Long before the moral police did its number on ‘Fire’, Deepa Mehta saw it coming.

Even as celebrity careers crumbled and tabloid stories spilled onto the desks of foreign ministries, the murky underbelly of British society stood uncomfortably exposed.

In 1970 in Trinidad, everyone was humming the lyrics of a hugely popular single – ‘Nana drinkin white rum and Nani drinkin wine,’ a chartbuster that gave birth to a new form of music known as ‘Chutney’.

Forsyth often incorporates the closed door secrets of intelligence agencies such as MI6, CIA and Mossad into his novels, causing headaches and embarrassment to governments around the world. The Afghan remains faithful to this tradition.

Author Suketu Mehta once said of his former friend, film director Vidhu Vinod Chopra, that the latter has an ego so big he needs a truck to carry it. If self-indulgence is indicative of an inflated ego, Chopra may well have proved Mehta right with his film Eklavya.

Single motherhood is a growing phenomenon in middle and upper class India. In Hometruths: Stories of Single Mothers, Deepti Priya Mehrotra examines the ground realities of this phenomenon.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid is a book of clever construct — what starts as a memoir in monologue catapults into a thriller on the last page.

His 82 years rested lightly on his frame, for he was agile and fleet-footed and his thoughts flew swifter than the words needed to wing them. It was hard to get a man who constantly looks into the future to pause and talk of his past.

Hollywood was in a dark mood that year because of the writers’ strike. But TMC brought some sunshine to our TV sets – it ran a festival of past Academy Award winning and nominated films.

Geet Gaata Chal is a small group of musically inclined South Indian senior citizens who are keeping Bollywood’s old Hindi songs alive in the Tamil heartland of Chennai.

Walk past the open windows of this senior citizen’s home in Bengaluru and you may hear the strains of “We Are the World” or “These Are a Few of My Favourite Things” wafting out from the interiors.