Bharati Dubey

How Mumbai’s studios and streets celebrated cinema Mumbai: Mumbai’s Ganesh Utsav has always been more than a religious celebration. For generations, it has also intersected with the city’s other great passion-cinema. Long before photographs of stars welcoming Ganpati Bappa at home became an annual fixture on television and social media, the festival had a presence inside Mumbai’s film studios. Beyond the studio gates, Ganesh mandals were also bringing movies directly to neighbourhood...

Mumbai: The failure of ‘Batwara 1947’ has emerged as one of those box-office mysteries that is difficult to explain purely through the usual parameters of filmmaking. The film brought back the celebrated combination of Sunny Deol and director Rajkumar Santoshi after nearly three decades, carried a powerful Partition backdrop and featured acclaimed performers. Yet, despite the pedigree, the film struggled to attract audiences to theatres. For trade analyst Taran Adarsh, the failure was...

Mumbai: Sharon Verma’s journey in comedy is a story of an unlikely breakout. She was not introduced to audiences as an established star, but as a relatively new comedian who walked onto the stage of India’s Got Latent and turned a self-deprecating joke about being a “weak independent woman” into a moment audiences remembered. Originally from Bihar and now based in Mumbai, Verma has built her identity around observational, self-aware humour. Her comedy frequently draws from everyday...