tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9808389660579744382012-01-25T12:36:41.396-08:00Uttarika Kumaranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17620562181975440655noreply@blogger.comBlogger211100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-980838966057974438.post-12364982548417807772011-03-31T07:42:00.000-07:002011-03-31T07:46:34.213-07:00

My articles can be viewed at http://twitter.com/uttarika

Uttarika Kumaranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17620562181975440655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-980838966057974438.post-34837425907922348032011-01-13T00:04:00.000-08:002011-01-13T00:07:03.627-08:00

Published: DNA, January 8 Unhappy with the fit of skinny jeans available for men, 29-year-old visual merchandiser Inder Vhatwar and his friends would often shop in the ladies' section, trying hard to ignore the stares and giggles.“We were once at a shopping mall in Bandra and a friend went to the trial room to try on a pair of women’s jeans," recalls Vhatwar. "Almost all of the sales staff on the

Uttarika Kumaranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17620562181975440655noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-980838966057974438.post-27990968200318175762010-09-17T22:42:00.000-07:002010-09-17T22:46:19.612-07:00

Published May 29, 2010 DNA About a month ago, on the eve of Maharashtra Day, the Shiv Sena organised a mammoth blood donation camp, run with a startling efficiency that resulted in the collection of over 25,200 bottles of blood in a single day. It was a feat that earned it a place in the Guinness Book of World Records and drew the wrath of rival party Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, who called the

Uttarika Kumaranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17620562181975440655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-980838966057974438.post-2939213175809444032010-05-31T03:12:00.000-07:002010-05-31T03:18:17.838-07:00

(A dreadfully edited version came out in DNA, which you can find here)To be the first writer that Aparna Sen has ever collaborated with in her career is an achievement that newcomer Ranjan Ghosh best acknowledges by talking about it with an enthusiasm atypical of his otherwise stoic disposition. Ghosh was script assistant and assistant director on the National Award winning Bengali film Antaheen.

Uttarika Kumaranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17620562181975440655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-980838966057974438.post-85279785625333526782010-03-28T23:21:00.000-07:002010-03-28T23:26:32.962-07:00

(photo from The Indian Memory Project by Anusha Yadav)Of all the innumerable social rites that make up domestic lives, the ritual viewing of old photographs is particularly intriguing. The family, which exists to fulfil the principle of forward continuity, finds an odd antithesis in its attempt to derive meaning from a lost past, hoping it will somehow illuminate the present.Being the only

Uttarika Kumaranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17620562181975440655noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-980838966057974438.post-55594915384137331822010-03-28T22:41:00.000-07:002010-03-28T23:03:58.638-07:00

An article for DNA, Mumbai, which is where I'm working now. :-) Here's the link to the story. And here's the unedited version.---------Abheena, founder and lead dancer of Dancing Queens is yet to find a stage vast enough to sustain the remarkable enthusiasm displayed by her 14-member dance troupe, and Mumbai’s first queer drag performers. The Dancing Queens were first noticed by Mumbai’s LGBT

Uttarika Kumaranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17620562181975440655noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-980838966057974438.post-10699616633428602052009-11-21T21:52:00.000-08:002009-11-21T21:54:54.408-08:00

Quentin Tarantino’s cinematic oeuvre, which includes Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill series, has made ritualistic, exuberant violence as much an American trademark as baseball and apple pie. The legendary Tarantino effect essentially consists of lulling viewers into passive complicity with the seemingly predictable, only to jolt them out of it with the unexpected and bizarre at the

Uttarika Kumaranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17620562181975440655noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-980838966057974438.post-76417894429558526972009-09-09T02:41:00.000-07:002009-09-09T03:31:34.039-07:00

As always, I've managed to defect far beyond the domain of relevance by posting a review of a movie that everyone's watched already. But then I've always liked writing popular film reviews after most people have decided what they think of it. I think it gives readers a certain pleasure in revisiting the familiar. It also helps me sidestep crowded movie halls by catching a lazy afternoon show

Uttarika Kumaranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17620562181975440655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-980838966057974438.post-1208429735359082702009-08-19T22:11:00.000-07:002009-08-19T23:44:48.092-07:00

I'll be leaving Hyderabad soon and my job. But before I left, I wanted to put in my two cents about the city's unique page-3 culture, a phenomenon the magazine I work for proudly represents in all its glory, albeit attempting to go beyond. But I find it ironic that we're made the automatic targets of the city's inherent laziness to change status quo. Fortunately, Jyotirmaya Sharma's recent

Uttarika Kumaranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17620562181975440655noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-980838966057974438.post-47470459706079283042009-07-09T04:56:00.000-07:002009-07-10T02:52:53.206-07:00

That's the original title of the first draft of a story I wrote recently. But I decided to paint a (deservedly) much brighter picture about how amateur theatre is basically the last refuge of the dramatically inclined in Hyderabad. The performances might still be crude in parts and lacking in finesse but they're the best bet this city has in developing an active theatre movement that will

Uttarika Kumaranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17620562181975440655noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-980838966057974438.post-37571375988225706172009-05-28T00:09:00.000-07:002009-05-28T00:51:42.942-07:00

