Aseem Chhabra looks at the year's best Non-Hindi Indian movies.
'Xi's assumption of absolute power is neither complete, nor irreversible.' 'Nor is it safe, for Xi, for his party, or for his country more generally.' 'And the government knows this,' says Mihir S Sharma.
'People ask me if I miss living a normal life, since I don't have privacy, and I tell them I don't want to have a normal life. I want people standing outside my house, I want to be loved by them. I have been fortunate enough to live like a star for 25 years and I would like to die as a star.' Shah Rukh Khan, unplugged.
'The starting point of the Udta Punjab casting was that we didn't think stars would do a film like this, so we'd take non-stars. As the names kept rolling in and we had Kareena Kapoor and Shahid and Alia Bhatt, I was like yaar yeh ho kya raha hai?'
'For women, it's about, 'See idiot, this is what we go through.' For that, they will get their men.' 'When he comes, he will understand women's problems and say, "You are special" and she will get that 10 minutes ka bhaav. But it's very important.'
Ananth Mahadevan takes on the audience.
'Indian nationhood is indeed at the cusp of alarming redefinition -- hate-filled, and exclusionary.' 'Nations are not built this way, instead these are the ways of liquidating nations.' 'We must pre-empt it.' 'Can we?' asks Mohammad Sajjad.
Natwar Singh's book is un-illuminating, largely self-justificatory, often contradictory, and at times tendentious. He is too preoccupied with depicting himself as a victim of the Congress party's machinations, says Praful Bidwai.