CULTURE CURRY

Helen, Nadira and Aruna Irani defined old Hindi cinema's vamp, but never got the lead role. Here's why Bollywood built the trope that way.

For decades, one criticism has followed Indian cinema wherever it has travelled. “It is over the top.” Actors are supposedly too expressive. Faces reveal too much. Emotions are worn too openly. Joy is exuberant, grief is overwhelming, love is unapologetic and anger is unmistakable. This criticism is repeated so frequently that it has acquired the appearance of objective truth. Yet I would argue that it tells us far less about Indian cinema than it does about the assumptions e

LEGO's first Mumbai store opened at R City Mall, Ghatkopar with a world-record 738,000-brick mosaic and a Dabbawala made of 29,000 pieces. What it actually means.

It's an animated sequel about a boy who can control the wind. It's also, if you squint even slightly, one of the more coherent essays on the responsible use of power that's hit a screen this year. Avatar rang: The Last Airbender, now streaming, isn't just fan service dressed up in gorgeous animation — underneath the reunion-special warmth is a story that keeps handing its characters, and by extension its audience, hard questions about what to do once you actually have power.

In Mumbai’s fast-paced dining scene, creating a restaurant that people actually talk about takes far more than good food—it requires a story. At just 25 years old, Samantha Noronha has emerged as one of the key creative forces behind the city’s newest culinary hot spots. Once recognized as one of the leading faces on Mumbai Foodie—the person behind the viral Instagram Reels that caused endless queues across town—Noronha has moved from fronting content to building brands from

Hindi cinema does not write characters. It assigns them. We have spent decades politely calling it creative liberty, brushing aside the repetitive tropes of the corrupt local politician or the hyper-sexualised Christian secretary as the byproducts of lazy screenwriting. But lazy writing is accidental. A half-century of perfectly consistent demographic stereotyping is not an accident; it is a system. In a definitive analysis of Hindi films spanning from 1960 to 2010, IIM Ahmed

Most viral clips have a shelf life. A hot take gets its 48 hours of outrage, then the algorithm moves on to the next thing. The clip of Naseeruddin Shah calling Anupam Kher a clown in a 2020 interview with The Wire has not followed that pattern. It has resurfaced repeatedly for six years, most recently in 2026, and it's worth actually breaking down why, because the mechanics say more about how internet outrage works than about either actor. The first reason is structural: the

There is no press release for the moment a real feud ends. No joint statement, no coordinated photo op, no carefully worded olive branch drafted by a publicist. If Anupam Kher's telling is accurate, the six-year rift with Naseeruddin Shah ended the way most real reconciliations do: unplanned, at a funeral, in two words. The setting was the memorial service for H.D. Pathak, a chartered accountant who had worked with both actors over the years, the kind of shared professional c

New to this one? Here's the entire Anupam Kher-Naseeruddin Shah saga in five quick hits, no six-year archive dive required. 1. It started with a CAA interview, not a personal spat The whole thing traces back to January 2020, when Naseeruddin Shah spoke to The Wire about the anti-CAA protests and praised Deepika Padukone's JNU visit. Asked about industry figures backing the government, he named Kher directly, calling him a clown and a sycophant. 2. Kher didn't just clap back,

If you've seen the clown clip resurface again and want the actual story without digging through six years of coverage, here it is, in direct answers to the questions people keep searching. What exactly did Naseeruddin Shah say about Anupam Kher? In a January 2020 interview with The Wire, during the anti-CAA protests, Shah said he didn't think Kher needed to be taken seriously, called him a clown, and said contemporaries from NSD and FTII could vouch for a sycophantic nature S

Bollywood has a house rule that everyone knows and almost no one states out loud: stay likeable, stay marketable, keep your politics vague enough to survive both a BJP minister's press conference and a liberal film festival panel in the same week. It works, mostly, because most actors comply. Naseeruddin Shah and Anupam Kher are the two most visible exceptions, and the six years they've spent publicly disagreeing tell you more about the industry's discomfort with conviction t

Every few years, Bollywood produces a controversy that gets framed as a free speech story, and almost every time, that framing is slightly wrong. The Anupam Kher-Naseeruddin Shah feud is a good example. Nobody's speech was ever actually at risk. Shah said what he thought about Kher in a 2020 interview with The Wire and faced no legal consequence, no ban, no professional fallout beyond public criticism. Kher said what he thought right back, on video, to millions of followers.

Anupam Kher and Naseeruddin Shah spent six years as Bollywood's most-cited example of ideological warfare between two men who genuinely respect each other's craft. Both are National School of Drama alumni. Both have shared the screen in acclaimed films including A Wednesday!, Karma, Mohra, Main Azaad Hoon and Aiyaary, often as ideologically opposed characters, which in hindsight reads like foreshadowing. What follows is the full, dated arc of how a political disagreement turn

Ask a casual Bollywood follower to name one thing about Naseeruddin Shah from the last six years, and there's a real chance the answer is a single word: clown. Ask the same person about Anupam Kher, and sycophant isn't far behind. That's the strange tax two of Indian cinema's most respected, National School of Drama-trained actors have paid since January 2020, when a political interview turned into the defining public storyline of both their recent careers, at least in the al

Strip away the National School of Drama pedigree, the four decades of shared filmography, and the fact that both men are pushing seventy, and what you're left with is a diss track. Anupam Kher and Naseeruddin Shah have been trading bars in public since January 2020, and the shape of it is unmistakable: a needle drop, a comeback verse, a bunch of side characters weighing in on Twitter, and years later, an unlikely handshake at a listening party neither of them planned to atten

