Word: kerala
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Adoor, born in 1941 to a feudal family in a Kerala village that's also called Adoor, was writing and acting in plays from the age of eight. Movies, his family believed, were vacuous spectacles for nostalgic city dwellers. Adoor was planning to study drama, a more respectable art form, when he made an unpleasant discovery: to attend the school in Delhi, he had to speak fluent Hindi. He quickly lowered his standards and instead in 1962 entered India's new Film and Television Institute in Pune, believing that writing for the screen couldn't be too different than writing...
...first meet him at his home outside Trivandrum, he's wearing a traditional white dhoti, blue plaid shirt and square glasses that make his black eyes look like marbles in a bowl. He has cocoa-colored skin and wavy white hair that seems to uncoil as the humid Kerala day wears on. The architecture that surrounds him is classically Keralite: the roof is low-slung and pyramidal, and the tiles are red terra-cotta. Egyptian hieroglyphics hang near a miniature print of the Mona Lisa; a pair of Japanese paintings face off against a profile of Lenin. They're mementos...
...audience. He does, however, listen to the wind. While shooting his latest film, Shadow Kill, the story of an anguished hangman in 1940s India, Adoor was struck by the thumping sound of nighttime gusts playing on the leaves of a palmyra tree near his set in a rural Kerala village. "It sounded exactly like a heartbeat," he says. It was the rhythm he hadn't been aware he was seeking - a steady drumming, and a reminder of nature's indifference to his characters' troubled passions. "I made the wind a character in my film," Adoor explains. That's perfect casting...
...probably never heard of Adoor Gopalakrishnan, and for a long time that was fine with him. He's an art-film director in Bollywood-besotted India, and he makes movies not in Hindi but in Malayalam, the language of his native Kerala - two strikes against widespread recognition. A temperamental auteur whose cinematic talents - and ego - are in inverse proportion to his low-key fame, Adoor's intense, demanding films have been worshiped by Indian and foreign critics and celebrated in self-consciously sophisticated Kerala, yet they've barely been released in much of India. But with the visually generous Shadow...
...There is no one Indian cuisine, of course. Bengalis eat completely differently from their compatriots in Kerala, Kashmir or Gujarat. The vast majority of Hindus consider themselves vegetarians; but it's the meat-heavy menus of the mainly Muslim Punjabis that are widely considered the apex of Indian cookery. Thus, most Indian restaurants offer tandoori chicken, lamb tikka and butter chicken?a popular curry?along with nan, lentil dishes and cottage cheese preparations for vegetarians. It's not a sophisticated menu, but it's tasty and satisfying?and that's the template the new breed of restaurateurs is trying...