Paintings on weddings by Usha Shantharam, a Bangalore-based artist. Usha is one of our Voices of the Month.
What would life be without cinema? It really would have been so much less fun. And why not, when it does so many things? It makes you dream. It entertains you. It makes you laugh. It moves you to a tear or two. It awakens admiration in you. It makes you think deeply. It throws you back in time. It teaches you the nature of life. It lets you glimpse larger than life images. And in some way, it lets you forget your own self and makes you feel you are part of a larger, unified scheme, for a brief while. And that’s essentially what this issue seeks to explore. The different aspects of cinema and the sheer joy that films bring to our lives. Ladies and Gentlemen, we welcome you to revel in Movie Magic. Please click here to access the issue on our e-reader ISSUU or to download the PDF.
Spark’s ‘Writer of the Month’, Jai Arjun Singh, is a freelance writer and journalist based in Delhi. He writes a fortnightly film column for Yahoo! India and has also written for Business Standard, The Hindu, Tehelka, The Sunday Guardian, Outlook and The Hindustan Times, among other publications. His book about the film ‘Jaane bhi do Yaaro’ was published by Harper Collins India in 2010. He has also edited an anthology of film writing, ‘The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies do to Writers’, for Tranquebar. In an interview to Spark, he gets talking about his thoughts on cinema, his blog and his books. Interview by Anupama Krishnakumar.
India is a movie-crazy country. We celebrate them with sheer delight, dump them heartlessly, adore movie stars, praying for them and cursing them like our own. Well, that’s India! Parth Pandya talks about what cinema means to this country, with particular emphasis on Hindi cinema.
Amrita Sarkar recreates the emotions and expressions that grip us when we watch horror movies, through a painting.
In the world of full-length feature films and interminably long saas-bahu dramas, we have lost the beauty and brilliance that telefilms can bring to our television-watching experience. Sandhya Ramachandran on telefilms and why we need them back.
Ever wanted to enjoy the thrill of seeing a photograph you clicked like a frame from a movie? It’s not an uphill task, really. It takes only a bit of photo processing to do it as Maheswaran Sathiamoorthy explains through a simple tutorial and some of his processed photographs. Read on.
Nikolai is a graduate student and a willing participant in an experiment for cognitive science. But ‘plugging in’ periodically for the experiment makes him feel a strange kind of happiness and pleasure – and he doesn’t know why. Kicking off Spark’s new ‘Story Blocks’ series, Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty writes a multi-part series ‘Brain Back-up,’ with more episodes in upcoming issues.
What does it mean to watch a different, beautiful take on your favourite movie? Vani Viswanathan had one such experience recently watching The Lion King’s musical adaptation and tells you how it felt.