Prathyush Parasuraman

5 days 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 week 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.

2 months ago | 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.

2 months ago | 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.

2 months ago | frontline.thehindu.com | Vivek Katju |Saba Naqvi |Prathyush Parasuraman |Vaishna Roy

EntitlementRumaan AlamBloomsbury IndiaRs. 799True to the title, the novel is an exploration of the lives of the world’s richest one per cent. Described as “an engrossing and resonant tale of money, morality and madness”. ___A Pulp Fiction TextbookV.M. DevadasHachette IndiaRs.399A book about a series of gruesome deaths, the inventive book plants clues and reveals the killer through exercises, drawings, and questionnaires.