Welcome to the third edition of the lounge podcast with your host Anindita Ghose. We hope you had a great week following up on our weekly artsy recommendations.

Today we’re going to move to something more somber than what usually qualifies as Lounge.

This Thursday, as you all know, marks the first anniversary of the terrible, terrible tragedy that unfolded in Mumbai last year with the terrorist siege. This week’s Lounge issue is almost entirely dedicated to that. And it’s only appropriate that the podcast is as well. We’re going to start off by speaking with Lounger Parizaad Khan from our Mumbai bureau about the process of putting this issue together—it’s really a job well done. As Parizaad will tell you, several of the people featured in the issue, have never spoken to the media before this. Their stories offer new and more humane insights to the 26/11 events. Read more…

A few questions into an interview with New York Magazine, David Lynch clarifies what his next film is going to be about:

I went on IMDb.com to see what you were up to next …
Most of it is lies …

Well, it listed Snootworld as your next directing project. Is that true?
No. [Laughs] Snootworld is a kind of children’s film, and it’s not happening yet.

What is your next project?
I’m going to make a film on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It won’t be a so-called David Lynch film, really; it will be about Maharishi and the knowledge he brought out. It’ll hold a lot of abstractions. We’re on our way to India in December to start the India part of it. Read more…

The government of Sri Lanka has recently unveiled a brand-new 1000 Sri Lankan rupee bank note to commemorate “The Ushering Of Peace And Prosperity To Sri Lanka”. Which, I assume, means the final and complete defeat of the LTTE all over the island nation. According to the press release by the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (doc format) this is just the second commemorative note ever released, the first was launched in 1998 to commemorate 50 years of Sri Lankan indepenence.

So clearly this is a big deal for the country. But not big enough, alas, to get some original art work made for it. Read more…

The blue-eyed boy of the fashion circuit (who is not-so-boy anymore) just launched his first flagship store in India. The venue is Carma, a feted designer space nestled close to Delhi’s Qutab Minar. This reinvented 14th century stable was previously a multi-designer space that stocked the likes of Manish Arora, Rajesh Pratap Singh and Abraham & Thakore. It was famously listed in Vogue as a Shopping All Over The World destination alongside Prada and Hermes stores. The management’s decision to go solo with Sabyasachi has understandably ruffled a few fashion netas. Read more…

Husain’s horses, women and breezy lines are all explained.

His just-launched autobiographical e-book, Untitled, chronicles his life with a sublime non-linearity. In its animated narration, we meet the skinny boy called Maqbool who sold his geography textbook to buy his first tube of oil paint and we meet the Maqbool Fida Husain who earned 4 annas per square feet for his film poster work in Bombay in the 1930s. We meet the man who is forever searching for the mother who died when he was barely two years old, the man who fell in love one too many times and the man who deifies all the women he has known only to deify the one he hasn’t known—his mother.

Kamna Prasad, an Urdu language publisher and cultural activist, pressed Husain to pen these stories. The writing—all 40 chapters of it— and Husain’s sketches and their animation happened over the last three months. Read more…