Q: 1. Jaswant Singh flew Delhi-Beijing on the inaugural direct flight. He
travelled by ...
a. Air-India
b. Air China
c. China Eastern Airlines

Q2. Ashok Shandilya won the recent Asian billiards championship defeating ...
a. Geet Sethi
b. Pankaj Advani
c. Devendra Joshi

Q3. At the 13th Valenciennes International Film Festival in France, five awards were bagged by the Indian film ...
a. Lagaan
b. Monsoon Wedding
c. Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham
Answers: 1(c), 2(b), 3(c)

ART ATTACK
Surreal Screen

VIDEO UNPLUGGED: Malani with her works

At a stage in Indian art where output seems a euphemism for repetition, Mumbai-based Nalini Malani’s work is edgy, ambitious and techno-fluent. Her huge video installations were projected on the walls of Delhi’s Apeejay Media Gallery recently, evoking the feel of a drive-in. Malani, 56, is a faithful child of postmodernism where scale is as important as substance and extravagance lures you into the complex world of intellectual earnestness and pictorial schizophrenia.

The show used Bertolt Brecht’s The Job and Heiner Mueller’s adaptation of Hamlet to negotiate pet themes like genocide, gender, nuclear war, communalism, nature and sustenance. A clever animation technique—painting on glass, shooting it, partially effacing it and adding something else—was used for the first one, and the other, a surreal film on the Ayodhya tangle, was covered in four big screens running malformed faces, segmented limbs, riots, a dying fish and the drowning Ophelia.

Malani first made films way back in 1968 while still in Mumbai’s J.J. School of Art but re-emerged into video art in the 1990s with landmarks like Medea, Remembering Toba Tek Singh and the shadow play of cylinders with its portable chiaroscuro. Her next project is on the ageing female body ... so there’s no repetition.

—Anshul Avijit

MUSIC REVIEW
Affairs of the Heart, Without the Ache

Tum Aaye; Sony Music; Rs 55

Sony Music continues the trend of getting the music director, lyricist and singers to work together as a team, then presenting the output as an album. Sony’s Tum Aaye has Raju Singh’s music with Javed Akhtar’s lyrics. Alka Yagnik’s soothing, whispery voice complements Hariharan’s daring improvisations. This unconventional album explores love without the pangs of separation. The songs instead work as a dialogue between the lovers. The collection has eight songs, sensitively composed and sung.

Devoid of jarring rhythms, the orchestration makes for pleasant listening. Rakesh Chaurasia’s flute interludes work magic. The songs Kya tumhe pata hai and Kya tumhe bhi narrate the story of a relationship. The singers manage to convey a range of emotions, though Yagnik says “singing for a film album is easy but in a private album you have to ensure quality”. Buy this album if you like to listen to soft, mushy and hummable ballads.

—S. Sahaya Ranjit

SOTTO VOCE

So which channel is going to telecast the soccer World Cup this summer? The buzz is Sony ... A cag report says there are 11,831 colleges in India. But only 5,169, or 44 per cent, are recognised by the University Grants Commission ... The poto debate in Parliament marked the second time Vajpayee confused Clinton with Lincoln ... At the Ceat Cricket Awards, Saurav Ganguly was a nominee for the year’s best fielder. Must have been a pre-April 1 joke ... Cherie Blair has contributed the recipe for kutchi bhindi, an okra dish, to a cookbook called Favourite Recipes of the Raj ... Apparently there was a proposal to make K.V. Krishna Rao a field marshal. It got nixed by the RSS.