Hridayapoorvam teaser: Mohanlal, Sathyan Anthikad reunite for feel-good film
The screenplay is written by Sonu TP, based on a story by Akhil Sathyan, the director's son. Produced by Antony Perumbavoor under the banner of Aashirvad Cinemas, the film features Malavika Mohanan and Sangeeth Prathap in lead roles.The ensemble cast also includes Sangita Madhavan Nair, Siddique, Sabitha Anand, Baburaj, Nishan, Lalu Alex, Janardhanan, and SP Charan.'Hridayapoorvam' is set to hit cinemas on August 28, aligning with Onam festival.- Ends
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Hindustan Times
an hour ago
- Hindustan Times
Yael van der Wouden: 'History also serves as an unfinished thought'
On winning the Women's Prize for Fiction, you note how you stand on the shoulders of queer and trans people before you. Please share the significance of the prize for you? Author Yael van der Wouden (Courtesy It's a huge honour, first and foremost. The word 'woman' as a possessive for me hasn't always been a straightforward one, but my love for stories always has, as has my appreciation for platforms that elevate stories written from the margins. Being acknowledged in this way and read so kindly by the judges — and by so many people — has been a gift, and fully unreal. I've been reading along with the lists for years and can hardly believe I have a little Bessy [the bronze statuette] living in my house now. The other day, I caught a glimpse of my new paperback cover on the counter, and now it has the green circle and the word 'winner' on it. I had my first true, 'Oh my God' moment where the realisation briefly hit home. And then it was gone, and I went back to peeling ginger. 272pp, ₹799; Viking The Safekeep asks readers to reconsider what they own, and discusses people's possessiveness about objects and land. It also raises a wider question about the idea of theft. Were you deliberately invoking these propositions, or did it happen as the story progressed? I come from both a European Jewish heritage and a non-Jewish, Dutch heritage. I have grandparents who fled the war, and grandparents who had to live through the German occupation. I grew up in Israel/Palestine, in a city shaped by colonialism and built on the remnants of destroyed Palestinian villages that go unnamed and unremembered in contemporary Israeli memory. The question of choices made in war, of theft and of land and how people dealt with those choices after all was said and done, is a question that sits at the core of who I am, my position in history. I've been wanting to write something about that for a long time, and for a while, I figured that something would probably end up being an essay or a long read. The idea for the novel came to me almost as a surprise! But once it did, and once I saw the scope of it play out in my mind, the writing became almost compulsive. It's a conversation I'm having with myself, a meditation on homes, on desire, on who benefits from apologies — the person apologising, or the one who is there to receive? Reading The Safekeep, I couldn't help but think of the connections Olivia Laing makes in The Garden Against Time between gardens and post-war real-life stories. Then, I read your essay, On (Not) Reading Anne Frank, where you mention reading Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden. The consumption of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden explains humans' origins in many cultures. There's, however, something unmistakably erotic about that act. Gardens are also private little paradises where a lot of pivotal scenes in your novel are set, alongside the unabashed, unapologetic eating of the fruit, with its core and all. Am I making puzzling connections here, or were gardens and erotica on your mind, too, while working on this book? Oh, you're absolutely not making puzzling connections here — that's as bang on the money as it gets. My background in academics was a niche within a niche: in Comparative Literature, I was doing Memory Studies, and within that, Landscape Studies. That's a very complicated way of saying: I was writing about and looking at the ways national identity-making and memory-making define the way we shape our environment. One of my favourite lectures to give was one on the history of the suburban lawn, where we trace the path of a lawn from being a symbol of wealth (consider the renaissance Venetian garden, and compare it to your run-of-the-mill monastic garden: the former says, 'I have all this land, and I don't even need to use it for the production of food, that's how wealthy I am!', and the latter says, 'I'll use every piece of this garden to feed and maintain my community'), and how a patch of grass — a plant kept in infancy by its continuous mowing, so it's never allowed to grow into maturity or procreate — has therein become a marker of control—of nature, of wealth. Run that through the mill of industrialism and the making of the suburban city, the creation of the individual under capitalism, and what you end up with is the middle-class home with its small square of well-kept grass to tell the neighbours: I too have money, I too am in control. And yet nature pushes back: continuous weeds to pull out, the roots that grow too deep and the seeds that spread too quickly. The garden is nature's glorious excess, and our relationship to it is one of restraint, of nipping the one to allow the other. There's something compulsive and almost fetishistic in that, isn't there? Certainly, a kind of eroticism in the pretending that we do when we keep a garden, the same theatre of control that we apply to bodies, to desire. In leveraging the diary Eva maintains to further the story, were you trying to invoke the most popular historical record of WWII, the diary of Anne Frank? Eva's recollections are markedly different, for they're not manipulated by hope but document what the diarist has been robbed of; entries are almost tainted by a feeling of revenge. Then, there's your history with Frank, when, looking at you, children in school chanted Anne Frank! so much that the 'nickname stuck'. Initially, when I started writing the novel, I didn't mean for it to have a