Winds From The East

- Kumar Shahaini As life slowly climbed the ladder of evolution. one sense after another arrived and developed.  Hearing was the last to arrive, and the last to attain a state bordering on perfection.  We have acquired the habit of giving the greater part of our attention to what we we, laving a mere fraction to what we hear  -James Jeans (1937)  Both the senses of sight and sound, it may be noted, arose out of the need to perceive movement; to locate an object, and one's own relationship to it; to gauge the pressures at work; to achieve points of equilibrium and to move in a controlled manner not only from static point to static point, as we seemed to imagine in our classical civilisations, but to find in these different vibrations, and differences of pressure, the vitality of being itself.  "When does one say that a piece of material lives. When it continuously does something, moves ..."  The atomic physicist, Erwin Schrodinger, quoted by Fritz Winckel. Winckel goes on ...

Indian Auteur - Issue 1 - Issue 2 Discussion- Bollywood Strike. It’s difficult to be Kumar Shahani. Not that there is a great public demand or media attention like our superstars. But its his path to continue pursuing the struggle to understand and evolve the form of cinema and its relationship with life and other art forms that has made things difficult. It's best put in his own words: "You know Subrato Mitra, whose camera work for early Satyajit Ray turned films into masterpieces. Subrato was also a film-maker in his own right. Can you imagine that all the films made by Subrato are reportedly reduced to ashes because of a fire in the studio which kept them in London?" asks Kumar. "Isn't it shameful that nobody seems concerned about such things?" Kumar should know. He is himself running from pillar to post to retrieve the negatives of one of his films. The lab, which is holding the negatives simply refuses to oblige because NFDC (the producer) has not paid ...