psaram42 - 26 February, 2013 | Bangalore | Analysis | Language and Culture | Oscars Award | Sharmistha Gooptu | Vibish Shivakumar

India is often perceived as a land of magical or spiritual powers. In India the existence of individual spirits as separate from the physical bodies is an accepted belief. Though highly unscientific bereft of any evidence it is deep rooted in the Indian psyche.

Life of Pi throws up rather obvious comparisons with the last film that was big on India at the Oscars – Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, which won the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars in 2009. The characters Piscine Molitor ‘Pi’ and Slumdog Millionaire’s Jamal Malik are both young men battling the odds in life, one kept alive by his belief in god and His goodness and the other by his belief in love.  Click here for the article

Dr. Sharmista Gooptu [1] is the Founding Trustee of the South Asia Research Foundation, scholar and author.

• She did her schooling from Loreto House, Calcutta and Graduated from Presidency College, PhD at the University of Chicago.
• Author of Bengali Cinema: another Nation (Roli Books, 2010; Routledge, 2011).
• She Co-founded the South Asia Research Foundation (SARF) in 2008.
• She is a Co-editor of the Rutledge journal South Asian History and Culture, and the South Asian History and Culture Books Series, Rutledge.
• She is also an Editor of the recently launched South Asia Archive, a digital repository of 5 million pages of historical materials from colonial and early post-colonial India.

To days TOI carries her article "Fetishing An Idea of Inda" [2]  is a significant article by the author on the film "Life of Pi" getting an Oscar for the Indian boy Vibish Sivakumar a Bangalore boy.[3 ]

Bangalore: Life has been a crazy roller-coaster ride for Bangalore boy Vibish Sivakumar since the promos of Life of Pi were out. Vibish played the role of Pi Patel’s older brother Ravi. On Sunday, the celebrations just got bigger after Ang Lee’s film notched four Oscars.

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