Author: Patricia Dsouza Lobo

You have almost certainly worn it. On a scarf, a shirt, a bedsheet, a tie passed down from a father or grandfather — the teardrop-shaped pattern the world calls “paisley” is one of the most reproduced designs in fashion history. Ask most people where it comes from, and you will get a shrug, or a guess involving Scotland. Almost no one will say, Kashmir. That gap between how far this pattern has travelled and how little anyone credits where it began is not an accident. It is the result of one of history’s most remarkable cases of a traditional design…

You have almost certainly heard that Indian cinema began in 1913, with a silent film called Raja Harishchandra. Its director, Dadasaheb Phalke, didn’t just make one film; he helped lay the foundations of what would grow into one of the largest film industries on Earth. What you probably haven’t heard is that the films he built it with have almost entirely disappeared. The original print barely survived its own decade. Film historians recount that it was lost within a few years of release, according to one widely cited account, destroyed by fire while being transported between screenings. What is better…

In 1973, two young writers finished the script for a film that would go on to make Amitabh Bachchan a superstar. When the posters went up around Bombay, every name was on them – the producer, the director, the star – except theirs. So they hired a painter and stencilled their own names onto the posters. Those writers were Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar. Decades later, recalling it in the 2024 docuseries Angry Young Men, Salim Khan put it simply: “Our names were nowhere to be seen.” Sit with that for a moment. The men who wrote Zanjeer, Deewaar and…