Sunday Long Reads: Nagraj Manjule on ‘Jhund’, Indian filmmakers at Oscars 2022, Tajdar Junaid interview, and more

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‘Indian filmmakers retaining key decision-making roles is a huge part of this Oscar moment’

Directors Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh wearing Raw Mango. The 94th Academy Awards will be telecast in India on March 28. (Photo: Ashish Shah)

The road-to-Oscar rigmarole aside, was the Academy’s recent policy on diversity key in them selecting Writing With Fire?

Rintu Thomas, 35: After the whole #OscarsSoWhite (movement, since 2015), the documentary branch of the Academy took its diversifying efforts most seriously, with more people of colour, more women as voters, from outside of the US, that has a huge bearing on films like Writing With Fire or Attica this year, or Collective and The Mole Agent last year.

Sushmit Ghosh, 39: We’re the only film that doesn’t have a big producer, streamer or a studio behind it. The nomination, a big win in itself, has opened up a conversation, pan-industry, about how far an independently produced film can go and what the meaning of independence truly is.

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‘I wondered what would courage sound like’

Tajdar Junaid (Credit: Gitartha Goswami)

Mumbai-based Tajdar Junaid had never envisioned becoming a film composer when he started playing music at the age of 15 in Calcutta. All he wanted to do was play Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin), the song that inspired him to be a musician, and to knock on ace guitarist Amyt Datta’s doors to take him in as a student. Last year, during the lockdown, he composed a single (Reach Out) with old friend Warren Mendonsa/Blackstratblues, both sitting in two countries, “to tell people this (pandemic) will pass”. Mendonsa moved to New Zealand during the pandemic. From buying one of his first electric guitars from Mendonsa to being a part of the latter’s solo project Blackstratblues’ first tour in 2006, the two crossed paths during the Great Indian Rock concert days. Junaid, who’s keen to work with a “favourite” musician, Lucky Ali, has, over the years, bored with just playing the guitar and doing covers, has sauntered into the ashrams of the Bauls of Santiniketan, collaborated with different artistes, picked up myriad sounds, styles and instruments, and transitioned from just an indie musician to also scoring for indie films. This year, the spotlight is on a slew of such films scored by him, one is at the Oscars.

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‘It will take time for new work to start coming with the same energy as before’

Theatre director Sunil Shanbag (Express Archive)

During the pandemic, as several members of the theatre community came together to help artistes in distress, Mumbai-based theatre director Sunil Shanbag encountered an elderly loknatya performer whose deep sense of self-respect was preventing him from taking help.

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The marvels of a missus

Despite all the low blows and buffetings, sometimes created by her own inability to see sense, Midge Maisel refuses to give up

I’m missing Midge, she who headlines the Amazon Prime show, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which has topped off its penultimate Season 4 with a dazzling caught-in-the-snowflakes-in-NYC act. The motormouth female comic, with her rat-a-tat lines, and fabulous outfits, works hard to make us forget an indifferent Season 3. She waltzes into an illegal strip club with a solo set, managing to make it a somewhat respectable space, much to the horror of its rough-and-tumble regulars. She talks down a much more established rival, never abandoning her sartorial sharpness even at her lowest: the costumes and the window dressing in the series are a constant delight.

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What a hypnotic dawn and dusk can do

Watching the sunrise or sunset can actually be good for your well-being. (Photo: Ranjit Lal)

It really is something we should try to do every day or at least as frequently as possible. Watch the sun come up at dawn and go down again at dusk. For no two sunrises and sunsets are the same. Unfortunately, we have built our cities (especially the big ones) and fashioned our lives in such a way that dawn and dusk gazing is virtually impossible. At dawn we’re still asleep and will rear up like cobras if awoken, at dusk we’re usually battling traffic on our way home from work. But dawn and dusk watching can serve as a tonic far better than anything that comes in a little brown bottle or multi-coloured capsule no matter where you are.

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