India

Saahith Mothkuri’s Kichidi finally has a trailer, and it’s worth the wait. The Artical trailer drops a mood before it drops a plot. You get flashes of humour, a romance that doesn’t explain itself, and enough suspense to make you wonder what happens after the screen cuts to black. That’s how a trailer should work – it sells the feeling, not the summary. Mothkuri has been building a reputation for stories that sit somewhere between the familiar and the unexpected. Kichidi keeps that thread but pushes it further. The characters in these first glimpses feel like people you’d actually recognise, not the polished archetypes that fill most of the screen time these days. And the camera work has a quiet confidence to it – it trusts you to pick up on the atmosphere without spelling everything out. ...

On October 12, 2012, the Ministry of Home Affairs delegated powers to the Foreigners Regional Registration Office in Goa to accept and process Overseas Citizen of India card applications. A day later, in a follow-up letter, the same ministry qualified the delegation by noting that the Goa FRRO lacked adequate infrastructure and manpower, and that OCI applications would continue to be dealt with by FRRO Mumbai “till further orders.” That contradiction has defined the situation ever since. ...

This is a translation of an article “Passagem para a Índia” published in the magazine section of O Expresso on December 8, 2001. Translated by Gabriel Figueiredo, reproduced here with his permission. It tells the story of the 1961 Indian annexation of Goa from a Portuguese perspective, through the eyes of Carlos Azaredo. At 0:00 hours on December 18, 1961, the invasion of Goa, Damão and Diu began. It lasted 36 hours. The disproportion was obscene: Indian forces were 13 times larger than the Portuguese garrison. The “total sacrifice” Salazar demanded would have been a tragedy. General Vassalo e Silva, the last governor of 451 years of Portuguese India, understood this when he surrendered. ...

A few months back I picked up a Prestige portable hard drive from IT dot COM, a shop in Margao, Goa. It worked fine for a while, then one day the indicator light started blinking and wouldn’t stop. The drive wouldn’t show up on any of the computers I plugged it into. I was in Hyderabad at the time. I looked up authorised Iomega service centres nearby and found none. None in Hyderabad, none in Secunderabad. So I waited till I was back in Goa and took the drive to the store. ...