Month: May 2020

Two of India’s most beloved movie stars, Irrfan Khan and Rishi Kapoor, died within a day of each other this week, and though they came from two very different worlds and two very different schools of acting, both leave behind a treasure of cinematic work and millions of grieving fans.
This double whammy for India’s Hindi-language film industry, known as Bollywood, comes amid a crippling coronavirus lockdown that has brought the entertainment business — along with so much else — to a complete halt.
“It seems we are in the midst of a nightmare,” popular actor Akshay Kumar tweeted.
In normal times, the funerals for two of Bollywood’s most-admired actors would mean tens of thousands of fans gathering to bid them goodbye. Instead, their ceremonies were held in the presence of a handful of family and friends, surrounded by police.
The 54-year-old Khan died Wednesday after battling a rare cancer, while the 67-year-old Kapoor had leukemia and died Thursday.  
The career trajectories of both actors reflect the changing contours of Bollywood, which in the past traversed two parallel streams of arthouse cinema and commercial films. The growing acceptance and box-office viability of content-driven films over the last two decades gave the two a chance to cross paths and act in movies that were both critically acclaimed and popular.
 
A trained stage actor, Khan started his career with television and found work in new-age Bollywood, which was experimenting with visceral themes reflecting India’s social and political fault lines in the 1990s.  
It took years of roles in small films before Khan made it to the Bollywood big leagues. Balancing arthouse movies with popular commercial fare, Khan went on to play a wide array of roles including an intensely tormented lover in “Maqbool,” an adapation of “Macbeth,” and a gentle immigrant in Mira Nair’s “The Namesake.”
Unlike other Bollywood superstars with mega-stylized personas, the versatile Khan brought a rare intelligence and empathy to his characters over his 30-year career.
“He managed to walk off the screen and come home with us,” wrote film critic Shubhra Gupta in the Indian Express newspaper.
One of the best-known Indian faces in world cinema, Khan crossed over to Hollywood with ease, playing a variety of parts in movies like “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Life of Pi” and “The Amazing Spider Man.”
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said in a tweet that Khan was an ” incredible talent” and “left his imprint on global cinema.”  
“Gone too soon. When he is on screen, you can’t take your eyes off of him. He lives on in his films,” tweeted Hollywood filmmaker Ava Duvernay.
Kapoor’s cinematic journey could not have been more different.
Kapoor was a third-generation actor, born with showbiz in his blood. His grandfather Prithiviraj Kapoor and father Raj Kapoor were legendary actors of their time.  
Rishi Kapoor started young, receiving the National Award, India’s preeminent film award, for his role as a child artist in his father’s 1970 film “Mera Naam Joker.”
“Acting was in my blood and there was simply no escaping it,” Kapoor wrote in his 2017 autobiography.
The runaway success of the teenage romance “Bobby” in 1973 made him a Bollywood heartthrob and a string of romantic, musical blockbusters followed.  
The charming lover boy of the 1970s and 1980s went on to become one of the most dependable actors of his time and appeared in some of Bollywood’s most-loved films, including “Amar Akbar Anthony” and “Chandni.”  
To be in sync with contemporary filmmakers moving away from melodrama and mining plot-driven stories, Kapoor refashioned his career in later years to play a variety of strong character roles. His portrayal of an old man in the 2016 movie “Kapoor & Sons” and as a Muslim man forced to prove his patriotism in “Mulk” in 2017 won him great acclaim. His most recent movie “The Body” was released last year.
“There may not be another actor who grew up and grew old on camera,” tweeted film critic Uday Bhatia.
In his final years, Kapoor became a popular presence on social media, and was refreshingly honest about his opinions. In his last tweet on April 2, he appealed to people to respect the work frontline health workers were doing.
“We have to win this Coronavirus war together,” Kapoor wrote.
Altogether Kapoor acted in more than 100 movies in a career spanning more than 40 years.
“He smiled on screen and the world outside became a little bit lighter,” film critic Baradwaj Rangan wrote in a tribute. “He gave us joy.” 
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Friday is May Day, the ancient spring festival whose roots can be traced back to second century Rome. The day hailed what was originally the first day of summer, but because of changes in ancient calendars over the millennia, what we recognize today settled on the first of May. Across the centuries, May Day has come to represent different things to different people. Fertility dances and holding paper streamers while dancing around the maypole may seem hokey and old-fashioned to today’s cynical, high-tech world, but it is still part of the celebration in many places. Another tradition, that of delivering baskets of flowers, fruit and candy, also thrives. Although this year, the coronavirus pandemic has moved these rituals from the forests and green grass of the great outdoors to the great virtual indoors. Cubans paint a wall in commemoration of May Day, in San Jose, Cuba, on April 28, 2020. This year’s May Day celebrations would be from home, respecting social isolation, and not at the Revolution Square.In the late 1880s, May Day began to morph into a double holiday — the start of summer and International Workers’ Day, proclaimed by U.S. communists and socialists to remember an 1886 labor strike in Chicago that turned violent. Bombs were tossed, police and marchers were shot and killed. Four American labor leaders were hanged after what unionists say was an unfair trial.  May Day became a day of pro-labor rallies and an excuse for overwhelming military parades through Red Square in Moscow and throughout the Soviet Union. But since the USSR collapsed in 1991, young Russians have lost their passion for International Workers’ Day.  Anton Fedyashin, is an associate professor of history at American University in Washington, specializing in Russian studies. He is skeptical that any group of young Russians would know what May Day is about. “What they’d probably say is that’s a day off and they have no idea what it’s about nor do they care. You can find probably a handful of exceptions of young people who are members of the Communist party or maybe Socialist party who would actually know what this is about, but for the most part, these kids don’t know anything. So they just treat it as a day off.” Fedyashin doesn’t really fault the kids and Russian 20-somethings for not knowing the significance of May 1 because, he says, there are reasons the pro-labor fervor for May Day has “completely fallen away.” “One is of course the end of the Soviet Union, the fact that the ideology isn’t there and manual labor is no longer put on a pedestal and considered noble by virtue of simply being … the idea of organized labor, of collective bargaining has also fallen away. By the 1980s and the 1990s, the importance and the strength of unions has declined,” he said. Care workers and members of CGT union, demonstrate in front of La Pitie Salpetriere hospital in Paris on April 30, 2020, on the eve of the May Day traditional march, during a lockdown in France to stop the spread of COVID-19.And not just in Russia. Fedyashin said manufacturing is on the decline in the West and the tech industry has eclipsed manual labor as the engine driving the global economy.  “So for May Day, you can say it’s been a perfect storm of the implosion of Soviet ideology and the general diversification of economic productivity and that’s eclipsed the importance of May 1st as international labor day,” Fedyashin said. Despite the lost fervor and the coronavirus, a number of May Day actions are still planned in parts of Europe.  Russian trade unions will for the first time replace Workers’ Day demonstrations in the streets with a massive online action. Hundreds of Czech commuters plan a roadblock at the Czech-German border crossing to protest the government-imposed lockdown, and marches are still set to take place in Athens, Lisbon, Paris and Vienna. But in the U.S., an annual Minneapolis May Day puppet theater, street festival, and dancing in the park has been canceled. 
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