The Lunchbox, a film of everyday life of Mumbai, is uniquely brilliant in its economy of language without verbose, precise dialogues and is marked by the characteristic precision of the actors' expressions. Its visuals communicate a lot through sound and, above all, smell of food, of infidelity, of senility, and so forth. It becomes a container of a variety of expressions: affection, anger, riposte and rapprochement. It is a fi lm exploring issues like the pathological side of conjugal relationships in a patriarchal family with great subtlety and optimism.
CPI-ML general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya has said that the verdict of the additional district and sessions court of Patna sentencing 16 Ranvir Sena men to death and 10 to life imprisonment for the 1997 Laxmanpur Bathe massacre, though belated, is a slap in the face of the Nitish Kumar gover
Goa, with only two parliamentary constituencies, divided its favours equally between the two main alliances in the 2004 elections. Though, and as previous trends also bear out, voting in Goa has generally been along community lines, this time other factors were at play too. Both constituencies showed widely varying patterns as regards campaign practices adopted by the contesting parties and also in terms of voter preferences. In North Goa, the anti-incumbency factor did not work against the sitting BJP MP, whereas in South Goa, the Congress was assisted to power by a united NCP-Congress campaign and by the church's appeals to the electorate.
