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Dorothy Movie Review: An extraordinary Ilaiyaraja elevates this deeply empathetic Karthik Subbaraj film
Early in the movie, just before the now-viral Kalyana Virundhu hits, there is a nadaswaram that goes off to celebrate the newlyweds. But look at the music that Raja uses there — it is the theme from Star Wars, a beautiful Easter egg for “my dear John Williams,” as Raja likes to call him. It is a blink-and-you-miss-it feature that lasts no more than 10 seconds, but it is the kind of naughtiness expected from the man who deserves the title of BGM king. It is the first of five Rajas you meet in the film. This phase is called Naughty/Mischeivous Raja as the maestro plays with that emotion for…
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Three Films, One Partition: How Main Vaapas Aaunga, Dhurandhar, and Ikkis converge
The first time I read about the Partition of India, it was in school textbooks. One among a series of events that decided the map of independent India as we know it today. But little did history tell me about what that particular piece of geography did to people’s lives beyond 1947. That burden, across multiple pieces of pages and physical reels and gigabytes, was left to art. And politics. But we will come to the latter later. Over the last six months, we have seen three disparate movies that are entirely different in both writing and execution. Yet the binding wound across all three is identical: Partition, and the…
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Are SIPs Really FII-Proof? The Structural Risks Beneath India’s Retail Boom
There is a comforting story floating through Indian financial circles right now: that the Indian stock market has become “FII-proof,” sustained indefinitely by the unstoppable rise of retail SIP investors. But beneath the optimism lies a more fragile reality. As corporate tax policy, AI-driven labour shifts, rising household debt, and middle-class financial stress begin colliding, the assumptions supporting India’s retail-investor boom may be weaker than they appear. This is an attempt to examine the structural pressures building underneath the surface.
