagination of India and its ‘New Middle Class’ enters the circuit of Bollywood.
For many of us Bombay films were central to our coming of age. As we went in and out of cinema halls in the seventies and early eighties, the hero who failed to make a deep impression was Rakesh Roshan, son of the famous music composer Roshan.
Agitating The Frame, a collection of Zizek’s six essays, has an ambitious plan with lofty objective which attracts, while the very same turns out to be unmanageable monstrosity.