Think of Meena Kumari and Sahib Biwi Ghulam’s melancholic Chhoti Bahu comes to mind first. Can we think of Nutan’s films and not think of the golden hearted prisoner of Bimal Roy’s Bandini? Or remember the glamorous Dimple Kapadia without her award-winning performance as the deglamorised rustic Sanichari in Kalpana Lajmi’s Rudaali? Dream girl Hema Malini minus all her fancy costumes and hairdo, plays a simple sari-clad village girl who exudes confidence and conviction in Gulzar’s Khushboo - clearly one of her best performances.

Tendulkar found solace, and even escape, in his works, as he writes, “There was no thought of tomorrow. Everyday began and ended with work.” And he provided that solace to other creative souls around as writers, directors, playwrights, theatre directors… flocked to him and were born from the womb of his work and his honesty. Examples can be given of film directors like Shyam Benegal (Nishant, Manthan), Govind Nihalani (Aakrosh, Ardh Satya), Jabbar Patel (Saamna, Umbertha and Sinhasan), Amol Palekar (Akriet), Nachiket Patwardan, Satyadev Dubey and many more.

Tendulkar was such a man, who like the ideal teacher for Gandhi, did not just preach lessons, but became the lesson himself. And that is where the greatest contribution of his lay. In the deletion of hypocrisy in his life. In the striving for ‘satyagraha’ - the steadfastness in truth, despite repeated failures. Purists may scoff at this comparison between Gandhian ideals and Ten, who was preoccupied with violence. But to me, there was no greater Gandhian than him, for he not only believed in truth, but lived by the truth, fought for truth and wrote the truth. And violence was the truth he discovered in the times and the society he lived in.

All within the space of a traditional nuts-and-bolts studio summer picture, the area in which Jon Favreau’s Marvel adaptation succeeds most broadly is its barely-hidden subtext deliberately de-politicized in favor of more a more universally guided moral compass. We have the summer’s first blockbuster action-hero movie, and it’s a damn good one, raising expectations from The Dark Knight (the soon to be released Batman movie)

Ah, the joy of watching a Rivette film is pure exultation for the senses.

But contrary to what might be construed, most of Rivette’s works have a very raw nature to it - kind of like a strange distant quality, as not in the plot, per se, but more in the mise-en-scene, which makes one initially uncomfortable about Rivette, but, not long, finding delectation for his methods. To qualify the distant aspect with being surrealist (an exception, one might say, being “Céline et Julie vont en bateau”), per se, or Dogma95-ish would be going off the track. Rivette’s films are like reading a novel chaptered into distinct plots intangibly shaping out like an undulating curve - you are “in” the plot but the discreteness is felt.

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