Author Bio
I belong to a family steeped in Hindi film. My mother Kamna Chandra sowed the Bollywood seed. She wrote scripts for two of Bollywood's finest directors: Raj Kapoor and Yash Chopra. My siblings followed in her footsteps: my sister Tanuja Chandra is one of the few women directors in the Hindi film industry. My brother Vikram Chandra is a renowned novelist (Sacred Games) who has also written film scripts. I am a film critic. And I'm married to Vidhu Vinod Chopra, a well-know Hindi film director whose short film, An Encounter with Faces, was nominated for an Oscar in 1979. Conversations in our home inevitably center on movies, scripts, songs, critics, box office. We rarely agree on anything. I'm a sucker for full-blown Bollywood musicals while my husband, educated in European art house cinema at the Film and Television Institute of India, doesn't have the patience for six songs and melodrama. I have my own weekly film review show on a channel called NDTV 24/7. I see almost every film that is released. Many are terrible but each week, I am thrilled to sit in the dark and escape, with my bag of popcorn, into a landscape of color, joy and beautiful people. For me, and for millions of people around the globe, Hindi cinema is a necessary comfort and a collective expression of hope.
Though I love fantastical Bollywood films, my preferred reading is non-fiction. I read a lot of writing of cinema, especially other film critics. I admire the work of Richard Corliss, Anthony Lane, Roger Ebert and of course Pauline Kael. I also love to read New Yorker writers such as David Remnick and Adam Gopnik. And at the risk of sounding like a besotted younger sister, I think Sacred Games is one of the finest novels I've read in years. ANUPAMA CHOPRA lives in Bombay, India.