Kitchen Confidential Adventures in the Culinary UnderbellyBy Anthony Bourdain“Food is pain.”Kitchen Confidential sees noted chef and TV presenter Anthony Bourdain thoroughly in his element, minus the awkwardness which sticks to him like grease on the proverbial frying pan when he has to reluctantly socialise with strangers on his various TV shows. What we had suspected to be certain antisocial

Uttarika Kumaranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17620562181975440655noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-980838966057974438.post-35318030655141353862009-05-20T03:39:00.000-07:002009-05-21T01:03:01.867-07:00

The Atlantic recently published an in-depth feature on George Vaillant, the chief psychiatrist behind the legendary Grant study which in 1937, picked 268 Harvard men to follow their lives in as much detail as possible - through marriages, careers, personal relationships and the onset of old age. The study was meant to uncover the secret to that elusive mental state we call happiness. Worth a read

Uttarika Kumaranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17620562181975440655noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-980838966057974438.post-35272206822197500372009-05-14T03:36:00.000-07:002009-05-14T23:32:52.001-07:00

I had taken a personal oath that I wouldn’t participate in the current media hype revolving around the social networking site Twitter – news channels are airing primetime stories about it, academes with serious delusions about their own coolness are writing papers on it and the entry of celebrity Twitterers (Oprah been the latest celebrity member) has just skyrocketed registrations even further.

Uttarika Kumaranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17620562181975440655noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-980838966057974438.post-68445219967203593052009-04-24T13:03:00.000-07:002009-04-24T13:08:49.930-07:00

I was watching a documentary on The Lord of the Rings film trilogy today. Apparently, the entire project which spanned a period of eight years, cost a preposterous $280 million to make. A lot can be said, mostly positive, about the intrinsic power of cinema to transform one man’s vision into a reality more palpable than any art form has ever come close to achieving. It is a flattering tribute to

Uttarika Kumaranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17620562181975440655noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-980838966057974438.post-8228336231785496512009-04-10T03:32:00.000-07:002009-04-11T03:29:23.533-07:00

Rakhi Ka Swayamvara is soon going to be the next reality show everybody will watch religiously in the privacy of their homes and then feign ignorance of it the next day. A self-confessed pop culture omnivore (although not as much as I’d like to with some people I know always taking the remote control into their custody when I’m around), this is one show I’m not going to miss. Just the very

Uttarika Kumaranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17620562181975440655noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-980838966057974438.post-45026707894425570702009-04-01T10:02:00.000-07:002009-04-10T04:30:50.571-07:00

Hyderabad’s tendency for mass procrastination in any public event seems to be an epidemic as wildly rampant as a plague in medieval England. It's like the entire city is functioning in a different time zone but nobody bothered to inform me. In Hyderabad, people treat arriving late as a birthright, like they treat the right to breathe or the right to put up really bad theatre productions. I can

Uttarika Kumaranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17620562181975440655noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-980838966057974438.post-5856831487715799702009-03-18T23:10:00.000-07:002009-03-19T04:06:49.122-07:00

The Deccan Chronicle, the largest English daily in Andhra Pradesh, yesterday published this headline in the bottom half of their front page –Balayya Slaps Thigh at his SisterAs a fairly conservative editor and even moreso a cosmopolitan bigot, I find it amusing that this went to the press as a front page headline, especially if one takes seriously the editorial rule of comprehensibility for the

Uttarika Kumaranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17620562181975440655noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-980838966057974438.post-22376652433894097182009-03-13T00:30:00.000-07:002009-03-13T00:41:27.035-07:00

Drop that Cone!I confess, I can't stand watching men eat from an ice-cream cone. I don't know whether it's the phallic undertones but the very thought of a man gingerly licking melting ice cream off a waffle cone is enough to make me lose all respect for him and more importantly, all interest in my ice-cream. There are some men who try rather hard to make the entire act look a bit more manly by

Uttarika Kumaranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17620562181975440655noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-980838966057974438.post-31897046129192831862009-03-09T13:40:00.000-07:002009-03-09T23:23:14.464-07:00

Haven’t you come across a lot more funny men than you may have genuinely funny women? To me, an allegedly ‘funny’ woman is always extremely self-conscious of the fact that she’s about to crack a smart one. While some still develop a certain skill at witty repartee, they never quite match up to the men in their company. Most others stumble their way through, often giving themselves away in that

Uttarika Kumaranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17620562181975440655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-980838966057974438.post-86839334272940874162009-03-05T22:54:00.000-08:002009-03-06T05:21:33.283-08:00

Apparently, President Obama is having a challenging first month in office. After having had his foreign policy and skin colour subject to months of intense political scrutiny, the American public has now focussed its attention on the president's rapidly greying head of hair. Well, at least they know he's been keeping busy. It's funny though how anybody in the public eye (who wishes to remain in

Uttarika Kumaranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17620562181975440655noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-980838966057974438.post-8911295111289365392009-03-05T02:09:00.000-08:002009-04-11T03:27:39.926-07:00

When Indian TV channels repeatedly aired the footage of girls outside a Mangalore pub being physically assaulted, dragged by the hair and pushed to the ground by men, we were both shocked and disturbed. These were typical urban Indian women – the kind of people we know at the kind of place we’d hang out. When feature writer Nisha Susan used the social networking website Facebook to launch the ‘

Uttarika Kumaranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17620562181975440655noreply@blogger.com0