Manil Suri's "My Life as a Cabaret Dancer"

The monthly magazine The Caravan is an excellent forum for long-form feature writing and journalism, and the January issue is special for me on two counts: first, it carries a piece I've written about Jaane bhi do Yaaro - the film and the book. Here's the link.

Second, the issue excerpts this wonderful essay by author Manil Suri about the "Helen dance" he performed in drag after a public reading at the Brooklyn Book Festival. The piece is one of 13 original essays in The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies do to Writers, an anthology of film-related writing that I've edited for Tranquebar. The book should be out in February, and needlesss to say I'll keep feeding you information and updates about it. But for now, do read Manil's piece, and watch his Bollywood dance here.

P.S. It's purely coincidental that the Helen number Manil picked for his dance was from a film titled... Caravan.

Look, book!

Got my first copy of the Jaane bhi do Yaaro book on Friday. It looks good. Very compact (272 pages, with a six-page insert of photos) and it turned out just the way I was hoping it would when I first saw the cover on email. The black colour, the clapboard with the title and the movie reel on the sides make it look a bit like one of the Faber books on film, which is pleasing.


One thing I really appreciate (and I think I have Harper Collins’ Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri to thank for this) is that they put an Index at the end. It adds a touch of gravitas, but more than that it gave me a kick just to read the movie titles and people names mentioned in the Index – Godard’s Bande à part, Werner Herzog’s Woyzeck and Milos Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball sharing space with the Jeetendra-Jaya Prada starrer Tohfa. Not to mention Socrates, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov and Raj Kumar Kohli's Jaani Dushman. Heck, if I hadn’t written this book I might almost want to read it!