The Unforgettable Desire

A lot has been said about loneliness. A lot has been said about the difference between being lonely and being alone. I was raised in a ‘learn to be alone’ way that implied the idea of being self-sufficient. Given my childhood and teenage was dominated by my dedication to friendship, I was often asked, ‘Will any of your friends do what you do for them?’ It was based on the assumption of requiring reciprocation. I am not sure if I said it out loud, I might have, that, ‘I am not doing it for them, I am doing it because I need to do it for myself.’ A few months ago, during a conversation I asked a man if he was married. He laughed and mentioned that he is sixty nine years old. I simply added, ‘and…?’ Then he clarified that he is married and has many grand children. I understood his amusement, but I didn’t understand what age had to do with the question. A person can be widowed or divorced or homosexual or asexual or just single. Being sixty nine doesn’t say anything about his/her m...

Satyajit Ray adapted his grandfather Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury’s short story ‘Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne’ (1915) as a film, bearing the same name that released in the year 1969, at the request of his son to make a film for children. Twenty years later, a similar request was made to an author by his son that had put the author in a dilemma, “You should never break a promise made to a child, but is the death of the author a reasonable excuse?” Salman Rushdie, the author in question, produced Haroun and the Sea of Stories in 1990, dedicating the book to his son. Ranade's Goopi and Bagha (Image source: The Hindu) Fifty years after Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne , Shilpa Ranade’s directorial debut  Goopi Gawaiya Bagha Bajaiya (2019) has recreated the magical world of storytelling. After a few minutes into the movie, I couldn’t help but wonder about its uncanny resemblance of wordplay with Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories . Like Rushdie’s story, the film not only reminds ...