Last week’s news that quiche had been chosen as the signature dish for the King’s upcoming coronation was been met with mixed opinions: are broad beans a good fit for the pastry-based dish? And can anyone get hold of eggs these days?
Along with the broad beans, the recipe for “coronation quiche” includes spinach, cheese and tarragon – but this is far from the only way to fill a shortcrust pastry case. With this in mind, we want to hear all about your favourite quiches: what’s in them, why are they so great, and what memories does eating them conjure up for you.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
New Delhi: “You are blessed with so much talent. You can see the ball a split second earlier than me…” was how legendary cricketer Sachin Tendulkar described the batting prowess of his ‘favourite’ former teammate VVS Laxman during the 1999-2000 Australia tour, reveals a new book “Sachin@50: Celebrating a Maestro”.
The story, narrated by former Indian cricketer MSK Prasad in the book, was from a conversation between Prasad, Laxman and Sachin on their favourite players in the then Indian Team touring Australia.
While Prasad, who was also part of the team, said he liked Rahul Dravid, Saurav Ganguly and VVS Laxman; Tendulkar, who was captain of the then Indian team, declared Laxman as his favourite player.
“If you don’t smile and show your teeth, I’ll say you are my favourite player,” said Tendulkar to the always-smiling Laxman who thought the Master Blaster was simply making fun of him.
But Tendulkar wasn’t. He even elaborated on the reasons for picking the stylish middle-order batsman as his favourite player among the likes of Dravid, Ganguly and several others.
“You are blessed with so much talent. You can see the ball a split second earlier than me. God has given you exceptional talent which you are not able to understand,” said Tendulkar as recounted by Prasad in the book, which has who’s and who of the sporting world sharing their experiences with the legend himself.
Tendulkar, dubbed as the ‘God of Cricket’, as per the conversation, said unlike Laxman, god gave him the “minimum talent” which he was “maximising”.
“I have four gears in my batting — defence, push, drive and loft. I understand the conditions and use my logic and perform accordingly. You have so much talent that you can straightway bat on fourth gear. You see the ball so early that you don’t worry about the conditions.
“That way, sometimes you click, and sometimes you fail. The day you realise the value of the first three gears, you will become a legend of the game,” he explained.
A tribute to the global sporting phenomenon, “Sachin@50: Celebrating a Maestro” features essays and pieces by well-known figures, including Tendulkar’s family — wife Anjali Tendulkar and elder brother Ajit Tendulkar — and cricket legends Sunil Gavaskar, Sourav Ganguly, Harbhajan Singh and Rohit Sharma.
The book, published by Simon & Schuster India, will be officially launched on the occasion of Tendulkar’s 50th birthday on Monday.
Mumbai: Known for his soulful voice and introspective lyrics, Lucky Ali is all set to perform at a concert in Hyderabad today, and fans are eagerly awaiting his performance. The singer will be performing live at Hitex Exhibition Center and the event is expected to attract hundreds of fans from all over the city.
In a recent video that has surfaced online, Lucky Ali can be seen speaking about his favorite places in the world. In conversation with Curly Tales’ host Kamiya Jani, Lucky Ali revealed that his top picks are the holy cities of Mecca and Madina in Saudi Arabia despite having traveled to numerous countries and performed at countless venues across the globe. Watch the video below.
Lucky Ali aka Maqsood Mehmood Ali visited Madina in October last year with his daughter Tasmiyah and gave his fans glimpses of their trip. Taking to Instagram, Lucky posted a picture and also a video as they travelled to the city in a bullet train.
Lucky Ali is one yesteryear singer who had carved a niche for himself in the Indie pop genre during the 90s – early 2000’s and is still loved by millions. Although he has been away from Bollywood for quite some time now, he still manages to sooth one’s soul with impromptu gigs, albums and concerts.
As Lucky takes the stage in Hyderabad tonight, fans can expect to be treated to his heart-touching voice in songs like O Sanam, Tere Mere Saath, Jaane Kya Dhoondta Hai, and Mausam, among many others.
The head of the Rockefeller Foundation, Rajiv Shah, has emerged as the favourite to succeed David Malpass as head of the World Bank amid calls for the White House to lose its stranglehold on choosing who should run the global development body.
Shah, a doctor, health expert and former head of the US Agency for International Development, is one of the names hotly tipped to be the Joe Biden’s administration choice as a replacement for Malpass following his announcement that he would be leaving his post by June.
But the likelihood that Washington will use a “gentleman’s agreement” under which the US picks the World Bank president while Europe chooses the managing director of its sister organisation – the International Monetary Fund – brought immediate calls for the process to be opened up.
“With the dismal Malpass gone, the US are already manoeuvring to appoint the new head of the Bank”, said Oxfam’s head of inequality policy, Max Lawson. “This neo-colonial 80-year-old stitch up has to end if the World Bank is to retain any credibility with the rest of the world.
“Joe Biden should back a fully transparent open recruitment process to show the world that his administration is different.”
The UK government accepts that the next World Bank president will have a US passport, which means the list of possible choices could include the current head of the World Trade Organization, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who was born in Nigeria but has American citizenship and previously worked at the bank for 25 years.
