PM Review

  Amitabh Bachchan in K.A. Abbas’ Saat Hindustani [1969] is his silver screen debut as pacifist poet, a muslim, Urdu native speaker from Bihar and an undefeatable warrior to liberate Goa from the Portuguese colony. I was not aware before that “Liberation Goa” and “Anti-Hindi Allegation” during the 60s had been happened on such a great scale.   K.A. Abbas is [I will present tense because the creative persons live forever] such a prolific creative persona & auteur both in literature and cinema.  I will not know him if I wouldn’t see his Dhatri Ke Lal [1946] & as his screenplay of Niccha Nagar [1946] won Palme de ’Ore in Cannes Festival as first and only Indian film till now; besides his marvelous collaboration with Raj Kapoor and his films are groundbreaking in Indian cinema.   I don’t know if I am right or not. It seems Saat Hindustani may be one of the pioneers of Indian nationalistic political thriller. The forerunner of representing Pan-Indian nature i...

    As the evening invade the avenue in James Joyce ’s Eveline; a ravenous world waits outside for Ana Cancion in Angie Cruz ’s  Dominicana –a multiply rejected novel by the editors turned into celebrated universally and shortlisted for the  2020 Women Prize for Fiction in competition with Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other , Hilary Mantle’s The Mirror and the Light , Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships , Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet , Jenny Offill’s Weather . Ms Cruz, in an interview with PEN , admitted her fascination she borrowed the impact of Evline’s ‘a wholly undesirable life, to Ana’s a transactional life, similarly, when I read ‘...a good country girl is what a man needs...’ and when Ana’s mama said, ‘may be with Juan we can all get the hell out’, the line first hit in my mind is ‘it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in a possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife’ from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice . The novel is a...