Happy new year. Did you know 2025 is the only perfect square year (452) we will see in our lifetime? Wait, what… your uncle was born in 1935 and he has seen… Did you know who else was born in 1935? Soumitra Chatterjee. He got one hell of a biography this year. Sanghamitra Chakraborty’s Soumitra Chatterjee and His World – meant for a pan-India (and maybe, world) audience – did a great job of summing up not only the multiple facets of the thespian's life but also his impact on other greats. As a Bengali, the book is almost thrilling in the way it builds Soumitra's persona from an uber-talented youngster to a cultural icon. If you grew up in the 1990s, your definition of icons tends to get a little warped because you were surrounded by Sameer and Nadeem-Shravan. Sameer wrote a book about 50 of his top songs that read like a text version of The Kapil Sharma Show, where he recounted how he presented one unusual theme/line/word/pause in his songs, which was always rejected by the composer/director/producer/music company, before the music company/producer/director/composer stood by him and the song became a massive hit. Oh wow… here’s a Reel of Govinda at the Twinkle/Kajol show. Did you know Animal’s Jamal Kudu is the most used music for Reels? Yes, even more than Khada hoon aaj bhi wahi… *wipes tears* The trauma of 19 November 2023 – a perfect World Cup campaign ending in heartbreak – needed a catharsis. That partially came in both 2024 and 2025, but it could get out of our system completely only by reliving it completely – game by game. Aditya Iyer’s Gully Gully: Travels Around India during the 2023 World Cup did just that, tagging along an Indian cricket fan (who’s also a journalist) as he comes across other fans and fellow travellers, players and officials, euphoria and (finally) heartbreak as he watched every India match live. The book is as much a study of Indian society in the 2020s as it is about the joyous (and sometimes, illogical) celebration around sport. *giggles at Pakistan cricket podcasts where Akram recounts his Viv Richards story for the 414th time* If you are the type to wonder how one could taunt Richards, then Abhishek Mukherjee’s Caught Yapping: A History of Cricket in 100 Quotes is the book for you because someone actually did that. Not only him. Someone – with all the good sense of Piers Morgan (have you seen his Ashes tweets?) and then some – provoked the entire West Indies team and kind of triggered the whole West Indian juggernaut of the 1970s and 80s. Abhishek’s has that story and 99 other quotes that feel like quaintly shaped pieces of a jigsaw puzzle at first, but – when placed all together – forms a grander picture. Thanks to the judicious selection of quotes, the flawless research and the smoothly flowing writing style, this book is not merely a jigsaw puzzle, but a classic painting where one can admire each of the hundred perfectly measured brush strokes. (Just got reminded of Ben Stokes, ha ha!) Just as cricket and movies and streaming shows (and did I mention Reels?) are cutting into my reading time, it seems like directors nowadays are also spending too much time on social media and podcasts and endorsements (and did I mention The Kapil Sharma Show?) that they take a few years to make a film. On the other hand, Amborish Roychoudhury’s Raj Khosla – The Authorized Biography reminded us of those rocking times when directors flitted between noir, romance, mystery, dacoit action, socials (not media!), hits, flops and made the masala cinema that everyone now is claiming to be dying. Amborish loves cinema, Amborish writes well, Amborish researches like no one else I know in India. What’s not to like when the subject is interesting and the times were so great, and there is history and trivia and real-life accounts and well-posited theories and even the voluble Mahesh Bhatt popping up several times in the book! I read about 13 books this year – a far cry from the 24 I promised myself (and to Goodreads) on 1st January 2025 – of which 9 were on Indian cinema. I have to guiltily admit that my tsundoku (look it up, guys, if it hasn’t appeared on your Insta feed) got worse because I may have bought about fifty! So, the year ends with me not finishing Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me – a book I bought at the time of its release and then delayed starting to read. I am about one-third into the book and realise this is vintage Arundhati Roy – observations and memory beyond that of mortals, prose that AI can’t learn let alone replicate, and honesty that leaves you gasping for breath. And those lovely nods towards Estha and Rahel from that magical book from nearly 30 years ago… ‘I saw that the dress didn’t match my knees, which were full of scars and cuts – a comprehensive logbook of my wild, imperfect, fatherless, pilotless life on the banks of the Meenachil River in Ayemenem.’ Sigh. This is the type of book that makes you want to swear off social media for the next year…
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