Kevin Watkins, the former head of the charity Save the Children, said: “It will be a US treasury appointment, which is outrageous. There should be a global search for the best candidate.”
Justine Greening, the former UK international development secretary, said there was a strong case for a tradition that stretches back to the founding of the World Bank and the IMF in 1944 to be broken.
“Because the World Bank is a development organisation it makes sense to have it run by someone for one of those countries”, Greening said. “We should be looking forward to how we want to do development in the 21st century not looking in the rear view mirror to how we did development in the 20th century.”
Liam Byrne, chair of the parliamentary network on the World Bank and IMF, said it was a moment when “the World Bank needs the best leadership it can get from anywhere in the world”, but it was also vital for the new president to be closely aligned with Yellen and Biden. “Congressional support for the bank is supremely important and the choice needs to be someone able to negotiate with Congress.
Malpass was Donald Trump’s choice to succeed Jim Yong Kim – a Barack Obama appointee – after his surprise decision to leave the World Bank in 2019. Janet Yellen, Biden’s treasury secretary, has made no secret of her unhappiness with Malpass and sources said he had decided to go before being formally denied a second five-year term.
In addition to Shah, a number of other American candidates are being floated for the World Bank job. These include Samantha Power, the current head of Usaid and previously US ambassador to the UN; Gayle Smith, who coordinated the US’s global response to Covid-19 and now runs the One Campaign, the development lobby group set up by Bono and Bob Geldof; and Wally Adeyemo, Yellen’s deputy at the US treasury, and who was responsible for coordinating the international effort to impose sanctions on the Kremlin following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Should the US agree to break with tradition, possible choices include Raghuram Rajan, the former governor of India’s central bank and once chief economist at the IMF; and José Antonio Ocampo, the finance minister of Colombia.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
I can’t say these are the greatest short films of all time: there are thousands and thousands of short films and you’d have to watch all of them. Most of them I saw when I was making short films, going to film festivals and watching a lot of them. These are the films that have stayed with me. They are films that I thought I’d like to share with the world, that more people should see them. In no particular order, here they are.
The Cat With Hands (2001)
Grimm-style fairytale from director Rob Morgan about a gruesome mutant cat-human hybrid being.
This feels like a story that has existed for hundreds of years and yet the director was actually inspired by a dream that his sister had. I just love the fact that it’s a recently invented fairytale. It’s three and a half minutes long and is so perfectly told: that’s something you are always striving for in short films, to find a complete story, and so many shorts don’t manage that. It’s such an incredibly nightmarish film; weird and riveting in its fusion of animation and live action to craft a strange fairytale world – and the buildup and mad editing of the finale is superb. It’s more than 20 years old now, but the production value is incredible, it feels like you are stepping into a huge-budget fantasy film.
She Wanted to Be Burnt (2007)
A Banquet director Ruth Paxton’s first short film, about a woman undergoing a mental health crisis whose origin is not clear.
This is a tumbling ride through a young woman’s shame. I remember feeling Ruth Paxton had captured a horrible feeling and put it up on screen and I was so impressed by that. I love it when I see a film-maker who isn’t censoring themselves or overthinking things. It’s not a straight narrative, there’s an experimental aspect to it; it’s implied, so you can bring your own baggage to the film. It’s not clear exactly what the root of this young woman’s shame is, but she appears to be trying to get away from herself, to rid herself of something. I found it really powerful.
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
Surreal fable by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, about a young woman haunted by a mysterious mirror-faced figure.
Cinema is the art form that most closely resembles our dreams, or nightmares, and I think Meshes of the Afternoon sits closest to this. The fact that it is silent makes it particularly dreamlike. Our minds attempt to create meaning and story from the somewhat dislocated events happening on screen – I find that fascinating from the perspective of how our brains seek out narrative. Ultimately it’s the repetition, those loops of images, that really stayed with me: we see a woman chasing a cloaked figure up a hill, and the edit makes it feel as though she is going back to the beginning over and over again. I’m unsure if I’ve created that idea in my head, or if that’s actually what happens – it feels like a dream we are trying to piece together. I very much respond to surrealism, and this is a film I return to time and time again to tap into that style of cinema and technique.
Camrex (2015)
Documentary by director Mark Chapman about Camrex House, a since-closed hostel for homeless men in Sunderland.
The hybrid nature of this film meant that when I first watched it, I wasn’t entirely sure if I was watching a documentary or a fiction. The shooting style resembles fiction; scenes setup with these men in different scenarios, doing press ups, throwing furniture out of windows. But it’s clear that these are not actors – they’re real people on screen. I find that technique so fascinating; this blurred line between reality and fiction. And it’s done here in such a cinematic way. It’s also not a world we often get to see on screen: we all know there are people living in homeless hostels like this but I don’t think I’ve ever seen into one of them. As a study of masculinity I also found it really fascinating and actually quite heartbreaking.
Manoman (2015)
Animation by Simon Cartwright about a man in primal scream therapy who releases his inner id.
