PRAGOTI

''Habib Tanvir was a renaissance personality. There was nothing he could not do in theatre – he wrote, translated, adapted and evolved plays; he was a master director, a superb actor and a good singer; he wrote poetry and songs; he could compose music; he was a designer; he was manager of his company Naya Theatre, which he ran first with his wife Moneeka (and single-handed after her death) for exactly fifty years; he was a critic and theoretician; more, he was a seer, a guru for generations of younger theatre artistes. In all this, and through his prodigiously prolific theatre career spanning some sixty years, he remained an artiste with a deep social conscience and engagement, a public intellectual who never shied away from taking a stand and lending his name to progressive and secular causes.'' writes Sudhanva Deshpande

Ghajini is a violent tale of individual retribution and revenge, in essence no different from hundreds of other such films, from Hollywood to Bombay to Madras to Hyderabad to Lahore, about a super-strong hero destroying, single-handed, an evil villain. Ghajini is an assault on the audiences’ intelligence. Actually, many parts are just an assault – loud, jarring, over the top. The movie is just plain dumb. The film could have been, but is not, the nightmare that could have haunted the head honchos of Enron and Satyam, and indeed countless others, as they face meltdown, liquidation, bankruptcy and pauperization.says Sudhanva Deshpande.

"The idea of copyright itself needs to be critiqued because it obstructs the free flow and growth of knowledge. It is in opposition to copyright regimes that movements for free software (as opposed to proprietary software), for copyleft and creative commons licenses have grown. Playwrights and other theatrepersons need to study these options, so that corporations do not come in the way of the wide dissemination of their work".

Sudhanva Deshpande's presentation at the Second National Free Software Conference, Cochin