parotechnics

 Since this article appears in a truncated form on the Mint website - it was first published in a special issue of the paper on the theme Going Home - I'm putting it down here in its full form. The anatomy of a hometown summary PAROMITA VOHRA grew up listening to her father talk about his Lahore. When she visited it for herself, she found the city had become hers too     Changing cityscape :  An old photo of Faletti’s Hotel; (top) one of Pakistan’s many painted trucks. photo-group text BP Print As an Indian Air Force kid, I spent my childhood changing cities, changing homes, changing schools. I studied in Kendriya Vidyalayas and convents, experimental and public schools. Across them all, one thing remained constant. Every year, you had to account for the delicious, elongated torpor of summer holidays, their voluptuous aimlessness, by writing an essay: “What I Did In My Summer Holidays”. Some children did the Heritage of India holiday ...

I wrote this piece for Time Out when Himesh Reshammiya first became a thing - when he replaced Altaf Raja in my nightly auto rickshaw rides. It's a pity Time Out didn't keep its archives online, so if I want to share something I wrote for them I have to do it here. These were early writings on culture for me, and I think I was quite lucky to have the space to write about things other people thought were quite faltu - such as this piece on Rendezvous With Simi Garewal  (of which I was was an ardent fan ) and a new singer I heard on the radio called Rabbi Shergill :) I also wrote about my ongoing Himesh amusements on this blog at the time - about going to see Aap Ka Suroor and then! Meeting some people who had acted in the film in Stuttgart :D as well as seeing a fab docu on the Making of Aap Ka Suroor! Anyway the reason all this came back to me is that I just stumbled upon a truly genius instagram account called Himesh Doing Things , which I believe was #madeforme and well, Hi...

I wrote this essay for a book called tiltpauseshift: Dance Ecologies in India, published by Gati Dance Forum. I'm sharing it because Saroj Khan's passing made me remember it. Bodily Fluid: The Movement of Bollywood Dance from Body to Body Paromita Vohra For long, the song-and-dance elements of Indian cinema were seen as guilty pleasures, not to mention proof of its artistic inferiority. Even today, when this approach is being reassessed, it is not uncommon to hear the dismissive term ‘dancing around trees’. It is presented as an emblem of popular Hindi cinema’s infantile silliness, apparently on account of both un-realism and coyness about sex, disallowed by censorship. Into present time, directors of the new wave of Bollywood ‘indies’ declare their squeamishness with the song-and-dance routine, and talk about how they work around it in their films as it is a necessity of the market rather than an artistic preference. Their solutions are often pr...