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Johny ML
Johny is a New Delhi-based art historian, critic, curator and writer.
Collapse of Faith & Immoral Policing: The Indelible Images From Communist Kerala
08/04/2017Peace is abstract while violence has its own striking images. The image of Kerala Police officials dragging Mahija, the mother of Jishnu Pranoy, an engineering…
Rahasyangalude Pusthakam: The Secret Life of Artist Gopikrishna
01/04/2017Imagine a scenario where we could get into the minds of creative people. The result could be frightening, if not fascinating. That’s what we experience…
The Art of Mathai KT: A Prayer for the Wounded Land
21/12/2016When Indian contemporary art was going big and the spaces in and around Kochi were being acquired by land as well as art ‘developers’ during the…
The Curry Coast: A Culinary Journey Through Malabar History
05/12/2016Cartoonist E.P. Unny has this hilarious take on Malayalees. He says if you see a group of people at India Gate in New Delhi admiring the war memorial on a cold…
Fidel Castro: The Communist God Kerala Didn’t Invoke
27/11/2016It’s heaven to be a revolutionary when you are a 33-year-old, the age when Fidel Castro (1926-2016) came to power by overthrowing the Batista Regime in…
Remembering Tathri While Reading Coelho’s Mata Hari
24/11/2016It took me three hours to finish reading ‘The Spy,’ Paulo Coelho’s latest novel. Not really a page turner, but the 180 pages of fiction based…
What Pulimurugan Fails to Fight
17/10/2016A good consumer is a strong fanatic. Despite his/her willingness to test and taste new products in the market, internally he/she remains loyal to the products…
The Girl on a Swing and the Art of A. Ramachandran
03/10/2016“This is a girl on a swing,” says artist A. Ramachandran with a mischievous smile. The 81-year-old tall and charismatic artist stands before his…
Sam Mathew, Sakhavu & JB Junction: How Cultural Discourses Are Failing
20/09/2016Meter/metre was something that had deterred too many people from writing poems at some point of time. But during modern times, poets all over the world went…
Sabarimala Entry for Women: Let’s Occupy Our Homes First
07/09/2016Without much ado about anything, it’s pertinent to say the vociferous demand that all women be allowed entry into the Sabarimala temple is nothing but…
Bring Your Drink Home
22/08/2016God said, ‘go and multiply.’ He knew his test models were too lazy to work for it. So he found a way: he banned the fundamental process for multiplication,…
Viral Warriors of Kerala
11/08/2016There’s a viral fever of epidemic proportions in Kerala. Curious and fun-hunting Malayalees make anything and everything viral in social media. Malayalees,…
Return of O.V.Vijayan: Artists’ Works in Progress
01/08/2016When artist Rejeesh Sarovar left for Jaipur in early July this year in a huff, he had forgotten to pick up a novel that he wanted to read during the long train…
Rajinikanth’s Kerala Connection
22/07/2016Finally, Kabali has hit the theatres all over the world. The build-up has been so meticulous and strong that the countdown toward the release date itself was…
Thiruvannamalai: Malayalee Artists’ Tamil Sojourn
21/07/2016Thiruvannamalai, famous for the Ramana Ashram, the seat of sage Ramana, doesn’t look like a lucrative abode for artists. Spiritualists of different…
The Mega Star's Mighty Fall
15/07/2016' Rajamanikyam ', released in 2005, was a watershed film in Mammootty’s career. Still charming with his chiselled looks, the then 54-year-old ‘Mega…
Kerala’s Renaissance Man
27/06/2016Kavalam Narayana Panicker is no more. In his hay days, the arrival and departure of death would've been with the evocative chanting of folk rhythms. When he…
Ozhivu Divasathe Kali: A Brutal Show on Malayalees' Unanchored Life
17/06/2016Circa 1970. Location: a local reading room in Kerala. Five young men sit around a table and discuss Kafka, Camus, Freud, Marx, and politics. They argue vehemently…