Prathyush Parasuraman

Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.

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Ajay Devgn as DCP Bajirao Singham in Rohit Shetty’s Singham Again.

Rohit Shetty’s Singham Again is an epic cop-out

The movie, a forceful, joyless retracing of the Ramayana does a disservice to the very thing it purports to be in service of: the police force.

Prathyush Parasuraman

The Open Hand Monument in Capitol Complex, Chandigarh.

Empty hands: Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh between symbol and reality

Today, its modernist symbols—from the towering Open Hand Monument to the unused Pit of Contemplation—float like ghostly ideals.

Prathyush Parasuraman

Indira Gandhi in Delhi on April 20, 1982. Documentary film Indi(r)a’s Emergency covers events from the 1942 Quit India Movement through to the Emergency period.

Can a film be progressive if it is too subtle?

Circumventing censorship with minor tricks doesn’t make a film progressive; it merely turns the capacity to evoke pity into an artistic virtue.

Prathyush Parasuraman

Kamal Haasan’s performance from Sigappu Rojakkal (1978).

A sterile, monochromatic analysis of Kamal Haasan’s cinematic legacy

K. Hariharan’s Kamal Haasan: A Cinematic Journey fixates on finding political subtexts, often stretching interpretations beyond credibility.

Prathyush Parasuraman

Hindi cinema’s realism, its Tier 2 cinema, where a film titled Stree, or woman, can be made with male protagonists, is frail.

Bollywood’s shallow realism

Hindi cinema’s current embrace of realism isn’t inclusive. It shows the same power structures as before, just dressed up as middle-class stories.

Prathyush Parasuraman

Fans of the actor Vijay celebrating the release of his latest film, GOAT, on September 5 in Chennai.

Vijay’s GOAT is a film overburdened by its star

While this is not unusual for star films, what is exceptional is the limits to which GOAT stretches this.

Prathyush Parasuraman

Schoolchildren reciting the Hanuman Chalisa in Bhopal on January 20, 2024. Author Vikram Seth recently completed a translation of the widely recited hymn and poem into English.

Can poetry survive translation?

Translators face a delicate balance between fidelity and creativity, but some argue audacity trumps sincerity in preserving poetic essence.

Prathyush Parasuraman

A still from Slaves of the Empire directed by Rajesh James.

Anger as the constant

At the International Documentary and Short Film Festival held in Kerala every year, the audience is hammered down for a week by raw courage.

Prathyush Parasuraman

Fawad Khan in a still from the teaser of Barzakh.

The pathetic man is rewriting the macho script

How filmmakers are redefining masculinity on screen by embracing vulnerability.

Prathyush Parasuraman

Anant Ambani, son of Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, and Radhika Merchant, daughter of industrialist Viren Merchant, react during their wedding celebrations in Mumbai on July 12.

The Ambani wedding: A spectacle of excess in an age of inequality

The festivity linked to the wedding was cinema and we have all just been an audience to the greatest circus trick: a disappearing moral compass.

Prathyush Parasuraman

A still from Love, Sex Aur Dhokha 2.

LSD 2: Looking sin in the eye

Dibakar Banerjee’s film Love, Sex aur Dhokha 2 invokes the horror of being online, and being present in the crosscurrents of our attention economy.

Prathyush Parasuraman

“Embrace” by Gieve Patel (2016)

Ways of unseeing: The art of overanalysing art

A kind of criticism dwells in the distance created between art and meaning. Why is the obvious so suspect? Why is the surface not nourishing enough?

Prathyush Parasuraman

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