Bookshelf
Darius Cooper does a deep reading of Booker prize winner Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand in translation by Daisy Rockwell and ends up with a lot of sand. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Darius Cooper unpacks some of those poems of Arun Kolatkar in which he frequently combines the blues and Rock n Roll from American folk and pop culture with the medieval Indian bhakti tradition of Bhajan culture…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Darius Cooper, poet and author of works on Satyajit Ray and Guru Dutt remembers the birth of his passion for cinema from what he calls the golden age of world cinema screening in seventies Bombay. …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Darius Cooper drives with son from Los Angeles to John Steinbeck country with a stop-over at Henry Miller’s Big Sur log cabin and discovers a little more about himself...[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Darius Cooper responds to Geetanjali Shree’s “Growing up in Two Tongues” with delightful vignettes of multilingual possibilities and offers a clue as to why “English…determinedly adopted me.”..[Read More]…
Bookshelf
Arup Chatterjee’s homage to the Indian Railways recalls those epiphanies that opened up for Darius Cooper . all over again, his own private operatic love affair with the “black beauties.” …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In this concluding part of his journey through Hindi cinema’s Nehruvian tryst, Darius Cooper finds an era of vanishing illusions, nostalgia and incipient despair
…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In this first part of his journey across Hindi cinema in post-Independent India till 1958, Darius Cooper sees Hindi films made with Nehru’s spirit of an “adaptable Occidentalism.” …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In this critical review of Satyajit Ray’s first children film made fifty years ago, Darius Cooper visits his oeuvre to offer insights into the legend’s take on music, masculinity and inter-personal relations in his films…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In RitwikGhatak’s films, punishments and deaths move us, elicit our mourning and tears because victimization is presented in its most radical forms, says Darius Cooper in the second part of his meditation.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In Ritwik Ghatak’s films, punishments and deaths move us, elicit our mourning and tears because victimization is presented in its most radical forms, says Darius Cooper.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Loius Malle’s film first shown on TV in 1969 was frowned upon by Indian officialdom. Fifty years on, Darius Cooper finds its dialectic and dialogic magic between camera and subject still resonates. …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In the two films, Darius Cooper locates the markers of spirituality to which the technology of cinema surrenders.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
The digital world where information instead of knowledge is found at the click of a button may have finally nailed the coffin on critical thinking says Darius Cooper who despairs that today’s students may have run back to Plato’s Cave, content to watch flickering shadows.…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
A meditation on Kedarnath Singh’s poetic visions by Darius Cooper who explores the blank page’s ancientness in which there is love and emptiness in which one can glimpse freedom.…[Read More]…
Why The Beacon? The Beacon is a web-based only feature magazine of writing and reading (long-form essays, fiction and poetry) that believes in confluences more than in consensus. The Beacon …[Read in full]…
Literary Trails
For Ritwik Ghatak, contemporary historical reality could only be portrayed through characters slowly becoming abstract archetypal figures. The mythic method allowed him to cope with and portray this “deceived age.” …[Read More]…