Dear friend,
This self-promotional newsletter is about three things.
First, Fifty Two: While our weekly publication is on hiatus, recognition for its second season of stories has been rolling in this week.
At this year’s ACJ India Awards, among a stellar list of honourees, “Hunger” by Andrew Fidel Fernando received a special mention in the ‘social impact’ category. Fidel travelled through Sri Lanka after a momentous year of popular uprising to report a story of deep and wide-ranging crisis.
“Uprooted” by Sarita Santoshini received a special mention in the ‘social impact’ category. This was one of the first stories we commissioned. Sarita had to wait a couple of years before the time was right to finish it. It’s about how the residential school system in Odisha is changing the lives of young Adivasis — an echo of how residential schools have affected children from indigenous communities in many parts of the world, over the last couple of centuries.
At the One World Media awards, Deepa Padmanaban received a special mention in the ‘environmental impact’ category for “Identity Crisis,” her work on how Indian forensic scientists are attempting to ease one of the most fundamental sorrows of natural disasters: finding and identifying the dead.
And Ankur Paliwal is on their print feature shortlist for “Off Balance,” the story of a rare disease that affects the members of just a few communities in India changes — and the story of how doctors and researchers are trying to ease their unusual burdens.
Stay with me a moment longer: we’re also on the SOPA shortlists. Karishma Mehrotra is nominated for excellence in tech reporting for “Human Touch,” her story about the young women in small-town India who make up the unseen manual force that teaches AI systems their work.
And Bhavya Dore is shortlisted for excellence in feature writing, for “The Match,” a haunting story about European children adopted out of Sri Lanka decades ago, who are returning to find their birth families.
Second, The Lit Pickers.
Despite the other things Deepanjana and I get up to, our short two-season podcast about books and reading is somehow the thing we are most frequently asked about in person. We also often get asked to recommend books or talk about what we’re reading. Since I’m always interested in what Deepanjana is reading, this is a bid to nudge her into updating her own newsletter. Here’s a list of books I’ve been reading or re-reading over the last couple of weeks:
Yeh Un Dinon Ki Baat Hai: Incredible trove of essays edited and translated from Urdu by Yasir Abbasi, drawn from film magazines published in the second half of the twentieth century. It includes writing from Kaifi Azmi and Shakeel Badayuni, Naushad writing on K. Asif, memoir-essays from Nadira and Dilip Kumar, and op-eds by Balraj Sahni and Dev Anand. Unbelievable! Bloomsbury India.
Sone Chandi Ke Buth: Edited and translated by Syeda Hameed and Sukhpreet Kahlon, a selection of film writing by the amazingly prolific (and really very charming) Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, who writes about everything from the Kapoors to workers’ struggles to film as the Indian public’s great teacher of the Hindustani language. Penguin India/Vintage.
Darlingji: Kishwar Desai’s champagne bucket of a double-biography, on the private lives of Nargis and Sunil Dutt, maybe among the most fun books about the Hindi movie business anyone has ever published. Aside: Desai has a more recent book, also drawn out of the neglected archive, called The Longest Kiss. It is about Devika Rani and Himansu Rai. I started reading it in advance of Vikramaditya Motwane’s show Jubilee, which I thought I’d jump into feet-first, but haven’t gotten around to just yet. (Aside to the aside: Neerja Deodhar wrote a wonderful Fifty Two story about Motwane’s own family and the making of their epic Hindi movie about the freedom struggle.) Harper Collins India.
Bombay Hustle: Making Movies In A Colonial City: The scholar Debashree Mukherjee writes a thrilling exploration of the world of pre-1947 cinema, which can feel unimaginably different from what came afterwards to present-day moviegoers, whose primary pastime is, after all, forgetting things. Columbia University Press / Penguin India.
Nobody’s Girl Friday: By J.E. Smyth, about what Bette Davis called the “twenty years in which women ran Hollywood,” a contradiction of the prevailing idea that women workers and executives disappeared when American cinema transformed from a maverick silent-picture business to an industry controlled by behemoth studios. This book was totally new to me. I bristled a bit at the title because I love His Girl Friday. But the real world is full of ambitious successful women, while there are no editors like Cary Grant, other than myself. Oxford University Press.
This is a pretty narrow list, targeted towards the third thing this newsletter is about —
— a short essay I wrote for Film Companion called “Everything About Nargis Was A Serve.”
It came out on the forty-second anniversary of the death of my favourite movie star. I don’t want to extend this newsletter much further but I would like to point out that almost all the films I refer to in the article are available for free on YouTube right now. Most are sadly un-subtitled, but there is an un-grody print of Awaara with English subs that I honestly recommend for a reminder of just what a good movie it is.
I will continue to apprise you of developments, mine or others’, in future editions of this newsletter.
Supriya
This is so lovely, Supriya! does this mean I have to watch Sanju? Because this is the only thing that’s ever made it sound appealing...
love this! getting the K.A Abbas book and skipping to the Sahir Ludhianvi chapter before I read everything else - is that allowed?
thanks for recs!