For all the apparent simplicity of its plot, Yash Chopra’s Deewaar (1975) — on which I have written a book [HarperCollins, late December 2010] to which I made reference in my blog earlier this month — twists and turns on a number of phenomena, none perhaps as remarkable as the act of writing. Though Deewaar [...]
Archive for December, 2010
*Mujhe Tumare Sign Chaiyen: The Act of Writing in Deewaar (1975)
Posted in Cinema, The Politics of Indian Culture, tagged Amitabh Bachchan, betrayal in Deewaar, conversation and intimacy, Deewaar - Hindi film (1975), fraternal conflict, signature as identity, the pen and the sword, the signature, the written word in Deewaar, writing, writing vs. orality on December 14, 2010 | 6 Comments »
*Thesis Four – Nonviolence: A Gaping Hole in Postcolonial Thought
Posted in American Society and Culture, Globalization and Cultural Politics, Postcolonial Thought, The Politics of Culture, tagged Christianity vs. Christ's teachings, Edward Carpenter, Edward Said, Eugen Weber, Frantz Fanon, Leo Tolstoy, Martin Luther King Jr., modernization of France, nation-making, nation-state and violence, nonviolence, nonviolence and Western thought, philosophic anarchism, Ranajit Guha, violence of the nation-state on December 14, 2010 | 4 Comments »
The enterprise of making a nation is fraught with violence. People have to be not merely cajoled but browbeaten into submission to become proper subjects of a proper nation-state. Overt violence may not always play the primary role in producing the homogenous subject, but social phenomena such as schooling cannot be viewed merely as innocuous [...]
*Thesis Three: Postcolonialism’s critique of the nation-state remains inadequate
Posted in Globalization and Cultural Politics, Postcolonial Thought, The Politics of Culture, tagged Appiah, China and India in modern discourse, citizenship, civilizational frameworks, civilizational ties between India & China, commons, cosmopolitanism, ethics of the stranger, finite and infinite games, James Carse, modern civilization and finite games, nation-state vs. civilization, politics of the nation-state, Rabindranath Tagore, Tagore's Nationalism (1917), world cities on December 13, 2010 | 5 Comments »
The nation-state is the only game in town; and, since we only have a conception of finite games, this game has winners and losers. (As an aside, it is not accidental that the United Stats, which embodies the idea of the nation-state as well as any other country, remains incapable of comprehending games that are [...]
*The Footpath and the Skyscraper: The Pleasures of Deewaar
Posted in Cinema, Indian Politics, The Politics of Culture, The Politics of Indian Culture, tagged Amitabh Bachchan, Deewaar (1975), Deewaar: The Footpath . . ., mother figure, Pritish Nandy, tale oftwo brothers, the footpath and the skyscraper, urban landscape of Deewaar on December 1, 2010 | 10 Comments »
Few films from mainstream Hindi cinema have captivated audiences as much over nearly four decades as Yash Chopra’s Deewaar (1975, with Amitabh Bachchan). At a book launch in New Delhi last evening, a journalist told me that the film producer, writer, poet, and former editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India, Pritish Nandy, once declared [...]
