A behind-the scenes look at Basu Chatterji’s most loved films
This is the enigma of Basu Chatterji. His films did not have the box-office ingredients that could make them a distributor’s hot pick, nor were they art house cinema that needed unravelling over many cups of tea. He was the quintessential ‘middle-of-the-road’ film-maker, a genre that he founded in Bollywood. His films, whether it be Chhoti Si Baat or Rajnigandha or Chitchor, were about common people and common problems, such as employment and love, social and economic inequalities, and joint family conflicts. Like fellow cartoonist R.K. Laxman, who created the ‘common man’, Chatterji too was an auteur of the common man, whose journey he portrayed with charm, delicate warmth and humour.
As a person, Basu was much like his common man: mild, unobtrusive and media-shy. He preferred not to scout for stars and mostly made his films with rookies, giving them respectability as artists. And today, names like Amol Palekar, Vidya Sinha, Pearl Padamsee, Zarina Wahab, Nandita Thakur, Girish Karnad, Rakesh Pandey, Bindiya Goswami and Ranjit Chowdhry have become central to the history of Indian cinema, thanks to Basu.
Basu Chatterji: And Middle-of-the-Road Cinema, anecdotal in nature, goes behind the scenes of his films. It places Basu’s cinema and television work in the context of the changing times, like the emergence of Rajesh Khanna, Kishore Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan, the Emergency, the return of Sarat Chandra’s stories, the introduction of disco and the decadent phase of Hindi cinema in the 1980s. The book celebrates the work of one of the most underrated, yet successful, film-makers in Hindi cinema.
Are you looking to multiply and grow your money consistently? If yes, this book is just what you need!
Prasenjit Paul, a bestselling author and successful investor, who has multiplied his portfolio by more than a 100 times over the last decade, shares his wisdom on multibagger investing in this book. He recounts his wealth-creation journey and offers an easy-to-implement strategy, which anyone from any background can use to create wealth and achieve financial well-being.
This book offers readers a simple yet effective technique to identify the stocks that have the potential of generating stupendous returns. Cutting through the clutter and noise, it answers the three most critical questions related to stock-market investing: when to invest (enter the market), how long to remain invested and, finally, when to exit. Dispelling the myth that multibagger stocks are devoid of strong fundamentals, the book explains why only stocks with strong fundamentals can become multibaggers. It also forewarns readers to stay away from the stocks of dubious companies that seem like multibaggers and may lead to wealth destruction, and helps them identify good companies with solid fundamentals.
‘What should I study to best prepare me for success in today’s working world?’
This is the most common question one gets from young people (and their parents) who are transitioning from school to college education. They want to know which fields they should choose, which universities or programmes to attend, and which career track will give them the best chance to succeed.
The professional world isn’t as straightforward as it once was, especially in India. The modern workplace is changing rapidly. While many from the previous generations chose a career in engineering, medicine or business and then stuck to it, most people entering college today will end up changing careers at least once, if not many times. And many of the careers that young people will have in the future don’t even exist yet. Today’s students and their parents need new guides and frameworks to make decisions about what educational opportunities to pursue and what to focus on as they embark on their professional journeys.
In Learn, Don’t Study, drawing on his experiences of over twenty-five years in the field of education, Pramath Raj Sinha has put together the best and most practical advice available for youngsters who are facing some of the most important and challenging choices of their professional lives.
The Scientific Sufi is the most definitive English language biography of Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose, the father of modern science in India. In his time, he came close to, and many believe was robbed of, his due to winning at least two Nobel Prizes, if not one, for his work on wireless communication and the discovery of nervous system in plants. This biography carefully reconstructs his life, times, work, legacy, childhood, early years, influences and paint an intimate portrait of the father of modern science in India.
Languages make us human. The ability to communicate and be understood through songs, art,
words, inscriptions, or even gestures is essential because we, as a species, cannot live in isolation.
And each one of these languages has its own journey.
Early humans leaving messages on cave walls; three men on a raft stumbling upon a language they weren’t
looking for; a secret language that evolved to hide a people; the world’s only undeciphered language that is
4000 years old. The stories in this book take you from the northeastern-most tip of our country to the
forests in central India, from indigenous languages that are thousands of years old to those that
have developed recently.
Engrossing, entertaining, and packed with trivia, this book is for non-fiction lovers and students,
who have a keen interest in all things India!
