Prathyush Parasuraman

1 week ago | frontline.thehindu.com | Prathyush Parasuraman |C.S. Venkiteswaran |Vaishna Roy

Being online has a way of turning observations into accusations, questions into statements, and gestures into slams. One of the first such slams on my timeline, which came after the release of Mani Ratnam’s universally hauled Thug Life, was that Mani Ratnam hates women. How else could he justify a film like this?

3 weeks ago | frontline.thehindu.com | Prathyush Parasuraman |Vivek Katju |Vaishna Roy

“It is only fitting that translations, like so much else, should reflect the times in which they are made,” Arshia Sattar concludes in her essay “Translation In English”, where she traces the long history of calls for the translation of Indian languages into English, beginning with William Jones’ Sacontala and Charles Wilkins’ The Bhagvet Geeta in the late 18th century—relics of an instrumental interest in a culture, where the Governor General encouraged traders and administrators to press up...

1 month ago | frontline.thehindu.com | Prathyush Parasuraman |Gowhar Geelani |Vaishna Roy

The “one-er”, part of the cinephilic vocabulary for the single take, has become prime real estate: everyone knows its worth in the market of ideas, but few care for its inflated price. This year alone, with one-ers in Adolescence, The Studio, Retro,and Veera Dheera Sooran, this demand has turned the audience into cheerleaders hoping to never see the cut, so the image unspools for ever and ever. Sometimes, though, it is OK to chop an ambitious idea whose sole point is its ambition.

Mar 25, 2025 | frontline.thehindu.com | Prathyush Parasuraman |Vaishna Roy

To call a film “brave” is a fragile compliment, because it is not as much about the film itself as about the context in which the film was made and released—“hand on the primal bone/… taking the word from the stream/ Fighting the sand for speech, fighting the stone”, as the poet Dom Moraes said. To call a film “brave” is to demand a society where such words need not be used—the act of this film being exceptional is in the hope that one day such films might be unexceptional.

Mar 22, 2025 | frontline.thehindu.com | Prathyush Parasuraman |Vaishna Roy

Self-evident as it may sound, the world only exists because it is experienced, not because it is. How one experiences it, over time, becomes how it is. We spend lives trying to exchange notes, to see where our experiences cohere, and where we can comfortably plant the flag of “fact”, but the land beneath our feet keeps shifting.