India
josh.spero
Group shows can be strained: the rubric can be so narrow that it has to be stretched to accommodate the artists at hand. That is one reason why Haunch of Venison's new show, Mixed Media, is so pleasing: it features contemporary sculpture with an emphasis on the varied materials in use today, a capacious but not unlimited mission. The other reason is that the work is just damned good.The gallery, which has just extended its premises from Haunch of Venison Yard through to Bond Street, where its new entrance sits, inaugurated this engorgement with some of its most revered and freshest artists. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Can any drama work in which half the dialogue takes place by cellphone? Last night a new dose of Kidnap and Ransom gave this thorny question a thorough workout. Trevor Eve, bestubbled, gravelly and never very comedic, is back doing his Trevor Eve thing as Dominic King, a primetime hostage negotiator who never seems to have problems with his mobile battery. Clearly not an iPhone man.In this instalment he had just wrapped up a deal releasing 10 hostages in a crowded Srinagar when at the nervous hand-over bullets flew, the chief kidnapper was shot dead. In the ensuing melee a young couple ran Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Travel, health permitting, knows few age barriers (if it did, there would be no Elderhostel), nor does charm, so there are two reasons up front why The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel fully deserves to win over the so-called "grey pound" market and much more besides. The story of a septet of British retirees abroad who need to leave home in order to learn any number of home truths, John Madden's film provides a welcome corrective to our youth-obsessed celluloid age without going to the opposite extreme and offering up an Anglo-Indian Cocoon, schmaltz and all.In fact, the film's flintiness is one Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Two hundred years ago in Durham taverns you could find men in wooden clogs clattering on the tables, with their mates pressing their ears to the underside of the surface. Meanwhile, at the other end of the world, African slaves with bare feet were shuffling on dirt with metal bottle caps held between their toes. Now picture a Mediterranean gypsy dancing of sorrow and pain with swirling shawls and angrily pounding heels. Three quite different scenes, different places, different eras, but all rooted in one human impulse, common the world over.Rhythm, in its expressive sense, has been quietly Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
That Alan Yentob gets around. I’ve run into him backstage during Jay Z's set at Glastonbury and in a jazz club in Poland, and here we found him in Rajasthan fronting a fascinating and well-shot programme, albeit workmanlike rather than really inspired, mostly set in one of the richest traditional music areas of India.Yentob (nicknamed Botney, which sounds like a furry robot) isn’t everyone’s cup of Bragg, and he isn’t that immediately likeable. Personally I prefer his lugubriousness to the overexcited and eager-to-please presenters TV bosses tend to go for. And he found the time to make a Read more ...
Dylan Moore
Thiruvananthapuram, capital city of the state of Kerala in the far south-west of India, is as crowded with people as its name is with syllables. By mid-November, most of the monsoon rains have passed and the city is bathed in a stiflingly sticky wet heat. The main thoroughfare, Mahatma Gandhi Road - a statue of the great man stands at an intersection garlanded with orange and yellow flowers - is a constant cacophony of traffic. Swarms of black-and-yellow rickshaws buzz like so many bees amid the jumble of modern cars, motorbikes, scooters and 1950s classics. Cracked, worn and non-existent Read more ...
mark.kidel
In the age of Skype and no-frills budget travel, frontiers barely exist – at least if you’re not an immigrant or refugee. World music is as much about boundary-breaking and fusion these days as it is about discovering the unsullied treasures of what UNESCO calls the "intangible heritage". Contemporary global sounds can feel like an opportunistic marriage between musicians who have little in common, or else a more appropriate union with some basis in cultural kinship or history.You’d expect the Shankar lineage to show respect for the essences of different traditions and Anoushka Shankar, whose Read more ...
howard.male
Over the past decade I’ve always been more an admirer than a fan of Susheela Raman, wanting to like her music more than I did. But her latest album Vel has changed all that. It’s an uncompromisingly dark and powerful statement that makes no concessions to what one might call “world music” tastefulness. It still incorporates some of the languid sensuality and meditative mood associated with previous works, but incorporates a harder, at times even angrier edge which makes it wholly unique.So when I turned up at last night’s gig to find myself in a large hall that felt like the inside of a 1930s Read more ...
hilary.whitney
William Dalrymple wrote his highly acclaimed bestseller In Xanadu, an account of his journey to the ruins of Kubla Khan's stately pleasure dome, when he was 22. In 1989 he moved to Delhi where he lived for six years researching and writing his second book, City of Djinns (1993), which won the 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book of the Year Award. Since then he has published five further books, all of which have won major prizes. White Mughals (2003), which won the Wolfson Prize for History, is to be made into a film directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes.Dalrymple also has an illustrious Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Composer and music producer Nitin Sawhney (b 1964) is known for his variety of musical projects, reflecting his background fusing Indian and British heritage. He has written music for films, television, dance productions, studio albums and concert performance, and is increasingly developing the possibilities of video games.Born in Rochester, Kent, he took music lessons in Asian, classical and flamenco, and dropped out of law studies and an accountancy job, as his urge to become a musician took over. He made his first breakthrough teaming up with Sanjeev Bhaskar on what would become the BBC TV Read more ...
fisun.guner
This was the sort of science programme that an interested non-science person like me finds immensely irritating. It began with a series of statements which were, in fact, meaningless overstatements. Not only this, but these overblown statements tripped each other up: “Scientists think they’ve discovered the secrets of a healthy, happy, long life – for all of us” (don’t you just hate this kind of teasing nonsense that treats us all either like fools or Daily Mail readers?) was followed by, “This is one man’s struggle to unravel our destiny.” So what was it to be? A dramatic narrative about one Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The bayadere bears on her shoulder a vase of holy water, and the story of the ballet La bayadère is of her refusal to compromise. She could better her life in two political deals: become the high priest’s mistress, or later, when bitten by a poisonous snake, take the antidote and live on while watching her sworn lover marry the princess who he knows tried to murder her. She refuses both. She remains, morally, the vessel of a purity that it would kill her spirit to give up.To stay so true to a principle isn’t only the stuff of fantastical ballet fairy tales. It has to be true of the Read more ...