When your main pastime is watching films — and if you’re the kind that sheds more tears in the confines of a theatre than outside — the lines between cinema and real life invariably begin to blur. As Jake Sully says in Avatar , “Everything is backwards now, like out there is the true world,…

Sometime back, I was invited by an acquaintance — an upcoming director — for a ‘story discussion’. He had found a producer, but had no idea what his film should be about. He didn’t have even a one-liner, let alone a bound script. He was sure about one aspect though, and made a proud declaration…

There’s a new disease out there. The symptoms include reddening of the eyes, a dramatic rise in blood pressure, eyes bulging, and a manic need to bite people’s head off. It is called Taking Offenciasis, and India seems to be suffering from quite the epidemic. It was in public display recently, when middle-aged women, who…

Chennai was an entirely different city when my last column was published. Homes hadn’t been ravaged, lakhs hadn’t been displaced, and heroes hadn’t yet been created out of ordinary citizens. Now, like an injured deer that has somehow managed to evade capture, the city is gingerly getting up, attending to its wounds. The smiles are…

What’d we do without the little joys that life is littered with? And there are so many of them, if you only recognise them for what they are: having your pet welcome you into your home after a tiring day, finding a precious thing that you’d thought was lost, eating sinfully through the week and…