Bala Subramaniam

Composing music for films happens within a circumscribed arena, especially in the Indian context where music is formulaic most of the time. In the west, film composers have a wider latitude to experiment with musical aesthetics and arrangement. For…

The last Jeffrey Archer I read was more than a decade ago, and that was a re-read of “Kane and Abel”. I had found a first-edition hard bound copy of the book in a thrift store. Reading Kane and Abel after twenty five years took me back to my younger…

Mike Flanagan's Carrie is now streaming on Amazon Prime. I have been waiting for this series for the last two years. Until a few years ago, Flanagan was making films and television series for Netflix; he has since moved to Amazon, and Carrie is his…

Annie Dillard passed away a few days ago at eightly-one. In her short 1989 book, The Writing Life - a book that every writer should read and should pass on to the next generation of writers - Annie Dillard quotes a conversation a student had with his…

Every uprising begins with a trigger, a voice, a picture, a deed, a tipping point. In India this summer the trigger was a single sentence. On the fifteenth of May, hearing a matter that had nothing to do with the young or the jobless, the Chief…

It is a recurring theme in the history of technology that, during periods of crisis, some of our sharpest scientific and operational thinking takes shape. Wars compress time, concentrate attention and resources, and force people to solve problems…

Epics are usually about two things: about war and about trying to get home. Most epics have a good share of both episodes. Homer’s Iliad, for instance, is full of the adrenaline of combat, the tragedy of destruction, and the fury of revenge. On the…

I have not seen Sir Garfield Sobers play. He retired before I started following cricket. In fact, very few of us have. When he was playing at his peak, televised cricket was nothing like what we have now. If you wanted to watch him, you had to be at…

I find it hard to believe that S. Janaki hasn’t been recording or singing in live performances for the last decade. Since her voice is with me every day, I never realized that her singing career had, in a sense, ended a long time ago. Every other…

This has been a scorching Wimbledon. In the last hundred years of recorded history, it has happened only six times that the tournament wasn't interrupted by rain in any form. It's been hot, humid, and with no breeze at all. The lush grass courts,…

There is something to be said about royalty. Even if the title doesn’t mean very much anymore, and democracies have pushed royalty to the sidelines, it hasn’t disappeared. You see it most clearly during Wimbledon. I tuned in early for the finals not…

In one of my favorite G.K. Chesterton Father Brown short stories, "The Queer Feet," he talks about clubs that are exclusively designed and exist only for the privilege of the few. In Chesterton's words, “Such institutions can only exist in an…

A few days ago, if someone had told us that there is a nation called Cape Verde playing in the 2026 FIFA World Cup, none of us would have believed it. In fact we would have to look up at the map to figure out where this country is and what we found…

Marshall McLuhan, considered the man behind media studies, coined the prophetic phrase “The medium is the message” in 1964. What he meant was the structure of a medium shapes the message and the way it is consumed. For a long time the format and…

Imagine you are an Italian music lover in the eighteenth century, arriving at the opera house early enough to catch what happens before the curtain rises. Seated behind the small enclosure at the front of the stage, the orchestra is already playing.…

Fifty years is a long time in any field of endeavour, more so in a demanding art form like music, the most subtle and ephemeral of the arts. When those fifty years are filled with unbridled passion, supreme commitment to one’s calling and craft,…

Winston Churchill famously described democracy as the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried. Over centuries we have experimented with the rule of kings, autocracy, dictatorships, communism, and everything in between,…

I am not going to mourn Asha Bhosle's death. As long as her music is alive, so will she. Javed Akhtar, the renowned poet and social commentator, in his tribute today on a television channel, remembered Asha's advice to him: "Don't count on human…