RD Recommends: Humans In the Loop, The Roses and More

Humans In The Loop 

Now streaming on Netflix

Directed by: Aranya Sahay

Written by: Aranya Sahay, based on the article Human Touch by Karishma Mehrotra, published in FiftyTwo

Starring: Sonal Madhushankar   

Inspired by a 2022 long-form article by journalist Karishma Mehrotra, Aranya Sahay’s Humans In The Loop premiered at the 2024 MAMI (Mumbai Academy of Moving Image) film festival. The film follows an Adivasi woman called Nehma (Sonal Madhushankar) living in a Jharkhand village, who ends up working as a data labeller to train AI models—she has to label objects seen in photos and videos, thereby helping the AI understand, process and classify. A divorced mother of two, Nehma finds new lease of life through her work, where she also confronts the inherent biases built into AI-based systems. The film has received considerable acclaim on the festival circuit, and is a very timely release, given the pace with which AI is taking over several realms of human endeavour.

The Roses

Now streaming on JioHotstar

Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Olivia Colman, Kate McKinnon, Allison Janney, Andy Samberg, Sunita Mani

Directed by: Jay Roach 

A remake of the 1981 black comedy The War of the Roses starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, Jay Roach’s latest directorial venture follows a wealthy couple, Theo and Ivy (Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman, respectively), with a seemingly perfect marriage. Over the tumultuous three years it takes to build their dream house, the well-concealed cracks in their relationship begin to emerge. Theo and Ivy bicker over material possessions, their arguments getting sillier and sillier by the day. Their descent into peak pettiness is unwittingly accelerated by the couple’s friend Barry (Andy Samberg) who also happens to be Theo’s divorce lawyer. If you like sitcoms where chaos reigns and terrible people engage in relentless one-upmanship, look no further than The Roses.

Slow Horses Season 5

Now streaming on AppleTV+

Created by: William James Smith, based on Slow Horses by Mick Herron

Starring: Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Jack Lowden, Jonathan Pryce, Olivia Cooke  

One of Apple’s most popular, crowd-pleasing shows, Slow Horses is an espionage drama based on Mick Herron’s Slough House series of novels. Disgraced spy-master Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) leads a team of shunned, failed MI5 agents who have been handed a ‘punishment posting’ to the ramshackle Slough House. In this administrative purgatory, the obnoxious, flatulent Lamb whiles away his days eating Indian takeout and poking fun at his hapless underlings. However, Lamb’s unappealing public face hides his ruthlessness, operational cunning and unshakeable sense of patriotism, as he and his team rise to the occasion whenever British national security is threatened. In the fifth season, Lamband Co. race against the clock to stop a series of terrorist attacks across the UK, seemingly carried out by homegrown terrorists. 

Courtesans Don’t Read Newspapers by Anil Yadav, translated by Vaibhav Sharma, Ebury Press

A hard-hitting collection of five stories and the titular novella, Courtesans Don’t Read Newspapers is the latest literary effort from Anil Yadav, one of the most distinctive contemporary voices in Hindi literature. Yadav's stories focus on the marginalized members of society in Uttar Pradesh—prostitutes, Muslim weavers and so on. In the titular novella, an idealistic reporter finds himself fighting the entire system. He is trying to expose a massive land grab carried out under the pretext of “freeing society” from the immorality of prostitutes. In other stories, a young couple is torn asunder by the inexplicable allure of a used-clothes market, a middle-aged man tries to recapture a cherished childhood memory, a folk singer slowly loses his soul amidst the demands of electoral politics—a full bag of impressionistic narrative-tricks by a master satirist.

Nautch Boy by Manish Gaekwad, HarperCollins India

Bollywood screenwriter Manish Gaekwad wrote his mother’s story in The Last Courtesan (2023)— this new memoir, Nautch Boy, is his own story. Gaekwad’s mother Rekhabai, originally from the Kanjarbhat tribe, was sold as a tawaif as a child. Her son’s childhood was spent in the dying kothas of ’90s Calcutta, as the Bow Bazaar bomb blast dealt a heavy blow to kothas in the commercial areas of the city. Amidst guns, gangsters and ghazals, Manish is packed off to an English-language boarding school, where he tries his best to assimilate, and pretend like he has nothing to do with his mother’s world. A poignant story told with wisdom and empathy, Nautch Boy is a fine follow-up to The Last Courtesan.

Uprooted: A Graphic Account of the Struggle for Forest Rights by Ita Mehrotra, Westland Books

Uttarakhand has historically been at the forefront of the Indian ecological movement, the tree-hugging Chipko movement having emerged from the region in the 1960s and 70s. In Uprooted, Ita Mehrotra tells this conservationist story from the perspective of Van Gujjar and Taungya farmers—communities whose lives, beliefs and cultures revolve around the forest. For several decades now, these communities have struggled against indiscriminate deforestation, accelerating climate change, government apathy and frequently misleading promises of ‘development’. How do you ‘resettle’ an ecosystem?, one interviewee in the book asks, challenging the resettlement narrative usually offered by governments looking to rapidly hand over land to private capital. It’s a question more of us ought to ponder.

Lost; Found by Faheem Abdullah

Streaming on YouTube and Spotify

The young Kashmiri singer Faheem Abdullah is the flavour of the season on both YouTube India and Spotify India right now. Abdullah’s heartfelt rendition of the title track from the film Saiyaara won him a legion of fans and led to a resurgence of interest in his 2024 album Lost; Found, which features a blend of hummable soft-rock riffs with Sufi and folk lyrics. It has 14 tracks in total, running to almost 80 minutes. Like Aatif Aslam and Arijit Singh, Abdullah knows how to tap into a very desi brand of melancholia, as the smouldering ‘Sajde’ proves, alongside ‘Aag’ which is just as sombre in its beauty. However, this isn’t an album content with diffuse angst. ‘Kashmir’ is a loving, wistful ode to Abdullah’s homeland while ‘Parwaan’ is a quiet demonstration of his Hindustani classical chops.

Joy, a Podcast by Craig Ferguson

Streaming on Spotify

The Scottish-American actor and comedian Craig Ferguson was a familiar, genial presence on late-night TV through the 2000s, his signature drawling monologues delivered with the camera right in his face (as opposed to Carson, Letterman and co. who kept their distance). Since the last couple of years, he has been producing and hosting the Joy podcast, inviting many of his peers in the talk show circuit. This podcast's ‘Big Subject’ is, quite simply, joy. More specifically, how does a thinking, empathetic person shield themselves against cynicism in this day and age? How do we insulate ourselves against the pervasive joylessness that marks so much of the post-Instagram era? From this fairly broad starting point, Ferguson and his guests embark on a series of wholesome, well-rounded conversations. A recent episode featuring ’80s and ’90s TV icon Jay Leno was excellent, as was the uproarious hour-long episode with comedian Hasan Minhaj.

The Sinica Podcast by Kaiser Kuo

Streaming on Spotify

It seems that everybody online in India today, regardless of their calling, has strong opinions on Chinese culture, society and economic policy. As is usually the case for social media, these opinions are seldom backed up by facts and knowledge. To those seeking to bridge this knowledge-gap, The Sinica Podcast is a natural home. The Chinese-American writer Kaiser Kuo has been hosting some version or the other of this podcast for over a decade now. Kuo talks to journalists, economists, policy experts et al., about all things China, especially with regards to how they impact the world at large. The latest episode sees Kuo and Evan Feigenbaum (from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) discussing President Donald Trump’s tariffs on India from a Chinese point of view—could this be the immediate tipping point for a resurgence of BRICS alliances?

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