Sonu Nigam on Society Achievers’ September cover: Surprise? Kirti Azad has been there. If cricket and politics can make you a society achiever, why can’t singing? Society Achievers continues the legacy of late Nari Hira’s Lana (La for Lalu Bajaj and Na for Nari) Publishing Company, which has undergone several changes since its formation in the early 1970s, as Lana Publishing Company, Magna Publishing Company, HiBa. Hi for Hira and Ba for Bajaj, his partner, a swimming champi...

Singers and music labels come together for long-awaited agreement on royalty The Indian Music Industry (IMI), the apex body representing all music labels in India, and the Indian Singers Rights Association (ISRA), the apex body representing all singers in the country, have signed an agreement between member labels of ISRA and IMI. As a result of this, pact, all record labels, singers and musicians will be greatly benefitted, at pan India level, and get royalties at much higher levels than at ...

Family of Thakurganj, Review: Nannu, Munnu and nothing New, New Referencing dozens of mafia/gangster movies made in India and the West, Family of Thakurganj glorifies crime for the major part, gets into a conscientious hiccup and sermonising after the midway mark, and ends-up offering ‘crime kills crime’ as a solution against the rot of corruption that has set in the entire fabric of the Indian police/law/politics nexus. Except for a couple of twists in the plot, there is little t...

Marudhar Express, Review: Chain reaction You might need to look-up the meaning of Marudhar, even if you are a native Hindi speaker. It refers to the Marwar area of Rajasthan, and the Express is a train that runs between Varanasi, in Uttar Pradesh, and Jodhpur (Rajasthan), touching Lucknow and Kanpur, the two biggest cities in UP, with Allahabad (now renamed PrayaagRaaj) being the third. Now, lest you begin to think that this film is a travelogue or that events take place on the said train, le...

Toilet—Ek Prem Katha, Review by Siraj Syed: Loo and behold! There is no point getting revolted by the title. Any fear that the film might have ‘dirty’ scenes can be laid to rest by the realisation that we have a robust Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) that sanitises every film before release. And almost every Indian knows that the current Prime Minister launched a campaign two-and-a-half years ago, to ensure that millions of villages and small towns in rural India ...

Siraj Syed reviews Anaarkali of Arrah: Item girl--“Spite ’em girl, Bite ’em girl” Ten minutes into this loud and raw film, you know you will root for the protagonist, an item girl plying her art in Arrah, a small town in the eastern Indian state of Bihar. An item girl is a woman who wears garish costumes, sings, dances, cavorts, titillates and tantalises on stage, to a public, sing-along audience, that joins her full-of-double-entendre lyrics, lusts after her and drool...

Indian films’ greatest playback singer Mohammed Rafi: Tributes on his 92nd birthday Rafi died in 1980. Among the singers who gave playback to songs picturised on Indian actors, he topped the list, both in terms of quality and quantity. Opinions have been expressed that Kishore Kumar had the edge when it came to spontaneity and Manna Dey was a classical wizard. My own childhood favourite, Mukesh, too, was the darling of a few millions, but nobody, nobody could eye the spot that Rafi had ...