How after Kolkatta and Trivandrum, now comes Bangalore!
There was this second Bengalooru International film festival in Bangalore. V.N.Subba Roth moving spirit behind it said it was a tremendous success though the Kannada film industry didn’t make much use of it.

An estimated 75,000 people vitiated the festival.
Girish Kaseravalli, the one star among the new generation of parallel film making community said many things that were all relevant to the parallel cinema.
This is the subject in which I was interested for a long time since my days at Santiniketan where the great Satyajit Ray grew up and gave up his art classes and entered into advertising and then through a long process he emerged as a great film maker.

I was one of the few lucky students who went to see the first screening of the Pather Panchachali in the nearby village theatre of Bolpur and when the film was screened there was no crowd. No crowd for many days and we were the only ones simply because Satyaji Ray was a Santiniketan name and as such we went out of sympathy for our own man!

Then after a few days in Kolkatta, after the film got noticed by discerning critics, there were so many Ray friends even then at Santiniketan, Chidananda DasGupta the long time friend and associate of Ray was one, then film hit the great banners in the international film festivals.

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The traditional Bharata Natyam faces an identity crisis?

There is a perceptible decline in the traditional art of Bharata Natyam, as we have known for long. On the one hand, there is the prim and proper stiff upper lip of the Kalakshetra style. They have thoroughly discouraged individual talents to blossom. In so many words, we needn’t go about it. It is for all practical purposes only group dance they encourage. With the result you don’t get to notice the emergence of individual talents, even the ones who have made a name for themselves did so in spite of the constraints imposed by the regime. So, no one seems to take to appreciating Bharata Natyam with its rich offerings of the rasas, more the famed sringara rasa as expounded in so many beautiful padas and varnams of the famed composers.

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Appreciating music and dance

A middle class paranoia contributes to decline of Carnatic music?

Music and dance, a country’s cultural symbols, always were thriving in India, even under difficult situations. There is always an appreciating elite and the crowd in any society, devoted to the maintaining of standards. Now, suddenly, it seems the music and dance scenario in the South, in Madras, the home of Carnatic music, there is a perceptible decline.

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Our civil society must shout more loudly!

The AP and Karnataka cases remind us our intolerance of open mind!

What education, what liberal values, and what civil society we can be proud about?

Open mind is what education is supposed to teach and inculcate. But in India we are yet to travel far. Our education is to give us the power of the mind to welcome criticism and give us an open mind. If education is all about closing our mind, then, what is all our education and culture amount to? Not much, sadly!

Our civil society is still pretentiously elitist and timid. Stray dogs bring the crowd to the streets but not the detention of and a newspaper editor! This is our value system?

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What the Indian Information and Broadcasting Minister must be doing?

There are some exciting things happening in the India media: print and TV. There is also much contradiction in the minds of media owners as to what constitutes news for the Indian audience. Even some of the well-established English newspapers are filling up the pages with downloads of foreign columns, so there are more US and UK news and views than Indian news and Indian opinion. So, the question, what constitutes news and what constitutes Indian opinion and Indian points of view assumes a new priority.
The Indian and global context seems right to ask such a question. There was this seminar in Hyderabad the other day. The Indian Information and Broadcasting Minister Mr.Jaipal Reddy was the main speaker. The other media stars, moghuls were Mr.Ramoji Rao, the owner of the Enadu group of newspapers and media products and M.J.Akbar, the star editor cum innovator in the Indian print media and also part owner in the Asian Age newspaper. Also were present the newest of the new media star, the NDTV breakaway rebel, Rajeev Sardesai who had floated a new news channel, a highly risky venture in the already crowded Indian news media and news channels market.

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News is what the commentary makes it to be!

Newsheadlines almost seem to define the daily news and opinions of most people.People in India,more than the west,do belive in the printed word.Once there was in the West,the common refrain:”Dont belive the newspapers!”.Not anymore.People do believe the newspapers,their favourite newspapers and their headlines go as given wisdom for their readers.
But is news always truth?Or,is news the truth?There are any number of definitions of what constitutes news.There are any number of media moghuls and media pandits.As James Cmeron,the famous Foreign Correspondent as he was know for once said:”News for the most time is just newsprint!” People just read and get excited and then forget what they read.Tabloids in fact did make instant news as instant wisdom.The broadsheets now almost all want to go the tabloid ways.In UK every major newspaper is now printed in Tabloid format.Even the venerable Guardian is now planning to follow suit.All the news batteles is circulation battles.How to get the extra reader!

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Bifurcate the HRD Ministry!

We need a bold new culture policy to preserve our ancient heritages and to project our contemporary brand image.

Before I write about anything else this time, I have to mention two events, one exciting, one saddening. The exciting this is about the archeological discoveries in Athens, Greece, where they have unearthing of  a marble bust of Aristotle, the roman coins showing Brutus, the murderer of Julius Caesar. There is going to be a three-storey New Acropolis Museum.

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We seem to be reading our daily newspapers and much of the books or TV news as dished out by American media.
Have you ever thought of who gives us these news or views or thought processes?

Yes, it is the world newspapers, world TV channels controlled by nine transnational corporations America dominates a monopoly of colonialism. Even the established Indian newspapers shamelessly fill their pages from US/UK news media! This is the hard truth! The mergers and acquisitions of the large media companies in 2000 had produced this media monopoly in the modern world we live in!

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Criminal defamation, Contempt of court, Violation of legislature privileges.

Can the hidden cameras/sting operations justified?

Press Freedom is a much talked about subject. Just now, Mr. N. Ram, the Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu has delivered a lecture in Hyderabad  at the Golden Jubilee Celebrations of the High Court of  AP had dealt with this much hyped subject. What is new in his lecture? What is not new?

Yes, there have been changes in the media world. Indian press had grown up with the freedom struggle. The Emergency saw the assault of the State against press freedom in its brutal forms. Now?

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