SCRIPT TO SCREEN The Progressive Vision of K.A. ABBAS Khwaja Ahmad Abbas is known as a journalist, film director, scriptwriter and novelist. A contemporary of Dr. Mulkraj Anand, he was also an ardent champion of the masses who chose such themes for his artistic creation that would further the formation of an egalitarian society. This book undertakes an in-depth study of his novels, films and journalistic writings to explore his progressive vision as reflected in these creations. The year 2013 is the centenary year of Indian Cinema while 2014 is the birth centenary year of Khwaja Ahmad Abbas. This book, therefore, attempts to foreground the contribution of K. A. Abbas who is an author of more than seventy books in English, a writer of the longest-running column of Indian journalism and a maker of such path-breaking films which may not have been box - office hits but were milestones of Indian cinema. The present book places Abbas in the perspective Vis-a-vis the realism canon and then attempts to disentangle the different strands that go to make up the whole, The inquiry is both factual and interpretive and it is hoped that it would do justice in directing our attention towards a great writer whom time has shrouded over.

This book traces the historical evolution of Indian cinema through a number of key decades. The book is made up of 14 chapters with each chapter focusing on one key film, the chosen films analysed in their wider social, political and historical context whilst a concerted engagement with various ideological strands that underpin each film is also evident. In addition to exploring the films in their wider contexts, the author analyses selected sequences through the conceptual framework common to both film and media studies. This includes a consideration of narrative, genre, representation, audience and mise-en-scene. The case studies run chronologically from Awaara (The Vagabond, 1951) to The Elements Trilogy: Water (2005) and include films by such key figures as Satyajit Ray (The Lonely Wife), Ritwick Ghatak (Cloud Capped Star), Yash Chopra (The Wall) and Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!).

Khwaja Ahmad Abbas distinguished himself by his ceaseless passion for revolutionary politics, which he expressed through his writings and films. He was a visionary who strongly believed that creative and artistic interventions are indispensable to nation-building. Bread Beauty Revolution, spanning the years 1914 to 1987, encapsulates Abbas's work, ideas, and ideals. It also provides an insight into the beginnings of modern India. The volume encapsulates 74 books, 40 films, 89 short stories and 3,000 pieces of journalistic writing byAbbas. His work flows in three languages - Urdu, Hindi, and English - and he translated his own writings freely from one language to another. The volume is in ten parts: (i) 'Abraham and Son', about Abbas's birth and upbringing; (ii) 'I Write as I Feel', which includes Abbas's first and best known short story 'Ababeel' (Sparrows), the story of Abbas's struggle after the publication of his short story 'Meri Maut' (also called 'Sardarji'), and Mulk Raj Anand's letter celebrating his literary genius; (iii) 'My First Love Affair', on his lifelong relationship with and unabashed admiration for Jawaharlal Nehru; (iv) 'Naya Sansar', the witnessing of the birth of an independent India; (v) 'Dharti ke Lal', recounting Abbas's love-hate relationship with the Left movement of which he was an outspoken advocate as well as fearless critic, his account of the birth of IPTA, writing the play Zubaidah and being invited to make the film Dharti ke Lal; (vi) 'Bambai Raat ki Bahon Mein', about another love that gripped his mind and soul, the Indian film industry; (vii) 'Reminiscences', containing personal accounts by people whose lives Abbas influenced, as well as a short story by him, 'Achchan ka Aashiq' (Achchan's Lover); (viii) 'Jagte Raho', an account of Abbas's fight against the censorship imposed on his film Char Shehar Ek Kahani (Four Cities, One Story), 1968, which led to the famous case, K.A. Abbas versus the Union of India, and the landmark judgment in his favour holding that pre-censorship of cinema was a violation of freedom of expression; (ix) 'Ek Aadmi', Abbas's 'beginning' as well as his 'end': his review of Shantaram's film Aadmi which brought him to the film world, and Ek Aadmi, his last film, which had a posthumous birth; andfinally, (x) 'Rahi', named after the eponymous movie Abbas made in 1953 about tea garden workers.

Dorothie and Martin Hellman reveal the secrets that allowed them to transform an almost failed marriage into one where they reclaimed the true love that they felt when they first met fifty years ago. Surprisingly, they found that working on interpersonal and international challenges at the same time accelerated progress on both.

From the late fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Hispanic Monarchy was one of the largest and most diverse political communities known in history. At its apogee, it stretched from the Castilian plateau to the high peaks of the Andes; from the cosmopolitan cities of Seville, Naples, or Mexico City to Santa Fe and San Francisco; from Brussels to Buenos Aires and from Milan to Manila. During those centuries, Spain left its imprint across vast continents and distant oceans contributing in no minor way to the emergence of our globalised era. This was true not only in an economic sense-the Hispano-American silver peso transported across the Atlantic and the Pacific by the Spanish fleets was arguably the first global currency, thus facilitating the creation of a world economic system-but intellectually and artistically as well. The most extraordinary cultural exchanges took place in practically every corner of the Hispanic world, no matter how distant from the metropolis. At various times a descendant of the Aztec nobility was translating a Baroque play into Nahuatl to the delight of an Amerindian and mixed audience in the market of Tlatelolco; an Andalusian Dominican priest was writing the first Western grammar of the Chinese language in Fuzhou, a Chinese city that enjoyed a trade monopoly with the Spanish Philippines; a Franciscan friar was composing a piece of polyphonic music with lyrics in Quechua to be played in a church decorated with Moorish-style ceilings in a Peruvian valley; or a multi-ethnic team of Amerindian and Spanish naturalists was describing in Latin, Spanish and local vernacular languages thousands of medicinal plants, animals and minerals previously unknown to the West. And, most probably, at the same time that one of those exchanges were happening, the members of the School of Salamanca were laying the foundations of modern international law or formulating some of the first modern theories of price, value and money, Cervantes was writing Don Quixote, Velázquez was painting Las Meninas, or Goya was exposing both the dark and bright sides of the European Enlightenment. Actually, whenever we contemplate the galleries devoted to Velázquez, El Greco, Zurbarán, Murillo or Goya in the Prado Museum in Madrid; when we visit the National Palace in Mexico City, a mission in California, a Jesuit church in Rome or the Intramuros quarter in Manila; or when we hear Spanish being spoken in a myriad of accents in the streets of San Francisco, New Orleans or Manhattan we are experiencing some of the past and present fruits of an always vibrant and still expanding cultural community. As the reader can infer by now, this book is about how Spain and the larger Hispanic world have contributed to world history and in particular to the history of civilisation, not only at the zenith of the Hispanic Monarchy but throughout a much longer span of time.

In many senses, viewers have cut their teeth on the violence in American cinema: from Anthony Perkins slashing Janet Leigh in the most infamous of shower scenes; to the 1970s masterpieces of Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah and Francis Ford Coppola; to our present-day undertakings in imagining global annihilations through terrorism, war, and alien grudges. Transfigurations brings our cultural obsession with film violence into a renewed dialogue with contemporary theory. Grønstad argues that the use of violence in Hollywood films should be understood semiotically rather than viewed realistically; Tranfigurations thus alters both our methodology of reading violence in films and the meanings we assign to them, depicting violence not as a self-contained incident, but as a convoluted network of our own cultural ideologies and beliefs.