It’s quite mad, this one. Like Camrex, this is a film about masculinity, which I must clearly be intrigued by! This is a disturbing, very strange look at the pressures, expectations and neuroses of being a man – all expressed in a hilarious and quite bonkers way. It’s one of those films that you love to show to people just to see how they react, particularly to the wonderfully insane climax. It’s definitely in the same space as She Wanted to Be Burnt: in that it’s a film-maker being creative and unbridled in their expression. I really respect that and think that’s one of the advantages of short films – you don’t have the same pressures as a feature. I just love seeing film-makers explode imaginatively on to the screen like this.
Dead. Tissue. Love (2017)
Documentary by Natasha Austin-Green interviewing a woman about her interest in necrophilia.
I first saw this one on The Final Girls’ We Are the Weirdos short film tour, and I found it so fascinating and atmospheric. Necrophilia feels like it doesn’t really exist in the real world – it’s more something you read about or watch in horror films – but this is a meditation on necrophilia delivered in a non-judgmental way, which becomes an opportunity to understand something beyond our comfort zone. We are pulled into it slowly: the woman’s voiceover (by an actor) explains her own discomfort with these strange desires – it all just fascinated me, to be honest. We never see the person speaking – the voiceover is accompanied by very visceral imagery making it feel like we are digging under and into flesh. I guess some people might find it a bit gross. But film has the power to allow us to see from other people’s perspectives; most of us would be horrified by the idea of necrophilia – disgusted, really – but this film seeks to humanise it and does so very successfully. It’s testament to the way cinema allows us to empathise.
Hes the Best (2015)
Short drama from director Tamyka Smith about a woman getting ready to go out on a date.
I saw this years ago at a film festival and I’ve never forgotten it. There’s no dialogue. We gather certain information via text messages as we watch a woman prepare for a date. We never fully see her face: in extreme close up, she puts on makeup, scrubs every millimetre of her body, removes hairs, perfects herself. Then she arrives at a house, where this guy in jogging bottoms, who’s clearly made no effort whatsoever, opens the door. It then cuts to her leaving the next morning – we don’t know what happened in there but we do know that the effort she went to, the expectations she had for this date, have clearly not been met. She seems so used. It’s a short film that takes a very small, seemingly simple idea and expresses it so clearly; the extremes and efforts that women go to to present themselves, and then this disappointment, shame, perhaps even embarrassment, feeling used, not being respected back – it encapsulates that really powerfully.
Ekki Múkk (2012)
Directed by Nick Abrahams as part of a series to accompany music by Sigur Rós, featuring Aidan Gillen and a snail.
I remember feeling so moved when I first saw this. The Sigur Rós music is very emotive. I had tears streaming down my face by the end – I don’t think many short films can tap into that level of emotion in just 10 minutes. There’s something so simple, surreal and fantastical about the story itself: a man lost in the forest and a snail helps him find his way – or not – out of the darkness. I am a sucker for anything with animals; the idea of empathy between humans and animals. It’s perhaps quite different from the other films here, more sentimental – but it sits in a fantastical space that really appeals to me. I can see I have a fascination with the darker aspects of life, death and decay, and this film has an incredible time-lapse sequence of a fox’s body decomposing, which makes you think about what we are, what nature is and how we all belong to the same thing.
Solitudo (2014)
Short film from Prevenge director Alice Lowe, about an isolated nun haunted by nameless fears.
This is a film with no dialogue, with Alice Lowe playing a nun in the middle ages, living on her own in the middle of nowhere. It has an incredibly strange atmosphere: you see her exploring the idea of isolation, living on her own in a ruin and trying to transcode messages from nature. For instance, she finds a dead bird and seems to interpret this as having a deeper meaning. Lowe captures a real sense of isolation and lack of rules about what’s going on in the world, leaving her character unanchored, desperately searching for meaning in a world that may have none.
Unravel (2012)
Documentary about women working in a recycling factory in India, which turns clothes from the west into yarn for blankets.
I have to confess, I worked on this film as an editor but I absolutely love it and believe in its sentiment, and the director Meghna Gupta is amazing. We might expect a film set in clothing factories to be depressing, but the natural warmth and personalities of the people interviewed brings a refreshing lightness. While the film is shot in the east, in many ways it is a reflection of our waste in the west, the capitalist clothing market that keeps us buying more and more stuff that we just end up throwing away. But what I really love about it is the central character Reshma: she doesn’t have much but she has a lot of joy. The clothes that she handles travel thousands of miles around the world to this one little sleepy place, Panipat, all while Reshma herself dreams of travelling but has never left the town – the contrast is poignant. She’s one of those characters that you could spend hours with.
Spider (2007)
Black-comic thriller directed by Nash Edgerton about a man whose prank on his girlfriend goes painfully and horribly wrong.
Like The Cat With Hands, this is a very complete story that works perfectly for the short film form. It’s also one I show people a lot – with a trigger warning – without giving away the ending, which is just so brilliant and shocking. The main character is idiotic and yet well-meaning; you kind of like him but from the start you are sitting there just dreading what is about to happen. The fact that the director has a stunt background makes total sense: it is such a well set-up joke … I don’t want to call it a joke, but it is. We don’t get that many shorts that hit that narrative perfection, but this one does. It’s not something to meditate on or make you a better person, it’s just pure entertainment.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
