ArtySri

Veteran Malayalam actor, director, and screenwriter Srinivasan died recently at 69. He had been unwell for several years, with rumors of his death even spreading last year after an emergency hospital visit. His prolonged illness left him extremely frail. He needed help to walk, his speech was hard to understand, and his once-sharp voice had

You can’t get enough of a good story. In the last few months, I went on three entertainment binges, totaling almost 150 hours (nearly a week of my life). These were on Donna Tartt’s two tomes in audio format: A Secret History and The Goldfinch, multiple viewings of all three seasons of Mike White’s The

Bankability is the cornerstone of relationships.  My earliest memory of the word “bankable” is from decades ago. After staying with me for a year, my cousin was moving to a different town.  In the goodbye gift, a book, she, a banker, wrote, “You can always bank on me.” The word has always stayed with me

I recently took an eight-week Shakespeare class at a well-known acting school in the city. Like for most people, Shakespeare was an enigma, and the class, surprisingly open to even non-actors, was my chance to demystify the Bard. There were around ten people in the class. Some were pros, but they assured me newbies would

Since I don’t have cable, I had to rely on NBC’s YouTube clips. As a result, I mostly watched the US-dominant events, and track and field in particular. There is something visceral about seeing peak-performing men and women outrunning each other. As Woody Allen famously said, after skipping the Oscars despite winning the best picture,

The closest equivalent to the Indian “thali” in the West is a “platter,” although that bland word sucks the juice out of the delectable thali. A thali is a multi-course meal served on a single plate, and you can eat it in any order. Every thali has salad, rice, Indian bread, at least two main