acting

Ideas
by Anvita Sudarshan

A Star is Made

The Bollywood industrial starplex

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2006. Just a bit more than ten years ago. Two mega blockbusters were released in India, and three stars were born into the industry called Bollywood. One was a 21-year-old called Deepika Padukone. The other two were star kids, destined to be in the industry; Sonam Kapoor and Ranbir Kapoor. For those of you who are not familiar with Bollywood, Sonam Kapoor and Ranbir Kapoor are of Bollywood pedigree. Born to stars, they chose to make a life for themselves in the same space as their parents and — in Ranbir Kapoor’s case — grandparents and great-grandparents too. They did it quite successfully, too, might I add.

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Anvita Sudarshan
Anvita Sudarshan is a writer and filmmaker living in Mumbai. She started her career in writing by co-founding and editing a children’s magazine named Geo-Junior and then extensively for another popular children’s magazine in India named Tinkle. She spent her early twenties modeling, winning pageants (including Miss India Worldwide) ,the experiences of which culminated into a recent book, Beauty Queen, which being published by Amaryllis, is likely to hit the stands by Autumn 2017. As a filmmaker, she has written a number of feature scripts and has made films for both analogue and digital fora. She has also initiated a series of filmmaking workshops in India for young people as a way of visually expressing thoughts that can be woven into cinematic stories. She is now working on screenplays and a novel that portray the fortitude of women under challenging life circumstances. She also regularly writes for a YouTube Channel called Slang.
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Idle Chatter
by Morgan Meis

Charlton Heston’s Last Act

Those damn, dirty apes finally took their stinking paws off him.

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As the story goes, Cecil B. DeMille chose Charlton Heston to play Moses in his epic The Ten Commandments because Heston looked a hell of a lot like the Moses of Michelangelo’s famous statue. Apocryphal or not, I believe it. It had to have been an awesome experience being approached by a young Charlton Heston. It had to have been like running into a statue — rock hewn, solid, but supple all the same. He does look like that statue.

As a child I was transfixed by the presence of him, by the way he towers over things in that movie. I remember watching it with my sister more than once. She was barely more than a toddler, even less able than I was to expend much attention on a feature film. But Mr. Heston nailed her to a spot on the floor. He had something, some power to… More…