Rajeev Puri

When the comedian and television host Kapil Sharma recently welcomed the veteran screenwriter Salim Khan onto his show, he made a striking claim. India, he joked, has a national bird and a national animal; it ought also to have a national film. That film, he suggested, would surely be Sholay. Few would quarrel with the sentiment. Released in 1975 and directed by Ramesh Sippy,  Sholay  has long been treated as the Everest of Hindi popular cinema -quoted endlessly, revisited by generations and...

Guru Tegh Bahadur’s martyrdom 350 years on remains a defining moment in the subcontinent’s battle between power and principle. Painting depicting the execution of Guru Tegh Bahadur. On November 24, India marks 350 years since the martyrdom of Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Sikh Guru, who was executed in Delhi in 1675 on the orders of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. His death, seared into memory as an act of serene defiance, reshaped the religious and political landscape of northern India. To his...

Far more than an iconic boxing match, ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ was a spectacle of race, politics and redemption that turned Muhammad Ali into a global myth It was October 30th, 1974, and the air in Zaire’s Kinshasa was thick not just with equatorial heat, but with expectation. Under the floodlights of the Stade du 20 Mai, 60,000 spectators roared as two men entered the ring. One was the most feared puncher alive; the other, a poet-warrior who had lost his title, his license, and nearly his...