Welcome to ‘Nation of Auteurs’, a series composed of critical essays by academics, filmmakers, historians, and cinephiles, to examine the deep diversity of Indian film auteurs and illuminate the country’s wider cinematic landscape. By Ashish Dwivedi
Poetry by Sutputra Radheye: ‘my poems will be drunk, truthful / and blunt like your beauty that cuts / through my skin and draws graffiti / on my bones like tattoos’
Poems by Aardhra Chandran: ‘Concrete trucks rumble past his fence, shaking the loose teeth / in his jaw, spitting black diesel smoke onto his holy basil plant. // He measures his life not in years, but in missing trees—/The neem chopped for wood, the mango that died of thirst.’
In a recent visit to Ladakh, Navjot Khosla aims for a gaze beyond the touristy cliches, to be transformed instead by the sustainable models of growth, natural preservation, and the cultural heritage of the bioregion. By Navtoj Khosla