In 1979, Basu Chatterjee made Baaton Baaton Mein and unobtrusively brought to us the dating and courtship rituals of a community that was till then either caricatured or just overlooked in Hindi cinema. Nancy Perreira and Tony Braganza…
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Matriarchal manipulation in a patriarchal world is depicted unsparingly in Usha Priyamwada’s Pachpan Khambe Laal Deewarein (Now playing on Prasar Bharti). The mother resentful of her lecturer daughter’s comfortable life in her college residence because the younger daughters…
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“Start with hope..always start with hope. We went from being a shitty team to become one of the biggest dynasties in the sport and all it needed was one match to light this fire,” says Michael Jordan at…
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In 1947, my grandparents brought three children and the remains of an uprooted life from Pakistan to India in a train. One of those children was my mother. I grew up hearing a lot of stories about the…
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Three documentaries streaming right now show the ultimate culmination of the Bois Locker Room culture. And what happens when one gender is taught to mistrust its instincts of self-preservation and the other does not even learn something as…
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In Sudip Sharma’s Paatal Lok (Now streaming on Amazon. Co written by Sharma, Sagar Haveli, Hardik Mehta and Gunjit Chopra. Directed by Avinash Arun and Prosit Roy), India’s disowned inhabit the headlines we turn away from. A young…
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In Raj Kapoor’s Awaara (1951), Shashi Kapoor was a cherub with the eyes of a little devil. As the disadvantaged child of an impoverished mother, you see him brutalised by a cruel world, lose his innocent faith in life, in goodness and turn to petty crime to survive. This shift could not have been easy […]
‘Dil ki choton ne kabhi chain se rehne na diya jab chali sard hawa maine tujhe yaad kiya’ (The wounded heart restlessly aches… Whenever the wind ripples, for you…I crave) ‘Iss ka rona nahi kyun tumne kiya dil barbaad Iss ka gham hai ki bahut der se barbaad kiya’ (I don’t mourn the fact that […]
Working with acclaimed art director Suzanne Caplan Merwanji (whose work in Farhan Akhtar’s film Dil Chahta Hai gave Hindi cinema, a new design template) in the capacity of a photographer, Meenal Agarwal never really thought she would get sucked into the world of creating multi-dimensional cinematic contexts. Contexts where stories can live, breathe and […]
The girl mocked into silence by a devastating shaming campaign is speaking again.To claim the right to tell her story. She, who became fodder for 49 rap songs, recalled in a recent TED talk, with poise collected over the span of a decade or more, the names she was called by the media, by online […]
This International Women’s Day, as we celebrated sheroes who have shown us how to own their power and impact lives positively, I was reminded of an article adapted from Debora L. Spar’s new book Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection. She is the president of Barnard College and says something really pertinent […]
Director Navdeep Singh’s journey through the Hindi filmscape has been a bit like the perilous road trip in his latest film NH10. He uses words like ‘crash’ and ‘burn’ to describe the years that followed his first film Manorama Six Feet Under (2007). This moody and atmospheric interpretation of Polanski’s Chinatown won critical acclaim […]
Overly critical of ourselves, we are often busy either keeping up with the latest fads or working hard at refuting them. Every woman I know is fighting her own battle to break some kind of societal convention. I usually find myself at war with the concept of “what is good and right?” versus “what society […]
“Almost all your blogs talk about work,” my daughter declared a few weeks ago. I mildly protested but then it struck me that she was right. The years since I started blogging have been devoted to finding work, finding my passion, quitting jobs, moving and trying to find work again. At times I was under […]
Like all good actors, Aamina Sheikh is a chameleon. Her strong, striking face exudes both resilience and quiet simplicity in Pakistani soaps like Maat and Shikkan (now playing on Zee Zindagi) and yet when she wants to play a global citizen, she transforms herself in a second into a woman who drips effortless pizzazz. Born […]
When you call activist Harish Iyer, you hear instead a hilarious warning by Quick Gun Murugan to not waste too much of the gentleman’s time. Compliment Harish on all the work he is doing for rape survivors and LGBT rights and he feigns sadness and says, “But all this is not enough to get me […]
Suzette Jordan was not a name. Or a face, Or a person. For most part of the last years of her life, she was just a news headline. A controversial rape story. A cautionary tale about what a single woman must never do on a night out with her girl friends. She should not go […]
There is very little talk in Navdeep Singh’s NH10 but there is one chilling conversation summing up the heart of the darkness that India loses itself in ever so often. A cop is talking to Anushka Sharma’s Meera, almost as if, she, an urban woman, is an alien who must be educated about the laws […]