The Indian film industry is on the cusp of a revolutionary transformation, driven by landmark initiatives from the Union Ministry of Information & Broadcasting. With a renewed focus on innovation, growth, and global excellence, these reforms are setting the stage for a brighter, more competitive future for Indian cinema. Two Historic Steps for Indian Cinema The Ministry recently announced two major decisions designed to bolster film production, distribution, and technological

I recently found myself sitting through a panel discussion at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai. The event, titled "Being an Artist, Being a Woman: Many Selves, Many Worlds," featured a lineup of prominent women artists discussing their creative journeys, struggles, and inspirations. The stage, captured in image.png and image_2.png, was set for what promised to be a profound dive into contemporary Indian womanhood. Instead, what unfolded was a stark reminder o

In a digital landscape that increasingly demands our attention through flat glass screens and ephemeral pixels, there is a quiet, radical rebellion brewing in the physical world. It is a return to form, weight, and texture. Renowned photographer and former supermodel Sheetal Mallar recently captured this sentiment beautifully at The Japan Foundation in New Delhi. Showcasing her new book dummy, Rocket Rani, at the "Books move on" exhibition—a collaboration featuring Reminders

Stéphanie Boulay’s departure from the music industry to study law is not a retreat from creativity, but a calculated pivot toward institutional leverage. While the mainstream narrative frames her exit at 38 as a search for stability or a reaction to burnout, it is actually a diagnostic response to the total collapse of the streaming-era value proposition for mid-tier artists. Boulay is not leaving music because she no longer wants to make it. She is leaving because she has re

Veteran filmmaker K. Bhagyaraj, who passed away at 73 in Chennai due to cardiac arrest, is currently being mourned globally as Tamil cinema's "King of Screenplay". The tributes flooding the internet from the Tamil film fraternity are accurate but entirely incomplete. K. Bhagyaraj did not just master the Tamil domestic drama. He engineered the structural blueprint for the middle-class commercial screenplay that Bollywood would spend the next three decades attempting to replica

"Stars Who Built Businesses Beyond Films" has been making the rounds across corporate networks, triggering standard celebrations of celebrity entrepreneurship. The graphic maps out a select list of modern Indian icons alongside the latest reported numbers generated by their personal brands—stretching from Hrithik Roshan’s powerhouse HRX at ₹1,000 crore+ in revenue, down to Deepika Padukone’s 82°E hovering at ₹14.7 crore. While corporate consultants love to cite these charts a

The global internet is currently crying bloody murder over the promotional footage for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming $250 million mythic blockbuster, The Odyssey. Scholars and cinematic purists alike are having a collective meltdown over what they perceive as jarring, anachronistic faux pas. From modern monosyllabic syntax deployed in Bronze Age dialogue to the hazy, industrialized gray-and-brown color palettes of the Aegean Sea and the pseudo-medieval plated armor adorning th

The political machinery of Mumbai has hit a fascinatingly regressive milestone. In the wake of an online firestorm involving comedian Pranit More, audience crowd-work clips, and deeply objectionable viral statements, Mumbai Mayor Ritu Tawde has taken the ultimate, heavy-handed bureaucratic shortcut. Announcing plans to write to Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, the Mayor has called for a total, blanket ban on stand-up comedy shows, claiming the art form "spoils to

There are some evenings that remind you precisely why we lose ourselves in words, performance, and the sheer grit of storytelling. Last night—June 16th—was one of them. As a fellow Anglo-Indian who has long navigated the intersection of European literary heritage and the vibrant chaos of Mumbai, it is always a distinct pleasure to see those worlds collide with genuine sophistication. The occasion? The Consulate General of Ireland in Mumbai’s annual Bloomsday celebration, a gl

There is a persistent, structural delusion floating around contemporary media circles that the rise of high-budget streaming platforms has democratized acting. The modern commentator loves to claim that because a television series can now match the budget of a feature film, the historical barrier between the small screen and the silver screen has permanently dissolved. This is a profound misunderstanding of the medium. The chasm between a television actor and a legitimate mov

There is an ongoing, structural delusion floating around contemporary media circles that the rise of high-budget streaming platforms has democratized acting. The modern commentator loves to claim that because a television series can now match the budget of a feature film, the historical barrier between the small screen and the silver screen has permanently dissolved. This is a profound misunderstanding of the medium. The chasm between a television actor and a legitimate movie

As we navigate the endless scroll of pop culture commentary and internet noise, sometimes the best aesthetic choice is to log off and lose yourself in a truly brilliant page-turner. Welcome to this Wednesday's VishList—your definitive, curated edit of the top 10 books dominating the cultural conversation this week. From maximalist mythologies to razor-sharp cultural observations, here is what you need on your shelf right now. 1. Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy Memoir

The discourse surrounding mainstream Indian cinema has long been hijacked by a specific, clinical brand of critique that views every frame through a hyper-politicized lens. The latest target of this modern iconoclasm is Buchi Babu Sana’s *Peddi*. A recent piece published in *Woman’s Era* typicalizes this approach, reducing a massive, multi-layered cultural phenomenon down to standard buzzwords like "the male gaze" and systemic objectification. In doing so, the critique moves

If you have been doomscrolling through Indian history forums lately, you have probably witnessed the massive debate surrounding the authenticity and origins of the ancient Pashupati seal. Just when you thought the timeline had exhausted every possible historical theory, author K. Hari Kumar entered the chat with a fresh, serpent-infused perspective. Here is the breakdown of his fascinating deep dive into the Indus Valley Civilisation and the roots of serpent worship, curated

The Ministry of Culture, in association with local cultural committees, has officially locked down the dates for the highly anticipated 5th edition of the Banaras Lit Fest (BLF 2027). Widely regarded as a premier celebration of literature, art, and philosophy in Northern India, the upcoming multi-day festival will return to the historic city of Varanasi, operating on a larger footprint than ever before under its trademark tagline: "One festival, SIX Stages, Infinite conversat