One couldn't help feeling a certain melancholy viewing these now vagrant documents and photographs that would never be rightfully cherished. The pictures spoke to you. They offered slices of extinguished lives. They breathed sadness too, for what could have been and will never be. The sweet promises that Life made and insolently, arrogantly never kept.
True Indian scenes most often lie on less travelled routes, along roads that have fallen off the map, after modern highways have come up. On the fourth leg of their 2,148 km journey, Rediff.com's Archana Masih and photographer Rajesh Karkera discover one such forgotten place in the Thar Desert.
Aam Aadmi Party spokespersons, Ashutosh, Ashish Khetan and Raghav Chadha, are adept at turning issues on their head and putting up a good offence in their defence.
Princess Shivranjani of Jodhpur is breathing new life into dead forts and quietly changing the house of Marwar.
'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?'
'Single life is pretty good. I like the attention. If I feel lonely, I just call my mom and she sleeps in my bed,' Kalki Koechlin tells Rediff.com contributor Paloma Sharma.
Meet Mona Patel, one of CNN's Top 10 Heroes of the Year.
Moushumi Chatterjee, one of the biggest stars of her time, gives us a peek into her life.
'We were firing at Patton tanks that were moving towards India.' 'Fighter aircraft are the biggest menace for tanks because they come at great speed, attack from a height and their rockets are lethal.' 'The Hunter travels at 400, 420 knots. One knot is 1.6 times a km, so it was at a speed of 700, 800 km/hr.' 'You come at great speed and when you see the tanks, you pull up because attacks are always done in a dive.' 'You go up to 3,000 to 4,000 feet and then dive on to the target and let off your rockets...'
Though the worker strike at the Gorakhpur-based publisher of Hindu religious texts has been called off, it hints at an underlying financial crisis, says Manavi Kapur
Rediff.com reproduces the 1997 feature about Laxman, his passion for crows, and of course, his genius.
Akshay Manwani traces Aamir Khan's fascinating journey to stardom.
'As Rai spoke, in an unbelievably dead pan, almost off-the-cuff tone, about helping plan the murder of two youngsters, drugging them with vodka and whiskey spiked with dava (medicine), smothering one, dragging a body in rigor mortis out of a car, burning a corpse, destroying evidence, and so on, it felt like he was discussing nothing more surprising than the intricacies of the weather.'
This was good enough for Fernandes to hire Chandilya to lead his India business.
Kapil Sharma, the anchor of Comedy Nights with Kapil, is the hottest property on Indian television today
'He was believed to finish his own work in an hour and spend the remainder of the time walking from one office to another, sitting down with the harried junior staff and helping them sort out the problems they were working on.'