Across cinema, literature, art, theatre, reportage, pedagogy, and memory, Kaleidoscope 2025 charted The Daily Eye’s commitment to plural expression—where scholarship meets storytelling, resistance meets remembrance, and culture speaks back to power. 

Kaleidoscope by The Daily Eye in 2025 brought together powerful articles across cinema, literature, theatre, art, reportage, pedagogy, and travel writing. Featuring voices such as Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri, Utpal Datta, Aparajita Krishna, Sohaila Kapur, and Janaky Sreedharan, this collection celebrated plural expression, cultural resistance, and memory as witness in contemporary India.

The Kaleidoscope section of The Daily Eye, over the year, emerged as a space where genres dissolve and disciplines speak to one another—where cinema converses with music, literature with lived experience, travel with memory, and scholarship with empathy. The articles published here do not follow a single curatorial ideology; instead, they assert a deliberate openness to multiplicity—of voices, forms, regions, and intellectual positions. Together, they map an India—and an Indian imagination—that resists flattening.

At the heart of this diversity lies Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri’s long-form conversation with Gautam Chintamani around Dark Star: The Loneliness of Being Rajesh Khanna, now in its third edition. More than a biography-driven interview, the piece reflects on stardom, cultural memory, and the emotional costs of myth-making. Rajesh Khanna emerges not merely as India’s first superstar but as a prism through which Hindi cinema’s emotional economy—its rivalries, reinventions, and failures—is understood. The article exemplifies Kaleidoscope’s strength: rigorous cultural enquiry without academic aridity.

Music, memory, and translation come together in another deeply personal piece by Ray Chaudhuri, who presents excerpts from his English translation-in-progress of Pandit Amarnath: A Life in Music, written by Nirmal Chawla. This is as much about the Hindustani classical maestro Pandit Amarnath as it is about inheritance, loss, and the fragile labour of preserving artistic legacy across languages. Poetry, biography, and editorial reflection merge, reminding readers that cultural transmission is an intimate, vulnerable process.

Inclusivity takes centre stage in Utpal Datta’s conversation with Assamese writer Anjali Mahanta, whose Braille novel Moronoi Parar Noyona breaks new ground in Indian regional literature. Based on the life of Kamala Barua, the first visually impaired woman graduate from Northeast India, the article foregrounds access, dignity, and representation.  

Cinema, Craft, And Cultural Memory

Cinema scholarship finds a different register in Datta’s review of Tejas Poonia’s Hindi book Bharatiya Cinema: Vivechan aur Moolyankan. Engaging with low-budget cinema, regional films, documentaries, and short formats, the article critiques both industry hierarchies and critical blind spots. Films like Kantara, Pushpa, and Jai Bhim are examined not merely as box-office successes but as cultural phenomena.

The reflective, archival impulse continues in Satyabrata Ghosh’s exploration of Chalat Chitravyooh, written by filmmaker Arun Khopkar and translated into Bengali by Ghosh himself. Through Khopkar’s encounters with Ritwik Ghatak, Mani Kaul, Narayan Surve, and Charles Correa, the article addresses a crucial absence in Indian cinema: filmmakers writing about their own processes. It stands as both critique and celebration—of mentorship, memory, and documentation.

Contemporary fiction and genre play appear vividly in Ray Chaudhuri’s conversations with novelists Harini Srinivasan and Puneet Sikka.

Srinivasan’s ability to move between historical mysteries such as The Curse of Anuganga and rom-coms like Lovestruck and Confused is explored through questions of research, authenticity, and narrative pleasure. Meanwhile, Sikka’s debut novel Take No. 2020 offers a rare fictional gaze into the Hindi film industry’s everyday absurdities, vulnerabilities, and humour. Together, these pieces foreground women writers negotiating craft, genre, and industry with confidence and clarity. 

Social justice found an unflinching voice in the interview with Puja Shah, whose award-winning novel For My Sister addresses trafficking, gender violence, caste, and generational poverty through the story of two sisters. The article resists voyeurism, insisting instead on agency, ethical representation, and the global interconnectedness of oppression.

Anthropology and spirituality converge in the review of Anu Malhotra’s Shamans of the Himalayas, a work blending ethnography, travel writing, and documentary practice.  

Sohaila Kapur’s deeply personal travelogue, returning to Kashmir after decades, extends this arc through memory, politics, and climate anxiety woven into lived experience. Moving through Srinagar, Pahalgam, and Gulmarg, the article reminds us that landscapes carry history, grief, and resilience in equal measure.

Memory, Resistance, And The Ethics Of Witness

If the first constellation of Kaleidoscope writings revealed plurality through cinema, music, travel, and fiction, the second sharpens the lens on memory as resistance, art as testimony, and dialogue as survival.

At its centre stands Aparajita Krishna’s deeply personal engagement with Harinder Baweja’s memoir They Will Shoot You, Madam. Neither conventional review nor detached critique, the piece reads like a companioned journey through four decades of conflict reporting—from Punjab and Kashmir to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Baweja emerges as a journalist who did not merely document history but inhabited it. Krishna’s essay positions the book as both archive and warning: democracy demands transparency, and conflict is always deepened by ideology.

Theatre becomes another site of ideological interrogation in Himalaya Dahiya’s review of Ghar Aur Bahar, directed by Shuddho Banerjee—a stage reimagining of Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghare Baire. The production confronts nationalism, gender, and moral absolutism with striking restraint, insisting that Tagore’s discomforting questions remain urgently contemporary. Theatre here is not nostalgia; it is argument.

Pedagogy and intellectual legacy take centre stage in Janaky Sreedharan’s reading of the festschrift From Canon to Covid, honouring GJV Prasad. Mapping the transformation of English literary studies in India, the piece celebrates the expansion of the canon—towards Dalit aesthetics, translation studies, Northeastern writing, feminist interventions, and post-pandemic realities. It is a tribute to teaching as mentorship and intellectual courage.

Cultural diplomacy unfolded in the report on the Khushwant Singh Literary Festival’s Oxford edition, themed Humanity Across Borders. Conversations between Keshava Guha, Sunetra Gupta, and Matt Ridley reveal literature’s quiet but persistent ability to build bridges in fractured times.

Visual art and historical continuity dominated The Great Indian Modern Masters exhibition at Cosmic Heart Gallery, featuring works by M. F. Husain, F. N. Souza, V. S. Gaitonde, and S. H. Raza. The exhibition, curated by Jalpa H Vithalani, situates Indian modernism as both national foundation and global conversation.

Cinema history found renewed articulation in Raj Khosla: The Authorized Biography by Amborish Roychoudhury, with contributions from Anita Khosla and Uma Khosla Kapur—restoring a master filmmaker to rightful prominence.

Historical fiction gave voice to the silenced in Sakschi Verma’s conversation with Uma Lohray, author of The One-Way Ships. By recovering the forgotten histories of colonial-era “baby ayahs,” fiction becomes an act of justice. Finally, memory turns intimate and lyrical in Sharad Raj’s Nostalgia and the Train to Taiwan—a meditation on pre-digital connection, restraint, and fleeting human intimacy.

Taken together, these pieces published by The Daily Eye over the year, form a spectrum where conflict reportage, theatre, pedagogy, art history, literary biography, fiction, and personal memory coexist without hierarchy. This is Kaleidoscope at its most assured—refusing simplification, embracing contradiction, and asserting that culture, in all its forms, remains our most durable mode of resistance.   

You can read all the articles here