Articles by Sanya
If it's neon pink, it must be fusion
This week my mind has been on instrumentalists. First we learnt that Manohari Singh, a helmsman of R.D. Burman's techni-colour dreamboat, passed away on July 13 at the age of 79. Singh, whose saxophone lit up songs such as 'Roop tera mastana' and 'Mehbooba mehbooba', could play the alto and soprano versions of the instrument with a mesmerising ease that's rare in our part of the world.
Updated on Jul 17, 2010 01:06 AM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal, New Delhi
Teach us kung-fu, maestro
Born in Taiwan and trained in the craft of film-making in the US, Ang Lee straddles many worlds with the dash of a master storyteller. The 56-year-old has trained his camera on prospects as diverse as Manchu-dynasty China (Crouching Tiger) and modern American West (Brokeback Mountain), on Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility) and Marvel comics (Hulk).
Updated on Jul 16, 2010 11:37 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal, New Delhi
How Ela got her grooves
A show starting on artist Anjolie Ela Menon's 70th birthday brings together a lifetime of influences and themes.
Updated on Jul 10, 2010 12:19 AM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal
The poet who waged a jihad within
A bit of accidental jazz was introduced into the subcontinent’s musical legacy by a rapturous crowd. Iqbal Bano was singing to a 50,000-strong gathering in Lahore at the height of Zia ul Haq’s regime.
Updated on Jun 07, 2012 03:19 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal, New Delhi
Pancham’s punch
One day Bhanu Gupta, who played various instruments on Rahul Dev Burman’s team of accompanists, was strumming his guitar while waiting for a practice session to begin. R.D., who was taking a bath, poked out his bespectacled head and asked what the tune was.
Updated on May 16, 2012 02:43 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal, New Delhi
I hate remixes but love a good reprise
As Bollywood does it, a remix is a song re-recorded with a few more instruments and played to a dizzying dance-floor grind. The only falooda for this yesterday’s kulfi comes in the form of a string of loopy Angrezi lyrics. As a result, when a remix is not merely ornamental, it tends to be ‘mental’.
Updated on Jun 18, 2010 11:45 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal
What sets the poles apart
Despite being struck by tragedies, Poland has always bounced back. The credit goes to the Polish temperament.
Published on Jun 14, 2010 10:45 AM IST
Amitava Sanyal, Krakow
With the vistula as witness
Legend has it that there are 366 underground ‘cellars’ around the main town square of Kraków. “One for each day of the year and then one,” explains our guide, Izabela Hryciow.
Updated on May 29, 2010 11:57 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal
To the rhythm of life
Life along the rim of the Indian Ocean skipped a beat in December 2004. The tsunami wreaked devastation at a scale not known in living memory — tens of thousands died and millions of homes were flattened. But out of this rare calamity was born a thing of rare beauty — the Laya Project.
Updated on May 28, 2010 11:37 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal
Keeping aside the shariat
There are few things in the post post-26/11 world that can shake our cynical view of communal harmony. Bi’shar Blues, a National-Award-winning documentary that presents the tolerant, inclusive worldview of fakirs, the Muslim minstrels of Bengal, is one of those rare things.
Updated on May 22, 2010 01:18 AM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal
Let’s call them music producers, please
We confuse ourselves by calling people like Pritam ‘music directors’. We take the term to be something akin to ‘composers’, and hence expect originality, writes Amitava Sanyal.
Updated on May 14, 2010 11:56 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal, New Delhi
Familiarity of Rahmania
Allah Rakha Rahman has been the Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar of Indian film music ever since Mani Ratnam’s 1992 film, Roja. Many meteors have blazed across this pitiless sky since then, but only Rahman has shimmered on like a star. So much so that in recent times he has been sounding a bit too much like, well, himself, writes Amitava Sanyal.
Updated on May 07, 2010 11:33 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal
The future is
Forget Avatar, it was just the tip of an ice-cube. In comparison, the three-dimensional iceberg that’s drifting in its wake towards the entertainment industry is far bigger than the effect James Cameron’s $2.7-billion grosser has wrought.
Updated on Apr 25, 2010 12:40 AM IST
Hindustan Times | Pranav Dixit and Amitava Sanyal
Tribal instinct
The hippie counterculture’s first rock musical has its first show in India, writes Amitava Sanyal.
Updated on Apr 24, 2010 12:10 AM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal
They are different, folks
Shankar, Ehsaan and loy have paid tribute to that very 1980s’ sound, when Amitabh, Kamal Hasan and Sunny Deol could star in simultaneous releases, writes Amitava Sanyal.
