Jude Ratnam didn’t realize he would be telling his own story. Initially, Ratnam set out to make a film about the Sri Lankan Civil War, using the railway connecting the Sinhalese-dominated south and the Tamil-dominated north as a springboard for his explorations. “You can’t rationally understand the process of art-making,” Ratnam told Kajal. “But one … Read More
Of The Island is a short film by Amanda Yogendran and Vidhya Manivannan that centers four young creatives of the Sinhalese, Tamil, and Burgher Sri Lankan diaspora – Ushka, Rolex Rasathy, ELSZ, and Santhya – who share their experiences of migration, culture, identity, art, and self-expression. “I feel like I always had an alter ego,” a voice in … Read More
There is strange fascination in pressing an old, yellowing bruise, still tender. It begs for repetition and simultaneously unsettles. Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s debut collection, White Dancing Elephants revels in this discomfort, veering through short stories ranging from the speculative to the queer, the mythic to the historical, the pleasurable to the sexually violent. Centering the voices … Read More
Challia, Awaara, Shree 420 – the singer Mukesh’s soulful voice is found across the soundtracks of films in an early post-colonial India, narrating the vastly different post-partition life on the sub-continent. With Raj Kapoor, an accomplished actor and producer, Mukesh would go on to play an essential role in forming a young India’s national identity … Read More
The One Who Loves You So, writer and director Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke’s widely-anticipated original play, ran at Colombo’s Namel Malini Punchi theater in August. The play is a complex depiction of a short-lived relationship between two men, one “a wealthy Colombo trust-fund baby” and the other a British expatriate. Their relationship starts with an ordinary match … Read More
CIRCLE, a film by Jayisha Patel that premiered last weekend at the Berlin Film Festival, tells the story of a young girl in rural Uttar Pradesh, India, and the physical manifestations of intergenerational trauma. The film follows the story of Khushbu, a survivor of sexual assault, as she recounts her gang-rape at the hands of … Read More
Australian comedian Aamer Rahman released the first episode of his new webseries “Can We Kick It?” Wednesday on YouTube. And his first guest was New York City-based fellow comedian Hari Kondabolu. Rahman and Kondabolu meet up in the episode the day before Kondabolu’s Netflix standup special “Warn Your Relatives” is released. The two stroll through … Read More
Netflix’s first Indian original series, Sacred Games, has notably excited our country’s entertainment and art-loving urban youth — a generation that has grown up witnessing idle productions overshadow serialized entertainment. A deluge of media coverage, social media statuses and tweets, and passionate reviews from peers convey awe and admiration. Reviewers chimed that Vikram Chandra’s 2006 novel could … Read More
Fatimah Asghar’s much-anticipated debut collection of poetry spans the divide of Partition, community, loss, and love. Motion connotes a certain amount of freedom. It belongs in the air, in the depths of the ocean, in the fingertips of flames reaching for something greater, more infinite. But the movement of Partition relied on boundaries to restrict … Read More
In Marriage of a Thousand Lies, Lucky, the restless romantic, ruminates on queerness and notes that, “most people think the closet is a small room. They think you can touch the wall, touch the door, turn the handle, and walk free. But when you’re inside it, the closet is so vast. No walls, no doors, just empty darkness stretching … Read More
