The Books Blog
The Books Blog is the bookworm's cozy nook, the authors' stage to connect with his or her readers, the critics' space to speak of things which can't be told in the official milieu of reviews.The Hindi film industry and its sorority of regional-language sister industries in the sub-continent has elevated the song-and-dance sequence to a rare art form. Inspired partly by turn-of the-century stage adaptations of popular "musicals" in the West and partly by the equally popular though entirely home-grown Parsi theatre, film songs serve a variety of purposes. Studded at judicious intervals all through the story, they can make a more telling statement than mere dialogue; they can be both entertaining and illuminating; they can, of course, leaven an otherwise flat story with humour and spice and colour. Though the average song "picturisation" does tend to require large dollops of "willing suspension of disbelief" given the mind-boggling change of costumes, the hordes of incredibly dressed background artistes who descend every time the hero and heroine romance against sylvan backdrops (imagine something more incongruous than Rajasthani...Read more...
More about Rakhshanda Jalil
Rakhshanda Jalil writes on culture, literature and society. She has published over 15 books, including the much-acclaimed book on Delhi's lesser-known monuments called 'Invisible Delhi' and a well-received collection of short stories, called 'Release & Other Stories' (Harper Collins, 2011). She blogs at www.hindustaniawaaz-rakhshanda.blogspot.com. Her Ph D is on the Progressive Writers' Movement.Recent Posts by Rakhshanda Jalil
- Javed Akhtar: talking cinema, songs and the state of Urdu
The Hindi film industry and its sorority of regional-language sister industries in the sub-continent has elevated the song-and-dance sequence to a rare art form. Inspired partly by
Arundati Dandapani
How I became a print digitisation fanatic!I have spent the past few months working for a Christian publishing house in the gorgeous old town of Oxford, producing books that illuminate, detail, debate, commodify, beautify, question
Manu Bhagavan
A response to Perry Anderson's essay on Partition in The London Review of BooksI recently read with significant concern Perry Anderson's essay on Partition of the Indian subcontinent (The London Review of Books, 19 July 2012), hyperlinked below. While Anderson is a
Amrita Tripathi
From the Land of the Thunder DragonMountain Echoes has kicked off to a promising start here in Thimphu, Bhutan. There's usually only so much you can say about a literary festival, but here's one whose
Krishan Partap Singh
When fiction comes to life India is in crisis. A corrupt government rules with no clear and credible replacement in sight, the economy is in terminal decline, the people's trust in the political system
Rakhshanda Jalil
Javed Akhtar: talking cinema, songs and the state of UrduThe Hindi film industry and its sorority of regional-language sister industries in the sub-continent has elevated the song-and-dance sequence to a rare art form. Inspired partly by
Ursula James
Of my India visit and the powers of the moonIt is my first visit to India in 20 years, and as I wonder at the extraordinary changes which have taken place here, I also reflect on what a