Updated on Apr 23, 2010 11:33 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal
For the people
Ever wondered why so many of our public sector companies have large, revolting pieces of public art in front of their offices? Asks Amitava Sanyal.
Updated on Apr 10, 2010 10:57 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal, New Delhi
When Rahat opened the window
Rahat Fateh Ali Khan is to Sufi music what Miles Davis was to jazz. At first, both tried to play along with the dizzying melodic pyrotechnics of their elders — Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie for Miles and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan for Rahat. Both of them got slapped on the head for failing to keep up. And it pushed them to strike out on their own — on paths that celebrated the simplicity of tonal arrangements rather than frenetic climbs up and down the octave.
Updated on Apr 10, 2010 12:32 AM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal, New Delhi
Francis Newton Souza: How the artist’s libido guided him in art as in life
Francis was as fast with his friendships as he was fickle with his females. He was frank, impulsive, egoistic and iconoclastic. The son of a teetotalling Goan Catholic schoolteacher, Francis loved alcohol and hated the church’s dogmatic impositions. He claimed once that he painted murals on the walls of his mother’s womb. As a trained artist, he chewed on various artistic pastures — Byzantine murals, Gupta figurines, Khajuraho reliefs, and the works of Picasso, Gauguin and Cezanne. But he spat out everything in his unique style.
Updated on Apr 09, 2010 11:19 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal
Jinns of the city
Tonic for the Soul: Hundreds of jinns are believed to reside in the heart of modern Delhi. And thousands of people seek their help every week. Amitava Sanyal reports.
Updated on Apr 04, 2010 12:13 AM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal
Marlboro man of jazz
It’s an hour to his opening concert in India and Wolfgang Haffner is as cool as a mountain stream. He sits by the lawns at the back of the Goethe-Institut and puffs on one Marlboro after another.
Updated on Mar 29, 2010 12:46 AM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal
Will the real Sufi please sit down?
Everybody today wants a piece of the Sufi soufflé. Every music company wants to be able to claim at least one album of 'Sufi music' under its label, whatever the songs, whoever the singers. As a result of what seems to be purely a scramble for a fast-growing market, we the listeners are left with a confusion: what is a Sufi song writes Amitava Sanyal.
Updated on Mar 26, 2010 11:12 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal, New Delhi
Play it again, Sita
The first few decades of India’s recording history belonged to women. They came forward to record in numbers — mostly from various courtesan traditions — in the first few decades of the 20th century. Anecdotal evidence has it that most of the era’s men turned into mice, worrying that the electrical equipment would weaken their voices. And in our otherwise schizophrenic nation, this occurred in the North as well as in the South, writes Amitava Sanyal.
Updated on Mar 26, 2010 10:40 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal, New Delhi
Lust for life
You get into a 'multimedia' show featuring 'installations' with furrowed brows. You worry how those open-ended terms might leap at you. But when you step out of the show transformed, unmindful of the mediums used by the artists to present their ideas, you know you are on to something special. 'A Cry from the Narrow Between', an exhibition of "photography, video installation, text-based works and sound works", achieves that rare feat, writes Amitava Sanyal.
Updated on Mar 26, 2010 10:17 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal
Pondy blues
32 artists from nine countries holed up at a camp. How did they react to the camp’s theme, Puducherry Blue?, Amitava Sanyal writes.
Updated on Mar 20, 2010 10:10 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal
@ The Park
It was a chance encounter that led to a long association that, in turn, led to Delhi’s most-loved series of free-to-view, open-air concerts, Music in the Park.
Updated on Mar 19, 2010 11:09 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal
It’s the singer, stupid
But after the first five tracks, the album sheds Akhtar’s sleeveless jacket and wears dance-floor tights, writes Amitava Sanyal.
Updated on Mar 13, 2010 12:55 AM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal
What size is yours?
In a market that sets prices by the square inch, a few are challenging the notion that art is what its size is, writes Amitava Sanyal.
Updated on Feb 27, 2010 11:58 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal
Unequal music
From playing film songs on a harmonica to scripting scores for philharmonic orchestras, the classical composer has come a long way, writes Amitava Sanyal.
Updated on Feb 27, 2010 10:52 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal
What the doc didn’t prescribe
The Medicine Show, the unique cabaret with its provocative acts is back, wrirtes Amitava Sanyal.
Updated on Feb 26, 2010 10:32 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal
Putting magic into reality
I get a sudden urge to conquer Poland every time I hear Mukesh’s voice, from any year. Ditto for Lata in any song after the ones in Lekin (1990), writes Amitava Sanyal.
Updated on Feb 26, 2010 10:30 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Amitava Sanyal, New Delhi