“Killing must serve a purpose; otherwise it’s just plain murder.” ---Harry Morgan Is there anything I can say about Dexter Morgan that hasn’t already been said before? That he represents the darkness that resides in all of us, and that he embodies the rage we all feel when
Life has always inspired art and literature. Even the most imaginative book on aliens in outer space has some resonance with reality. But that’s talking about stretching reality to its extreme. What if the stories you were to read were about a regular day in your city? Would they
When you watch Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for the first time, you convince yourself that the life of a gonzo journalist is perhaps one that is worth living. When you read Fear and Loathing, Hunter S. Thompson convinces you that you need to become one. But when you
Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, first gave us the concepts of the ‘anima’ and the ‘animus’. According to Jung, each individual has both masculine and feminine components of the psyche. For a male the feminine component is the anima, and for a female it is the
Brought up as we supernatural junkies are, on a diet of Anne Rice, Charlaine Harris and, more recently, Stephenie Meyer, it’s a little difficult to believe that screen vampires weren’t always the attractive and beddable types. Watch Nosferatu, the 1922 German horror classic, and you’ll see vampires
Quirkiness is a strange platform for creativity. Just a little push towards the ostentatious can turn it into a carnival of kitsch; a little nudge towards the humourless can make it self-important and inaccessible. If there’s a pair in the Indian music scene who thoroughly understands this unsaid rule,
I’m tired. And it’s only 8.00 a.m. I trudge along the dirt track that leads me to the latest village I have been frequenting. After two bus rides that pulverised my morning meal quite successfully, and a quick zip on a motorcycle, during which I nearly
Uttarkashi isn’t likely to make the top ten lists of many tourists. It doesn’t offer much in the way of museums or ancient ruins or souvenirs. The heart of town is the large open stadium---a combination of political rally venue/cricket ground/open bazaar/general crossroad. One side
In the dead of a summer afternoon, hiking through a forest in the Deccan is an unnatural experience. There’s only the ear-numbing noise of cicadas chirping and the sound of dry leaves and twigs cracking underneath your feet as you plod along in the heat. Your ears ache because
Several films, Shortbus and 9 Songs to name two, have sought to ‘de-eroticise’ explicit sexual scenes and depict them as some kind of a happenstance in the broader context of the plot. More specifically, what I am referring to here is un-simulated sex in mainstream cinema and not just a
