When it comes to bad films, there has to be a distinction between a ‘failure’ and a ‘fiasco’. Thomas Crowley trains his lens on the Salman Khan starrer ‘Kick’ and Luc Bresson’s ‘Lucy’ and shows us why they fall in
Three films about by Indians about Pakistan. (1) Nuanced, amusing… but ultimately self serving. (2) Earnest, well-intentioned, but ultimately banal. (3) Deliberately trivialising, over-the-top, but ultimately satisfying. By Thomas Crowley. The recent events in Pakistan – most dramatically, the Karachi
The ‘modern’ middleclass ideal of suburbia: reaping the fruits of industrialisation while insulating ourselves from its side-effects by staying enveloped in an apparently benign, familial, protective, pseudo-naturalness… as Thomas Crowley shows us through the prism of one familiar household product.
A Review of Azad Essa’s No Country For the Poor By Thomas Crowley Spoiler alert! I am going to begin this column with the closing words of the e-book under review. Those words: “business arrangements posing as democracies.” This damning phrase is
Scholars of philology, work heroically to understand long dead languages… in a way, they work to save the past from being lost… But is there something in their work that can, in turn, save ‘the present’ from an essential loss
Considering the rerelease of two classic, high-nostalgia films – one a cult favourite, the other an all-time blockbuster – Thomas Crowley reflects on how and why we process the past and what it says about about the present. 2013 may
During the Delhi elections, the incumbent Congress Party unleashed a dazzling ad blitz in celebration of its ‘achievements’ on behalf of the people. It was a colossal failure, perhaps because it played out as straightforwardly tone deaf, instead of learning
The WTO’s Doha Development Round in Bali ended with India keeping its agricultural subsidies and enjoying a temporary reprieve from its immediate food security concerns. But as long as India continues to embrace Capitalism’s basic imperialist priorities- favouring the exchange
It is increasingly difficult to pin-point the specific causes of various protest movements across the world, but all of them signify a fluid feeling of unease and discontent…Thomas Crowley tries to understand the true nature of the recent protests in Turkey. ‘The Occupy movement’ in
This month Thomas Crowley charts out Bollywood’s fascination with the don, the almost mythical Dawood Ibrahim. Literary critics often note that Satan is the most compelling character in Paradise Lost, the 17th-century epic poem penned by devout Christian John