The remote village of Perumpadi, at the border between Kerala and Karnataka, is a unique settlement. Bounded by dense Kodagu forests on the south and west, and raging rivers on the north and east, its very isolation was what drew the first settlers to this unharnessed land.
The first to make his way across this rough terrain was Kunjuvarkey, along with a young woman bearing his child. Kunjuvarkey was fleeing the opprobrium of getting his own daughter pregnant. Those who followed had similar shameful secrets. In a land of sinners, where no one pried into the other’s past, they were able to live and build a community without being tied down by society’s interdictions.
Fifty years later, as the community moves into modernity, they start showing signs of reforming from their beginnings-of a hillbilly and promiscuous existence. With no panchayats to resolve local disputes, following in his father’s footsteps, Jeremias Paul of Reformation House, known by the moniker President, becomes the unchallenged adjudicator of Perumpadi, thanks to his equanimity and sense of fairness.
But Jeremias has his own secrets and, ultimately, may have to answer for his own moral lapse.
Anthill, a robust translation of the award-winning novel Puttu and with a cast of over 200 characters, tells the story of a people who have tried to shed the shackles of family, religion and other restraining institutions, but eventually also struggle to conform to the needs of a cultured society.
Written with disarming honesty and biting humour, Anthill is ultimately a story that questions the veneer
of respectability people try to put up in their lives.
No relationship has been as complex and so difficult to manage as India’s relations with Pakistan. Four wars, cross-border terrorism, and Pakistan’s persistent hostility and relentless campaign on “Kashmir issue” have been a source of strategic challenge for every Indian leader. Yet, each has pursued peace in the interest of India’s progress and security with differing strategies, but with the same result.
As a diplomat who served around the world and in Pakistan, the late Satinder Kumar Lambah’s unique position helps tell an insider’s story of the turbulent history between India and Pakistan. He writes of his personal experiences of India-Pakistan relations having served six Indian Prime Ministers, whom he worked directly with and offered counsel. This includes his role as Prime Minister’s Special Envoy for back-channel talks under PM Manmohan Singh and India’s quick diplomatic moves in the post-Taliban Afghanistan. With insight, he also traces the roots of Pakistan’s evolution since its birth and the challenges its army-driven polity poses for India and reflects on the way forward in dealing with Pakistan to secure peace in the region.
Not every courtesan has gone down in the annals of history like Ambapali. She was beautiful, intelligent, talented and, as the nagarvadhu janpad kalyani-the bride of the city-she went on to wield immense power amongst the nobles. Until she renounced all worldly pleasures to embrace Buddhism.
This vivid narrative tells the story of a young woman forced to follow a path because of the machinations of powerful people. Propelled onto the cultural centerstage in the Vajji republic against her wishes, betrayed in love, disappointed by friends, Ambapali’s is yet the story of a strong woman determined to take control over her life. A remarkable, poignant novel about the dazzling glamour, daring romance, and sacrifice that marked Ambapali’s life.
Oblivion and Other Stories is an anthology of twenty short stories by Gopinath Mohanty, the doyen of Oriya (now Odia) literature. The stories, written across a half-century (1935-1988), sample his oeuvre of writings and the variety of his themes-from ‘Dã’ (mid-1930s) to ‘Oblivion’ (1951) to ‘The Upper Crust’ (1967) to ‘Lustre’ (1971) and ‘Festival Day’ (1985).
They capture the forgotten others, the banality of marginal living on life’s edge-of the poor, the tribals and ordinary people-invisible in the feudal landscape of Orissa in the twentieth century.
Originally written in Oriya by the Padma Bhushan awardee, these have now been translated for the first time into English and recreate the social life of mid-twentieth century India.
The embellished past in the stories is not one of nostalgia but a full-toned portrait of society. Marginalization is the running thread: dispossession, disenfranchisement, class/caste social exclusivity and lack of education.
Just imagine.
If you could switch your life with someone else . . .
Would you?
A staid housewife, Nandita, swaps her life with Annie, her doppelgänger. She switches her phone, her home, her husband and her boring family life for the glamorous corporate life that Annie leads in an advertising agency.
Annie looks at this as a social experiment for a new ad campaign she is creating. She hopes that this will help her beat her rival and put her right at the top of the company. Nandita believes this will make her husband fall in love with her.
Their lives begin to get horribly complicated when secrets are revealed. In their bid to have everything, they’ve set the ball rolling on something that has now pitched them against each other.
The question is, who will win? For whom will all the pieces of the puzzle come together?
Life Switch is a passionate, intense, sexy love story that thrills.
