Gone Girl and Lost Stars: A year in ten best pop culture discoveries
#1. Gone Girl: I confess that I had not read Gillian Flynn's book until the David Fincher movie came out, and quickly did so before sitting down to watch Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike enact the cool couple Nick and Amy. She was chilling as an Alfred Hitchcockian blonde, he was perfectly cast as the somewhat dufferish lunkhead. Marriage is hard work, and Gone Girl showed us exactly how much.
#2. Fawad Khan: After I saw the Pakistani actor in Khoobsurat, I realised he had an enormous fan following in India based on years of watching Pakistani soaps (an indulgence if there was one given how s.l.o.w.l.y things move there). I realised that his crazed fans had good reason to be so moved by his paper cutter cheekbones. So much so that I found myself at a recent India-Pakistan round-table sharing a paper on soft power partly based on him and listening to another, from the marvellous Delhi University historian Charu Gupta, devoted entirely to him.
#3. Nimrat Kaur: I had seen her in The Lunchbox and loved her in the Cadbury Silk ad, but fully appreciated her only in season 4 of Homeland, which has fortunately hit all the right marks after a terrible season 3 in which they killed my favourite Nicholas Brody. She plays the diabolical Tasneem, an ISI operative whose sympathies are with the Taliban. I can't wait to see more of her, preferably in American television.
#4. Adam Levine: He was always the tattooed dude with questionable views on women who appeared as a judge on The Voice. That was until I saw him in Begin Again, a little gem of a film co-starring Keira Knightley and the always perfect Mark Ruffalo, and heard its emblematic song, "Lost Stars". "'It's hunting season and the lambs are on the run/searching for meaning/But are we all lost stars/trying to light up the dark."' Listen to it and weep.
#5. Tabu: Call it a rediscovery. She was magnificent as Gertrude in Vishal Bhardwaj's visceral adaptation of Hamlet, Haider. Only in Bollywood do they not write enough roles for a woman of her talent.
#6. Kalki Koechlin: DevD showed us promising new talent. But at the India Today Conclave, Kalki the writer/actor blew us away with a powerful performance focused on what it means to being a woman.
"Women have their ways,
As somebody once put it.
The Queen of Sheba, Empress Theodora, Rabia al' Basra,
Cleopatra, The Victorian Era, The Mona Lisa
The Suffragettes, Marilyn Monroe, The sixties and burning bras,
The unpopular Thatcher and our own Indira
Et cetra et cetra and now here we are.
Here we are,
We've survived this far,
Thanks to seduction, perhaps some manipulation,
But mostly thanks to Mother Nature and ovulation.
Now look at all the queens and goddesses of history,
No prince came to the rescue,
No king ever went down on one knee,
No deity was even that trustworthy,
Yet all we've been told since we were three,
Are fairytales, adverts, and pretty stories,
Telling us to pray, hope,
And wait to be saved.
Here we are today.
Here we are,
On International Women's Day,
With some minor disappointments,
And a few little things to say.''
#7. Brain Pickings: A website that curates the best of literature from across the world with an uncanny ability to lift your spirits. Maria Popova reads voraciously so that you don't have to, or so that you can delive into things deeper. From Joan Diidon on grief to Vincent Van Gogh's letters to his brother, creativity, love, loss, life, you will find an answer to everything in this. Follow her on Twitter at @brainpicker.
#8. The Americans: 1980s America at the height of the Cold War. The luminous Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys as Russian spies living ordinary suburban travel agents' lives while killing, lying and seducing for Mother Russia. What's not to love? Watch the first two seasons before embarking on the third which starts in January. Almost as addictive as the other favourite I discovered last year, the lying, cheating and seducing couple at the top of American politics in contemporary America played by Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright in House of Cards.
#9. That every foreigner has to do an Indian dance: No matter who he is, even Keyser Soze, has to do a desi move to be accepted by India. Spacey had to do the lungi dance and Roger Federer had to do the Amitabh Bachchan move. I hope we reciprocate by doing a pirouette.
#10. TED Talks: One stop cure for depression. Need to feel inspired, outraged or just amazed? Log on and watch some of the speeches. My current favourites; Ken Robinson on why schools kill creativity and Susan Cain on the power of introverts.
Honourable mentions:
Josh Charles (how could they let you go), who played Will in The Good Wife, a smart, driven lawyer with a thing for his co-worker Alicia Florrick. Their timing was always wrong - except for a few glorious episodes - and it remains one of the saddest exits in recent American television history.
Julian Ovenden's voice: The actor played Charles, the modern toff, in season 4 and 5 of Downton Abbey and appears to have lost the love game with the haughty Lady Mary, but please listen to his voice in his singer avatar. No one can sing Stephen Sondheim better.
Poirot: What Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock is to the rest of the world, David Suchet's Poirot is to me. A very precise detective. The episodes can be watched on a loop, not in the least because they seem to star almost every notable English actor in his youth.