diary chapter at all! I knew that there needed to come a moment of reveal for Eva, where we find out her true thoughts and desires and how she ended up at the house. My first idea of how to do that was very convoluted and involved a set of initials and an aunt and a trip to the local library — things that bored me just thinking about having to write them. So, I put them out of my mind and began writing the first chapters, figuring that I'd solve that piece of the puzzle when I got there. I realised in that process that Eva had a book with her, and that book was there so that she could take note of certain things and not use it much else, which is how I wrote that at first. The diary solution was a sudden one and one that I definitely struggled with for a few whiny days — I didn't want to take that route, worried I was going to fall into a gimmicky trap, worried indeed over the Anne Frank associations! I wanted to move away from conventional war narratives in many ways (another thread I desperately wanted to avoid: most war stories tend to focus on middle-class and wealthy families, because those are the families that tended to be able to afford the cost of hiding in someone's attic. Those are the ones who more often survived, because there was a delay in how long it took for them to get deported. There's a whole class element to who survived the camps that I rarely see spoken of, and I wanted that woven into the novel so badly … and simply couldn't make it work within the plot). What became clear, though, was that there was my will and then there was the story's desire towards the path of least resistance — a clean, neat story where no one ever leaves the house, and all the explanations needed are there already. In the end, Eva's diary chapter ended up being my favourite chapter to write. I wrote the first half on the six-hour train ride to Berlin, and the second on the return. It was such a relief to get to cast off Isabel's restrictive narrative voice, but especially to get to do it all in the form of a grand reveal. Much of it was cathartic: after a hundred pages of not-knowing, to get to kick down the door and scream out everything that's been happening below the surface. It scratched an itch I often have when in conversation with non-Jewish Dutch people, when the war comes up: this desire to shout, 'You don't even know what you don't know!' The choosing of what went in and what would go was a more collected, restrained exercise; a lot of the research didn't make it in, and I had to be careful and make sure that it still sounded like a diary, not a mouthpiece for academic research — a list of facts. When I sent it in to my editors for a first round of edits, I was sure she'd say that half of it had to go. Surprisingly, they both said: more of this chapter, more of Eva's voice. Great news for me, of course, I had plenty more to say! One of the most satisfying experiences of reading The Safekeep was its deliberate suppression of the characters' train of thought, as if verbalising what's on their minds would give finality, a real shape to their thoughts. Interestingly, as these words hung in the air, someone else would pick them up and carry the conversation forward, as if a co-creation of something mutually thought was being signalled. In the incompleteness of the dialogues, you perhaps wanted to test the thresholds these people could cross or wanted to respect. In that sense, could you reflect on the dialogue writing in the book? The primary rule with Isabel was — she cannot have access. Not to her thoughts, her desires, her feelings. When she feels anything at all, she starts pinching at herself; when she feels desire, she redirects it into anger. When she thinks something that in any way goes deeper than an inch below the surface, she cuts herself off. The moment Isabel has access to herself, that's when we, as her audience, can stop wondering why she is the way she is — and the tension is broken. Isabel herself believes she knows herself, and that fantasy is only maintained as long as she doesn't dig too deep. So much of the novel was writing out bits of dialogue or thoughts and then backspacing them out of existence immediately because 'Isabel would not know this about herself.' I wanted the unfinished nature of thoughts and dialogue to mimic also what it feels like to exist in an environment where history also serves as an unfinished thought. READ MORE: Review: The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden Finally, in celebrating the fierce fire-like desire of a bodily want, you note multiple times that a body doesn't exist unless it's forced into being in the moment during an act of love. While same-sex desires have been considered deviant, there's something utterly mechanical but also philosophical about the love between Isabel and Eva that you describe in the book. To me, so much of that has to do with the body as it's seen and unseen. Both Isabel and Eva enter into the narrative furious with how the world perceives them — they feel utterly invisible in their true form, and only visible as a projection. Isabel is seen by her brothers as an extension of their mother; Eva is seen by her lovers as a mirror image of whatever they want her to be. Neither woman is considered in full until they are pitted against each other. And what they see, at first, is something ugly. Both women despise one another, but there's at least the relief of being despised for who you are, rather than loved for who you're not. The physicality of their desire becomes an extension of that: the body responds to being perceived, especially through Isabel's perspective, which is so deeply tactile. From the very first page, you see how intensely she experiences the world. Everything is vibrant and green, and every smell is overpowering, and every sound is too loud. A breeze could knock the poor woman over! She exists in her body, and the body overwhelms her. The physicality she finds with Eva is both about truth and perception, and it's also about channelling the very tactile way she exists in the world into something physical — touch. Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.
