Tribulations of gig-going, romantic fumblings…

Homework is a portrait of a young boy, who keeps passing exams and  if a changing England in the 1960s and 1970s. Geoff Dyer famous for his stylish sentences and diverse subject matters, has written fiction, nonfiction and essays, with an interest in film, art, photography, jazz and takes a keen interest in writers and their writing. Geoff’s novel included Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, a novel Out of Sheer Rage, about not being able to write a biography of D.H. Lawrence; Yoga for People Who Can’t be Bothered to Do It, (2003), a collection of travel essays is the … Continue reading Tribulations of gig-going, romantic fumblings…

Life of Outcasts with tainted nobility who scrub and clean the stains of our consumer society

Canadian writer, social worker, and sociologist, Simon Paré-Poupar who did his first round as garbageman in Montreal as a teenager in “Trash” writes “The Garbageman is the Sisyphus of our consumer society. My fellow garbagemen and I scrub clean the stains of our consumer society.” He says he has personally shifted nearly 70, 000 tonnes of junk, but he and his peers are given a wide berth by the households they serve, “people thank the courier… the mover, and the small carrier. But they barely see the garbageman. They wish we could be invisible, just as they hope their garbage … Continue reading Life of Outcasts with tainted nobility who scrub and clean the stains of our consumer society

Sir Garfield Sobers dies at 89

West Indies cricket legend Sir Garfield Sobers who held Test record of 365 not out against Pakistan in 1958, for 36 years, passed away aged 89. Between 1954 and 1974,  left-hander Sobers whose stroke play attracted huge crowds, turned out in 93 Test matches for the Caribbean side, totalling 8032 runs and claiming 235 wickets.  His contribution in cricket earned him a Knighthood in 1975, and he was later honoured as one of Wisden’s five cricketers of the twentieth century/ Tributes came from Sunil Gavaskar who described it as a perhaps the most sorrowful day cricket has ever witnessed, calling Sobers the … Continue reading Sir Garfield Sobers dies at 89

Rise and dominance of the world’s first “Jet age lion of cricket”

West Indian all-rounder Garry Sobers, got 90 votes in the 2000 Wisden, the bible of cricket, which named the five best players of the 20th century, a choice made by 100 voters from around the world.  Duncan Hamilton in The Man Who Walked Out of the Sun,  fell in love with Sobers when he was a schoolboy in Nottingham, and over the years  followed him around the country as he spoke at lunches and dinners. But he only once approached Sobers and that to request an autograph. He never asked for an interview when writing this book. Instead of contacting Sobers, Hamilton has … Continue reading Rise and dominance of the world’s first “Jet age lion of cricket”

Devastation of separation and the pain of betrayal

Avni Doshi, the Booker Prize finalist author of Burnt Sugar  comes a fascinating novel of rupture and rebirth, of one woman’s journey to understand the fault lines in her marriage, her home, and her family, her betrayal, renunciation, and renewal, who swims to the other side and comes up for air. When my husband comes into the bedroom we have shared thirteen years and tells me he doesn’t want to be married anymore, I reach for my neck. My head is missing. A husband announces he is leaving, that he was never happy. A woman is left behind with their two … Continue reading Devastation of separation and the pain of betrayal

AI and Gender Inclusion with Women in Film and TV UK

Raindance talk and discussion at The Canon Venue Piccadilly. Raindance Film Festival continues up to and including June 26 2026 at The Vue Cinema Lower Regent Street. “AI and Gender Inclusion with Women in Film and TV UK,” Panel – Katie Bailiff, Viviane D’Avilla, Katharina Gellein Viken and Georgina Cammalleri AI has been around for a lot longer than people realize and now it has filtered gradually into the mass public sphere and is actively employed more than ever especially in film making and any visual communication including of course, material featured on social media. The title of this well networked and informed … Continue reading AI and Gender Inclusion with Women in Film and TV UK

Difference between Good and Great companies

Corporate corruption for decades we’ve explained as a problem of bad actors, moral weakness, or isolated scandals. Again and again, companies founded with strong ideals drift toward short-term thinking, extractive behaviour, and mission abandonment- often despite the best intentions of the people inside them. Incorruptible argues that this failure is not primarily ethical, it is structural. As organizations grow, the systems that govern them- ownership, incentives, charters, accountability, and decision-making- quietly reshape behaviour. When those systems are poorly designed, even principled leaders are pushed toward outcomes they never wanted. Success itself become a form of financial gravity, bending companies away … Continue reading Difference between Good and Great companies

Transformation from pop icon to song craftsman

George Michael, pop star who bleached his hair blonde, wore tiny shorts and at the same time, critiqued his own image mercilessly, wrote one of the biggest hits of our age in “about an hour” in his childhood bedroom and would go on to collaborate with some of the greatest musicians of all time from Aretha Franklin to Stevie Wonder. He lived through the AIDS crisis and one of the most homophobic periods of British history and yet when he finally came out, he did so boldly and unapologetically. Wham! Were the first Western pop group to play in Communist … Continue reading Transformation from pop icon to song craftsman

One’s own story submerged by someone else’s

The haunting, multigenerational saga of a family of Sámi women fighting the devastation of their way of life. Elin Anna Lanna’s novel The Home of the Drowned, traces the story of a family- Ingá, her mother Rávdná, and her Aunt Anne – from 1942 to 1982. At a nearby lake recently dammed to build a hydroelectric power station floods their village. Their home, a type of hut called a goahti, is being submerged by the water. The Sámi are an indigenous people who historically inhabited northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and part of Russia. Due to state-sanctioned assimilation policies over the … Continue reading One’s own story submerged by someone else’s

Memoir of self-development

  When Irish writer, Brian Dillon was sixteen his mother died and he simply gave up all schoolwork. But his real education was going on elsewhere: with books, music, films and television. When at least he made it to university, his head was already full of avant-garde writing, art and ideas. Could academia liveup to the hopes and dreams he had invested in it? Halfway through college his father died, and the stakes of reading and writing seemed even higher. Ambivalence explores what learning meant to is author, what it enabled and denied between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six, … Continue reading Memoir of self-development