Festivals are intrinsic to communities the world over and are celebrated everywhere with joy, enthusiasm and devotion. This is even truer in India, an ancient land with an unbroken legacy of sacred rites and rituals, a strict adherence to custom and a consuming desire for communing with the Divine. Here, even the humblest home will mark the special days as best as it can.
As laid out in the introduction to All Time Favorite Books and Movies and Their Epic Journey, Patil has picked some of his favorite stories of all time from literature and cinema and presented rich behind-the-scenes trivia. To these details are added opinions which reiterate his imagination of their ‘epic’-ness.
The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda’, asserted Robert Capa, the legendary conflict photographer. So raw and realistic was his work that his memorable photograph ‘The Falling Soldier’, clicked at what appears to be the very instant that a Spanish Republican fighter took a lethal bullet hit, was the subject of long debate about whether it was genuine or contrived.
This book is rife with curiosities—like this image of a smiling dog keeping company with four men, all fashioned out of stone; a Mandrake like figure poring over The Times London with his hat sitting jauntily on the blank space where his head should have been; or the voluptuous beauty of a protea neriifolia growing in a Cape Town botanical garden.
Indian myths, legends, philosophical threads and Gods and Goddesses constitute the quintessence of this collection presented by the Indian born British poet Usha Kishore. She does not present the Indian ethos as reference points, but she goes deep into these elements and combines her inherent ideas related to feminism and her native links.
Darius Cooper’s poems bear the influences of the revolutionaries in Indian poetry written in English; one can hear Nissim Ezekiel, Saleem Peeradina,