Baradwaj Rangan

Baradwaj Rangan is an Indian film critic, writer, and formerly the deputy editor of ''The Hindu''. He later became a senior editor of Film Companion. Rangan won the National Film Award for Best Film Critic in 2006. Before joining ''The Hindu'', Rangan wrote for ''The New Indian Express''. He has also authored two books, worked as a screenwriter, and is a teacher at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.

Career

Baradwaj Rangan had no formal training in filmmaking or cinema writing. He is a chemical engineering graduate from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. According to him, it was a time when "parents considered only medicine or engineering" to be "serious professions", that he did not have interest but continued with it anyway. Rangan claims that he was fascinated with writing and liked reading critical analyses on world cinema, especially those by American critics. He was selected for a workshop by the Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI), Mumbai which led to him having a stint as a copywriter with J. Walter Thompson in Chennai. After that, Rangan received a full scholarship from the Marquette University, Milwaukee for a Master's degree in Advertising and Public relations, focusing on Internet advertising. Later, Rangan worked as an IT Consultant in the United States for about five years. He still had the urge to write and started reviewing films for the website ''sitagita.com''. That was when he was noticed by Sushila Ravindranath, then the editor of ''The New Sunday Express'', the Sunday edition of ''The New Indian Express''. Rangan worked there for two years, before shifting to ''The Hindu'', which he became the deputy editor of. Rangan also wrote for the magazine ''Tehelka'', while still working at ''The New Indian Express''. His first review was of the Hindi film '' Dum'', published on 30 January 2003 in the ''Madras Plus'' supplement of ''The Economic Times''.

Rangan has authored two books: ''Conversations with Mani Ratnam'' (2012), wherein he interviews film director Mani Ratnam on the perspectives of his films, and ''Dispatches From The Wall Corner: A Journey through Indian Cinema'' (2014), which he describes as a "panoramic view of Indian cinema". He also wrote an essay in ''Subramaniyapuram: The Tamil Film in English Translation'' (2014). Rangan made his debut as a dialogue writer with ''Kadhal 2 Kalyanam'', which never saw a theatrical release. He later wrote the screenplay for ''Kalki'', a 2017 release. He also teaches a course on cinema at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, and has interviewed notable personalities like producer/writer G. Dhananjayan, and director Gautham Vasudev Menon. Rangan wrote the English narrative for the 2014 play ''Meghadootam: The Cloud Messenger''. A short story written by him, ''The Call'', was published in ''The Indian Quarterly'' magazine. As of 2017, Rangan was the editor of ''Film Companion South'', and left in 2022. He is also a member of the Film Critics Circle of India.

In October 2018, Rangan was a guest speaker at India Film Project where he discussed about a critic's job and the role of criticism in the 'Insta Generation' along with critics Rajeev Masand and Vikramaditya Motwane.

Awards

At the 53rd National Film Awards which took place in 2006, Rangan won in the Best Film Critic category. The citation given to him by the jury of the 53rd National Film Awards reads, "The Award is presented for intelligent and reader-friendly reviews of popular cinema with a depth of understanding of the form, a discernible passion for the medium bulwarked consistently by a knowledge of the trends and touchstones of global cinema." In 2013, Arul Mani of ''Tehelka'' described Rangan as "far and away the most intelligent writer we have in India when it comes to cinema".

Works

* '' Conversations with Mani Ratnam'' (2012) Penguin UK

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases