Hotel coffee shops, I’ve learned from experience, are often not the best places to go to if you want a taste of the local cuisine of a city. In India, especially, most coffee shops tend to serve up pretty much … Continue reading
4 Seasons hadn’t been on our list of places we wanted to eat at in Hyderabad, but we’d come to this little complex of eateries, only to find that the place we’d been looking for—Pista House, which calls itself the … Continue reading
Frankly, ‘Republic of Noodles’ sounds too kitschy a name to me to expect anything other than an Indian Chinese eatery, offering the usual suspects: the vegetable Manchurian, the Hakka noodles, the sweet and sour chicken. Stuff I wouldn’t touch with … Continue reading
Left to book a hotel for ourselves (if we’d only been visiting Hyderabad as tourists), my husband and I would probably have chosen a heritage hotel, or something possibly closer to the tourist attractions of Hyderabad. However, since this was … Continue reading
In one pivotal scene in Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai, Kammo (Padmini), the daughter of a dacoit chief tells her naïve beloved that they, the dacoits, are not to be scorned or derided, because they wield guns to make things equal between the rich and the poor. They take from the rich and give to the poor, because the poor have always been preyed upon by the rich.
“Kammoji, tum log chochilist ho?” asks Raju (Raj Kapoor), wide-eyed. Because chochilists, as he informs Kammo, also work to make things ‘barobar’ between the rich and the poor. And when he is reassured that yes, that is the philosophy of the dacoits, Raju decides there and then that he will no longer think of dacoits as evil people.
The other day, scrolling through previous posts, I realised I hadn’t reviewed any Hollywood films for a while (to be honest, I’ve not even watched many Hollywood films over the past couple of months). I also realised that it’s been ages since I watched any films starring Tyrone Power, one of my favourite Hollywood actors. Time to amend that, I decided. So I got out a Power film I hadn’t watched before. An Irving Berlin production, replete with good songs and plenty of Ty candy.
We’d heard, sometime late in 2013, that Benihana—the US-based Japanese restaurant chain—was going to be opening an outlet at Epicuria. Since my husband and I are both very fond of Japanese food, this was something to look forward to. We saw, every weekend when we visited Epicuria, the progress being made: the interiors being finished, the furniture being brought in, and finally, the restaurant being opened to the public in the winter of 2013-14.
Benihana, at Epicuria Mall.
The Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), in tandem with the Kri Foundation, organised a two-day long event called Dilli ka Apna Utsav on March 22 and 23. This was a combination of different events—performances, walks, and … Continue reading
This wasn’t the post I’d planned for this week on Dusted Off. I’d been thinking, instead, of reviewing a Hollywood film—one which I happened to be watching when I received the news that Nanda had passed away on the morning of March 25. I changed my mind about writing a review; instead, I had to do a tribute to Nanda. Not just because I share my birthday with her, but because I think of her as an actress who deserves to be more highly regarded than she usually is.
I’ve been blogging for more than five years now, and over the years, I’ve discovered a lot of things that make me want to continue. One is the enthusiasm and support of readers. Another is the vast amount of knowledge I’ve gained, simply by blogging and watching so much cinema—a lot of which I’d probably never have seen otherwise.
And, there’s the laughter one gets out of logging into my blog’s dashboard and checking out the day’s stats. WordPress has a fairly comprehensive statistics page, with detailed information on stuff like how many views my blog got, which have been the most popular pages and the most popular posts, who comments the most on my blog—and, the icing on the cake—the web searches that bring visitors to Dusted Off. Most of these are fairly innocuous: o p nayyar songs list, madhubalasongs, humraaz, and so on. Fairly predictable search terms to arrive at Dusted Off.
Occasionally, however, there are absolute gems, stuff that makes me laugh. For instance, on November 10, 2013, according to my stats page, someone arrived at Dusted Off using the search term song tum mere paas aa naa shaky video.
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