"Awesome!" shrieked the young lady in front of me as she munched her popcorn. It was the final scene of the film, A Wednesday, and aam admi turned potential bomber, Naseeruddin Shah was at his histrionic best. "If the state simply stands by when we are struck by...

Shabana Azmi is a remarkable woman: five times National award winner, she has performed multiple roles in life and cinema. That someone from the increasingly vacuous world of Bollywood has emerged as a public activist-intellectual is rather creditable in itself. She may well have been a prisoner of...