Prime Minister Narendra Modi will contest the upcoming Lok Sabha polls from Varanasi, the constituency he currently represents, the Bharatiya Janata P
| | | Prime Minister Narendra Modi will contest the upcoming Lok Sabha polls from Varanasi, the constituency he currently represents, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) announced on Saturday as it released its first list of candidates for this summer’s national elections. | THE DAILY QUIZ A medical college named after him in the Bronx, New York’s poorest borough, will now provide free education after a billion-dollar-donation by former professor Ruth Gottesman. He was a patent clerk and theoretical physicist. Think genius hair and E=mc2. Who is he? a. Isaac Newton
b. Albert Einstein
c. Richard Dawkins
d. Stephen Hawking TAKE THE FULL QUIZ | | THE BIG STORY Modi, Shah, ministers among big guns in BJP’s 1st list of 195 Prime Minister Narendra Modi will contest the upcoming Lok Sabha polls from Varanasi, the constituency he currently represents, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) announced on Saturday as it released its first list of candidates for this summer’s national elections. “I thank the BJP leadership and bow to the crores of selfless Party Karyakartas for their constant faith in me. I look forward to serving my sisters and brothers of Kashi for the third time,” Modi said in a series of posts on X, formerly Twitter. “I am sure that the 140 crore people of India will bless us yet again and give us even more strength in fulfilling their aspirations and creating a Viksit Bharat,” he said. Read more. | | A LITTLE LIGHT READING In Chithi, the past is not rose-tinted, but harks to stranger times Bollywood screenwriter Pubali Chaudhuri (Rock On!; Rock On! 2; Kai Po Che) has written, directed and produced her first film — the 23-minute long Chithi (Bengali for letter) — as much as a personal memory project as an exercise to test her screenwriting skills on an actual set and with actors. “After decades of working in the ‘industrial' environment of mainstream movie-making, I wanted, for once, the freedom to have the film shape up in the way I imagined it,” Chaudhuri says. The indie film premiered at the Indian Film Festival of New York in May 2023 and also went on to be an official selection at the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne and the London Lift-Off Film Festival last year. Read more. | | THE WEEKEND FIX The countdown begins: What the coming dip in global population means for us all While India worries about its growing population, the world is looking at the entirely opposite problem: This is the century in which the planet will empty out. Countries around the world are seeing a slow, sustained collapse of fertility. Even in places where population is growing—India, North Africa—a tipping point is approaching. And it’s coming earlier than expected. The United Nations’ 2022 Revision of World Population Prospects estimates that Earth’s population will peak at about 10.4 billion people in the 2080s and remain at that level until 2100. But new data from individual censuses and localised studies shows that it could peak at 9.5 billion people, as early as the late 2050s, and decline sharply aftery. This means that for most of us, change will come in our lifetimes. “The children born today will inherit a vastly different world by the time they enter the workforce,” says sociologist and demographer Sonalde Desai, director of the National Data Innovation Centre at the National Council of Applied Economic Research. Read more. | | | | ALWAYS AT THE MOVIES BY ANUPAMA CHOPRA Gripping tales from the southside In August 2019, at a Q and A, after the screening of Virus (2019), an enthralled viewer asked the film’s director Aashiq Abu, what they were reading and watching because the storytelling in Malayalam cinemas was so much superior to Bollywood. That moment came back to me over the last two weeks as I watched Bramayugam and Poacher. Bramayugam is a fantasy horror period film co-written and directed by Rahul Sadasivan, who earlier made Bhoothakaalam (2022). The title means ‘The Age of Madness’ and the story is set in the 17th century. Bramayugam, shot entirely in black and white, is an allegory about power. The brilliant Mammootty plays Kodumon Potti, a powerful lord of a sprawling but dilapidated manor where time seems to stand still. A singer (Arjun Ashokan), who is lost in the forest wanders into this space and then finds out that like in the iconic Eagles song, Hotel California, he can check out any time he likes but he can never leave. Sharing the same fate is the cook (Sidharth Bharathan) who has been trapped there even longer. Potti perversely toys with these two like a child hurting animals as a pastime. At one point, it seems that the tables might turn but ultimately, Bramayugam repeats what British historian Lord Acton famously said: Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Read more. | | Were you forwarded this email? Did you stumble upon it online? Sign up here. | | Written and edited by Shahana Yasmin. Produced by Md Shad Hasnain. | | | | | | | Get the Hindustan Times app and read premium stories | | | | | | View in Browser | Privacy Policy | Contact us You received this email because you signed up for HT Newsletters or because it is included in your subscription. Copyright © HT Digital Streams. All Rights Reserved | | | | |  | |