News18
6 hours ago
- News18
BTS' V Becomes First Korean Male Idol To Cross 69M Instagram Followers, See Top 10 List
BTS' V sets a new record as the first Korean male idol to cross 69M Instagram followers. Here's how the rest of the top 10 male K-pop idols rank. BTS' V, also known as Kim Taehyung, has officially made Instagram history. The singer and actor has become the first Korean male idol to surpass 69 million followers on the platform, cementing his place as the most-followed Korean male idol on Instagram. This milestone not only reflects V's explosive popularity but also highlights his unmatched influence in the global pop culture landscape. V's Instagram is a unique mix of art, fashion, and personal aesthetics. Whether he's posting artsy black-and-white selfies, travel photos, or behind-the-scenes glimpses from shoots and concerts, his feed never fails to mesmerize fans. With this record-breaking achievement, V has solidified his position as a social media powerhouse. View this post on Instagram A post shared by V (@thv) Here's a look at the Top 10 most-followed male K-pop idols on Instagram, and not surprisingly, BTS members dominate the list: 1. BTS' V (@thv) Taehyung continues to set trends with his effortlessly stylish and artsy feed. His posts regularly go viral, earning millions of likes within minutes. 2. BTS' Jimin (@j.m) Jimin's elegant visuals and warm presence have earned him a loyal following. His posts often reflect his personality—graceful, heartfelt, and aesthetic. 3. BTS' j-hope (@uarmyhope) Known for his vibrant and cheerful posts, j-hope brings positive energy to fans worldwide, sharing his music journey and personal moments. 4. BTS' Jin (@jin) True to his nickname 'Worldwide Handsome," Jin's feed is filled with humorous and candid posts, winning hearts everywhere. 5. BTS' SUGA (@agustd) SUGA's minimalist and mysterious vibe translates well to Instagram. His rare but meaningful posts are deeply appreciated by ARMY. 6. ASTRO's Cha Eunwoo (@eunwo.o_c) The only non-BTS member in the top 6, Eunwoo's prince-like visuals and acting career keep his feed polished and fan-favorite. 7. BTS' RM (@rkive) The BTS leader curates a thoughtful, artistic feed with book recommendations, museum visits, and serene landscapes. 8. GOT7's Jackson Wang (@jacksonwang852g7) An international icon, Jackson mixes global fashion, music, and fitness updates that resonate with fans across cultures. 9. Stray Kids' Felix (@ Known for his dreamy visuals and duality, Felix's aesthetic posts are loved by his growing fanbase. 10. Stray Kids' Hyunjin (@hynjinnnn) Hyunjin shares moody, artistic snapshots that reflect his evolving artistry and emotional depth. Disclaimer: Comments reflect users' views, not News18's. Please keep discussions respectful and constructive. Abusive, defamatory, or illegal comments will be removed. News18 may disable any comment at its discretion. By posting, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Time of India
9 hours ago
- Time of India
Bigg Boss Malayalam gets an exclusive new house; Host Mohanlal hints at a grand mansion ahead of season 7
The countdown to Bigg Boss Malayalam Season 7 has officially begun, and fans are buzzing with excitement. While the makers have maintained tight secrecy this time, unlike in previous seasons where contestant lists, themes, and house visuals were often leaked ahead of the premiere, a major surprise has now been unveiled, creating a fresh wave of anticipation. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now For the first time in the show's history, Malayalam will have its own exclusive house, specially constructed for the Malayalam version. Until now, the show was filmed on the sets of or Bigg Boss Marathi, which drew criticism from fans and even posed logistical challenges for the crew. However, this year, the makers have raised the bar by building a dedicated set in EVP Film City, Chennai, tailored exclusively for the Malayalam edition. To reveal this exciting update, the channel released a teaser video featuring a sand art performance, accompanied by a voiceover conversation between host and Bigg Boss himself. The teaser begins with Mohanlal saying, "We need our own house for Bigg Boss Malayalam," as he goes on to describe his dream home, with a grand layout, a spacious garden, a large kitchen, lavish living area, and a cosy bedroom. Bigg Boss chimes in, insisting on a confession room as well. The entire conversation is brought to life through intricately designed sand art, offering fans a glimpse of the visual grandeur to come. The teaser has already captivated viewers with its artistic presentation and emotional connection, setting high expectations for the season. Fans have taken to social media to express their excitement, praising the creative approach and eagerly awaiting the house reveal. Bigg Boss Malayalam Season 7 is all set to premiere on August 3, and alongside a brand-new house, it is expected to feature a dynamic mix of celebrities and commoners. Names like Anumol, Appani Sarath, Adithyan Jayan, and Renu Sudhi are among those rumored to be participating this year, though the official list remains under wraps.
