Category Archives: Literature / Culture

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR All of us struggle with moral dilemmas. Such quandaries define and affect our lives and of the people around us. What’s more, most moral dilemmas are difficult, complex and demanding. They involve not only risk, but also discomfort, even when we are convinced that we have conducted ourselves in an upright manner. Remember […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR No yesteryear Bollywood hero — to state the obvious — held as much appeal as Shammi ‘Yahoo’ Kapoor, when he was at his peak, giving just about every star a run for their money. That Shammi, as he’s fondly known, established a sublime niche of his own, like no other, in the 1950s […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR We live in an era of paradoxes — of sometimes pleasing, usually passable, and most often ear-splitting music, aside from the typecast ‘stamp,’ or raucous remix[ed] digressions, thanks to hi-tech glitz. This isn’t all. There seems to be a growing penchant for Punjabi-accentuated songs in Hindi films today — rather than perceptible Hindi numbers. […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy’s rib-tickling genius knows no age, because they beamed the lighter side of life, the child and the adult, wrapped within our psyche, like never before. Oliver Hardy: “Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.” Stan Laurel: “Here’s another nice mess I got you into.” It’s such […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR When a crazy fan shot dead John Lennon, in a mad frenzy, forty-four years ago, it marked the end of an era — an age which was unlike any other epoch in music history. It’s also everything that made the Beatles, the Beatles — for yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The Beatles influenced just […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR For a man who did not relish writing, Octavio Paz, Mexico’s most renowned poet, simply savored and enjoyed its result, be it plaudits, or brickbats. He never used the good old typewriter, the word processor, or computer. He always wrote by hand — the creator’s most simple, yet powerful tool — the oracle […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR “We must always bear in mind that despite the most beautiful agreement between the facts and our ideas, explanatory principles are only points of view, that is, manifestations of the psychological attitude and of the a priori conditions under which all thinking takes place.” —Carl Gustav Jung, On Psychic Energy [1948] When Carl […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR “That is no country for old men. The young/In one another’s arms, birds in the trees/ — Those dying generations — at their song,/The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,/Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long/Whatever is begotten, born, and dies./ Caught in that sensual music all neglect/Monuments of unageing intellect.” Thus wrote William […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Music, said Ludwig van Beethoven, the legendary composer and pianist, is the mediator between the life of the senses and the life of the spirit. It is also a powerful catalyst in the creative process of the genius, the connoisseur, the proficient, and the average, among us. It is the art of thinking […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Picture this: Charlie Chaplin’s memorable film, City Lights [1931], where he plays the little tramp, as usual. He saves, in one hilarious sequence, a drunk from leaping to his death. The drunk turns out to be a millionaire who befriends Chaplin and the two spend the evening together, drinking and partying. The next […]