GENRE: Features

Satyajit Ray, Francois Truffaut, Girish Kasaravalli, Film Noir, Iranian documentaries and more - Bengaluru is the new haven for those wanting to explore cinema beyond the multiplexes. Whether one is looking for international film festivals or intimate rooftop screenings, the city's many film societies have it all. Besides bringing us the best in the world of cinema, they offer film buffs both new and seasoned, the opportunity to interact with one another. Pic: Suchitra Film Society. The city's oldest existing film society is of course the Suchitra Film Society (SFS). Suchitra started in 1971 as a forum for screening films…

The Karnataka Quiz Association (KQA), breeding ground for some of the best quizzers in the country turns 25 this year. Around 200 quizzers from across the country will meet in Bangalore on 28-29 June (Saturday and Sunday) to celebrate the occasion with a special two-day version of its anniversary quiz ASKQANCE. Round one In 1983, the late Wing Commander GR Mulky along with seven other quizzing enthusiasts- Deepak Murdeshwar, Rajeev Gowda, Thomas Uthup, KN Mahabala, Tribhuvan Kumar, P Raju and Jagadish Raja, founded the KQA. Mulky (or Wing Co as he's fondly called) explains on the KQA website that the…

What can be more soothing for a person, in the latter part of life, than to sit back and reminisce on bygone days? Some people are indeed lucky to be blessed with very special memories, and Ramadevi is one such person who has had the fortune of meeting literary stalwarts in her lifetime. Today, at 78, golden memories and thousands of books are her best companions. Her life is full of interesting happenings but she modestly dismisses them, saying that she has achieved nothing that deserves to be written about. Writer Ramadevi at her residence (pic:author) On entering her simple…

In the basement of Chitrakala Parishath, Bangalore is a long narrow room. Unlike regular Saturday mornings, on 17th May 2008 the room is bustling with activity. In one end of the room, members of INTACH Chitrakala Parishath Art Conservation Centre (ICKPAC) are busy packing their materials in cartons. Madhu Rani, who heads the initiative, tells me that they are getting ready for their trip to the Thiruvarur temple scheduled for the forthcoming week. An oil painting on canvas “Goddess Saraswathi” by artist S.K.Ayya, was received at our centre for restoration. The painting was in an extremely bad condition and it…

14 June is World Blood Donors' day. Many of us may have attended blood donation camps. But often, patients in need of blood are unable to get the service because their families cannot reach out to blood banks in time, or due to the unavailability of a particular blood group in the blood bank, and so on. How can we be sure that the donated blood reaches the person in need of it? A group of students from M S Ramaiah College have tried to do just that. To ensure that blood is made available - at the right time,…

Many people have dreams that they would like to convert into reality, but more often, as reality meets imagination, it's reality that triumphs. And when someone has gone to all the trouble to study Computer Science at a prestigious university in Boulder, Colorado, USA, and followed that up with a degree from IIM Ahmedabad, one may be forgiven for thinking that here's a young man who will follow the usual corporate path and make a big success out of it. But if Sreeram Vaidyanathan is the young man one is thinking of, one would be quite wrong. "I have always…

Bangalore has a large number of NGOs doing enormous work in various fields like leprosy eradication, caring for schizophrenics or dyslexics, protesting against felling of trees and so on. But there's also a group of volunteers who prefer to remain just that, and quietly go about their work without evangelism. They belong to Clean and Green, an organisation instituted for the specific purpose of keeping Bangalore that way. One of the volunteers briefing the others about using the rakes and sacks. Pic: Author. Clean and Green was born in February 2006, when a group of six came together and decided…

Going by the good responses photography workshops elicit, most people, having invested in a good camera, seem to feel the need for learning the basics right to become better photographers. So when Kalyan Varma, a naturalist and wildlife photographer (www.kalyanvarma.net) advertised a two-day digital photography workshop on his blog kalyan.livejournal.com I decided to attend. This was Kalyan's first-ever photography workshop, and he held it on 10-11 May at hotel Nandana Grand in Koramangala. The content was broadly divided into four sections distributed over the two days. On day one, Kalyan had scheduled the basics of photography and composition, purchase and…

Karaga is one of the oldest festivals in Karnataka and is also celebrated in Tamilnadu. In Bangalore, the Dharmarayaswamy Temple in Thigalarpet (central Bangalore, between the City Market area and Richmond Town) has been the focal point of this festival. Karaga ran its course in the third week of April this year. These pictures were taken on the night of 20 April, a full moon. A huge crowd in front of the Dharmarayaswamy temple, this is the only entrance path used by the Veerakumaras and other followers. There were people as far as the eyes could see. People were on…

One of the modes of transport which has been prevalent in many Indian cities has been cycling; and recently, it's been much touted as a non-polluting, eco-friendly, fitness-building activity, which is an exercise as well as a means of getting from A to B. Cycling within this city has many has many participants, from the toddlers on their first bikes, to hobby cyclists, to those who cycle because of their commitment to non-pollution, to those who cycle because that is the means of transport most affordable to them. Here are a few vignettes from each sector: Many children often begin…