Allô Chatrath

 I have been a fan of actress Sanya Malhotra. (Farrukh Jaffar Paggliat Badhai Ho Minakshisundaram Sam Bahadur: She was wasted in a very routine role.  'Photograph' was her first film that I saw. She was in a de glamourised role. She remains serious throughout the film and hardly speaks, except once when the old lady asks her to smile for a photograph. But she does not let her co-actor and senior Nawazuddin Siddiaqi over shadow her even once. My favourite scene in the film was when she and Nawazuddin touch each others hands for a few brief seconds. Kathal was a slap-stick comedy with a serious message. She, as a junior police officer performs her role with great gusto.  Mrs. inauguration in Australia in a ridiculously loud dress.

I visited Hoi-An in 2019.  Hội An is a city on Vietnam’s central coast known for its well-preserved Ancient Town, cut through with canals. The former port city’s melting-pot history is reflected in its architecture, a mix of eras and styles from wooden Chinese shop houses and temples to colorful French colonial buildings, ornate Vietnamese tube houses and the iconic Japanese Covered Bridge with its pagoda

  I am a fan of Stephen Spielberg. Over two decades back I saw his mini-series ‘Taken’ on the TV. It is about aliens who abduct some selected humans for short periods and then send them back to earth. There are a number of plots and sub-plots which are woven around the experiences of three generations. But here I am going to mention two parts from the series which impressed me a lot.   The first is the way Spielberg introduces an alien for the first time. One sees a fleeting movement of an alien running around in one corner of the screen. So the viewer is prepared to see the aliens later on, even though their presence on the screen is for very short spells of time. The subtlety with which aliens are portrayed is noteworthy.   The second part relates to a young girl aged around 7, who gets introduced in the last two episodes. She is Dakota Fanning. She carries every scene in which she is shown with amazing aplomb and self-confidence..   I subsequently saw two more films of

 "Over the past weeks, more than 200 people have been sentenced for participating in the riots that erupted across the UK this summer. On Friday Thomas Birley was handed a nine-year jail sentence, the longest prison term given to a rioter so far, for stoking a fire outside a hotel housing more than 200 asylum seekers...   ..." BBC

 I was in Paris on a long training. One of the best things about these foreign trainings for civil servants is that the lady wife too gets a chance to accompany the husband and stay abroad for a year. Of course the amount of fellowship being meager, one has to cut corners and live the Spartan life of a student, but still the reliving of the student days has a charm of its own. As soon as I was able to fix up some accommodation, my wife and five year old son joined me in Paris. However it was to be short stay for them as my son was not willing to miss his school back home in Delhi. I was to get two months fellowship and some winter clothing allowance, which totaled to, what at that time seemed to be, a tidy sum. I was hoping to manage the visit of the family with this amount. However my wife and the little son had an agenda of their own. Besides a long list of places to be visited in Paris, they had prepared a “small” shopping list, which would have neatly taken care of th

   When ever I read about Le Corbusier+ Jeanneret's 'heritage furniture', a scowl comes on my face. ....Carpenters in small towns around India have been making such chairs since long.                                  Take a look at some of the chairs that I photographed in Goa..                                                                          Goa chair                                                                              Goa The above is at least 5500 years old- crafted in Denmark and presently in the museum in Reykjavik, Iceland, where I photographed it.  Now you tell me which of these are real heritage items and which............... just wishful thinking.

  https://www.brittanytourism.com/offers/musee-de-la-compagnie-des-indes-port-louis-en-2115284/     This museum is the only one of its kind in France. The great trading companies of the 17th and 18th centuries plied their course from Lorient to the East Indies, bringing back exotic and precious cargoes from the other side of the world. With a vast collection of Chinese porcelain, Indian cotton fabrics, Indo-European furniture, models of ships, old maps, oils, gouaches, woodcuts, and miniatures, the museum retraces the voyages of the intrepid sailors of the East India Companies who landed on the coasts of Africa and Asia, setting up such famous trading-posts as: Mocha, Pondicherry, Chandernagar and Canton.     The museum's collections evoke the various Indian Companies in the 17th and 18th centuries and their relations with Africa, India, China and the Americas. The rooms present the Company of the East and West Indies, the bankruptcy of the financier Law, the Perpetual Compan

                      Guru Gobind do khare,                     Kake lagun paai,                     Balihari Guru aapne,                     Jinha Gobind diya milay.

                                     Photo source: The Tribune, Chandigarh, July 24, 2024.  There is no doubt that our police personnel work under very trying circumstances.....But it has to be drilled into them that the people in the crowd are our own brethren and the aim is to break the unlawful assembly and not break the heads of the protesters.

   https://www.tribuneindia.com/2011/20110313/spectrum/main7.htm

 #AgentOrange #Vietnam #USA #Magsaysay #NguyenThiNgocPhuong #kjschatrath #ChatrathKJS                                                The Indian Express, Chandigarh, August 31, 2024                                       ' What about those who committed this outrage? -