THE STORYTELLER

  By Avik Basak     When I was a kid, I used to wonder why the elders in my family were so obsessed with Indian football when the quality was not nearly as good as European teams. I also used to hear about India’s glorious triumph at the Asian Games which seemed like a far cry to repeat considering the situation of the team at the moment. Well, if you can relate to this, then Amit Ravindernath Sharma’s Maidaan is the perfect film to take you on a ride back in time to what was known as the golden era of Indian football.   The problem we always see in Indian sports dramas, especially biopics, such as Dangal or Chak De! India is that those are filled with an overdose of patriotism. Don’t get me wrong, I am not discounting these popular films as bad or even mediocre as I myself enjoy them a lot. However, we rarely see more focus on the journey, the technical aspects of the sport or the strategy that helps the team or the person reach the final goal rather than wha...

  By Avik Basak     After watching the final trailer of Swatantra Veer Savarkar that came out a few weeks before the film’s release, I told a friend of mine that I got this feeling that this film could be for Randeep Hooda what Citizen Kane (1941) was for Orson Welles. I simply made the comment because Welles too, despite being an acclaimed actor (primarily on stage) at that point in his career, was untested as a writer-director to helm a film of that magnitude just like Hooda was in this case. Citizen Kane later went on to become one of the classics of all time and turned out to be Welles’ magnum opus. Can Swatantra Veer Savarkar truly be considered as Hooda’s magnum opus in the same sense? We will come to that later.     At the core of the film, is the bonding between the Savarkar family, especially between the three brothers. It is a connection they have developed right from their childhood, due to what they have gone through just to survive. Hooda in...