Art & Culture
Bill Henson
Bill Henson’s intensely emotive portraiture challenges the concept-driven focus dominating contemporary photography, and embodies the formal elements of both painting and cinematography. Henson’s haunting images of androgynous adolescence adrift in nocturnal wilderness inhabit a state of primal hypnotic tension.
View
Queer
Tribute: Riyad Wadia
Riyad Wadia, independent filmmaker, writer, gay activist who lived in New York and Bombay, passed away on November 30, 2003. The openly gay filmmaker broke new cinematic ground in 1996 with BomGay, a series of vignettes exploring gay identity in contemporary India. EGO salutes the amazing life and legacy of Riyad Wadia.
View
Science & Technology
Google and the Erdos Number
What do the greatest mathematician of the 20th century Paul Erdos and the Google search engine have in common? It turns out that the way Google ranks its searches is based on an age-old concept - that it is better to be talked about by a few smart people, than to be talked about by many mediocre people.
View
Bollywood
Sex Sells in Bollywood
Sex sells everything, everywhere. Whereas once it was either the siren's role to show some skin or cabaret artistes like Helen doing special numbers in sexy outfits, in the new Bollywood cinema almost every heroine has to do some amount of disrobing to win herself a decent fan base, however indecent they may be.
View
Reviews & Previews
The Ascent of Mount Shasta
California has its share of “epic” summits; arguably Mount Shasta, a volcano that towers alone high above its surroundings, is one of them. Serban Nacu decided to brave the elements of nature to climb 14,000 feet to the top of the mountain, and to experience the pain and pleasure of conquering the beauty in all of her moods.
View
Art & Culture
Shirin Neshat
Internationally-acclaimed photographer, filmmaker, and video artist Shirin Neshat has been interpreting boundaries in Islam—boundaries between men and women, between sacred and profane, between reality and magic realism — raising new questions about Islam's place in the modern world.
View
Bollywood
Coming To America
Like many other HOT foreign names in Hollywood in the past, Aishwarya Rai seems to be everywhere. From appearances at Cannes “declaring the festival open”, to having the latest “Asian” Barbie dolls modeled after her, to being put on the cover of a Russian magazine, Ashwariya Rai has finally arrived in America.
View
Bollywood
Bad Girls, Anyone?
There are two types of women in classic Bollywood films: the Good Girl and the Bad Girl. The Good Girl is virtuous, chaste, and possesses traditional Indian values. In the end, Good Girl is happily married off to Handsome Hero. On the other hand, the Bad Girl is outspoken, often smokes and drinks and dances like her hips are on fire.
View
Economy & Politics
Breakthrough
Breakthrough is one of the hippest desi non-profits around. Rallying everyone from rock band Junoon to MTV to Alice Walker around its captivating slogan, "Building Human Rights Culture,"' Breakthrough has addressed issues as serious as immigrant rights in the US and the spread of HIV/AIDS in India.
View
Science & Technology
Should We Cure Aging?
"The knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton has never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor." - Aldous Huxley. J.P. de Magalhaes' essay on the myths surrounding a cure for aging.
View
Art & Culture
Rituparno Ghosh
EGO sits with India's most critically acclaimed contemporary director. An interview with the man who has ridden a meteoric juggernaut of critical and commercial success that has led to slowly filling that ever-dilating void punctured in Indian cinema since the death of the legendary Satyajit Ray.
View
Bollywood
The Warrior
Asif Kapadia's first feature film is the heroic tale of a man turning from a life of violence to face solitude in the wilderness. At first, the story may sound similar to a Hollywood Western or a Japanese samurai epic. Although the setting of Kapadia's film is the harsh frontiers of Northwestern India, the soul of the story is the same.
View