1. Ranbir-Alia Wedding: They married in a rush, made their fans gush, and quickly became papa and mommy to beautiful little Raha. Karan Johar who is Alia’s godfather says Raha is the most beautiful baby he has seen.After his own twins, of course. Alia is supposed to resume work in February 2023. Something tells me she won’t be able to tear herself away from her second home production(after Darlings, it is her little darling).
2. Karan Johar’s chat show: Koffee with Karan aired for the seventh season in 2022. Ever since its inception in 2014 it has established a reputation for getting uncomfortable answers out of top stars,creating a ambience where stars blurt out things that they regret later. As Aamir Khan shrewdly observed this season, anyone who comes on Karan’s show gets into trouble. The same happened this season too. The stars love Karan and surrender to his whimsical propensity for sensationalism. Koffee With Karan is the most popular film-related chat show ever and the saving grace on the doddering Disney+Hotstar streaming platform.
3. The Kashmir Files: Phenomenal impact of a political drama that spared us none of the gruesome details of the genocide of Kashmiri Pandits, The Kashmir Files opened up a debate on the marriage of politics and cinema. Should cinema be a tool for propagating the political reality, no matter how unpalatable? Director Vivek Agnihotri won’t pause for applause or approval . He will push on with his thorny tenets and uncomfortable home truth, no matter how the rightwingers smirk. It’s impossible to tell what Agnihotri is more angry about: the actual genocide(genocide, not exodus , we are told repeatedly) or the whitewashing-subversion of it by the architects of Indian history.Why is it that so much literature is available on the Jew holocaust and not the Kashmiri Pandits’ genocide? Agnihotri spares us none of the brutality that the Pandits faced as they were told to vacate their homes overnight. The Kashmir Files would have worked better if it had steered away from inducing horror and disgust through numbers. The idea that the film puts forward—of an entire creed being annihilated by fundamentalists—is so crushing in its implications that numbers cease to matter.What really counts is the impressive credibility Agnihotri brings to the polemical drama.