PLATFORM (Magazine)

Rasika Dugal's relationship with cinema began in Jamshedpur, shaped by a childhood of watching films on VCR, tracking liquid at the ready to clear up prints. Theatre visits were rare events, and functioned as excursions with family friends where knowing the owners might land you balcony seats. The shift came at Lady Shri Ram College. A workshop screened clips from Pather Panchali and something changed. ‘I had never seen cinema like that before and it piqued my curiosity.’ she recalls.

For Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon, the creators behind MAYA, entertainment has always been one of the most effective vehicles for transmitting new ideas and frameworks of thought. Through novels, films, games and immersive experiences, MAYA is revolution disguised as entertainment, inviting us to step inside these systems and come out with new ways of seeing.

A curated nine: an Iranian father-daughter elegy told in hand-painted animation, a CAPTCHA test that spirals into an identity crisis, an ICE arrest that derails a green card interview, and a photographer turning her own chronic illness into a raw documentary; these are the shorts that walked away with this year's Oscars and BAFTAs, plus one gloriously unhinged Sundance oddity about homemade Gatorade.

Simple designs that stay contemporary regardless of what’s trending at the moment is the ethos that the founder of Runaway Bicycle, Preeti Verma, follows while designing collections. Here, everyday wear is given a little edge of flair, lots of stripes, checks and the occasional dramatic collar. Even the colours are distinctive in their mutedness and while they are subtle, they still have a character of their own.

There is a certain kind of magic péro has always kept just out of reach, tucked into a stitch, a heart-shaped button, a scrap of Bandhani that shows up season after season like an old friend. Now, after seventeen years of shows that lasted fifteen days and homes borrowed from multi-designer stores, that magic has an address of its own.

Goethe famously called a novella the form of the ‘unheard-of event’; a form that organises itself around a moment when the familiar, upon probe, becomes strange. A novella is its own animal, long enough to live in, short enough to finish in a weekend and it often does more with less compared to its neighbour formats. The best ones are concentrated around holding important pressures of our times. What do we owe the people we love? How much of our past can we trust?

All her life, Devki Pande has heard snippets of her great-grandfather and how he studied law abroad; it was so embedded within the lore of her family. What really caught her attention was when she learnt that this was in 1916, amidst the First World War. Her interest was doubled when she learned that he had been only 21 years of age. The sheer guts it would have required in order to undertake such a journey, for someone who had never even left his town, was incredible to her.

Must Read Interesting reads to add to your shelf this month. The Radiance by Ayad Akhtar Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar’s The Radiance is about a writer whose life is transformed after a hit-and-run on a rural road. As the accident sparks a spiritual awakening and a dangerous entanglement with a campus colleague, buried family secrets emerge. Out this month, the novel explores faith, madness and what remains when everything else falls apart.

L: soft-geometry R: Kalawi & Co. The creation of any object, especially one that holds significance to design or fashion, often comes from a personal space. Memory especially plays a big role in these creative processes where people, experiences and even the fragment of a moment from the past, are transformed into something tangible. For some designers, these recollections become a way of preserving what might otherwise fade.

All her life, Devki Pandey has heard snippets of her great-grandfather and how he studied law abroad; it was so embedded within the lore of her family. What really caught her attention was when she learnt that this was in 1916, amidst the First World War. Her interest was doubled when she learned that he had been only 21 years of age. The sheer guts it would have required in order to undertake such a journey, for someone who had never even left his town, was incredible to her.