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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This morning I ate my breakfast mindfully. That is to say that I ate my breakfast as opposed to shoving food in my mouth while my mind raced ahead towards the day, one hand on the cellphone checking for messages and eyes on the computer screen, with parts of me scattered all over time and […]
Some people measure a day in Almora by whether the lofty Himalaya will peak through her veil of high altitude powder puff and the resultant powdery dust laden air. “See the Mountains today?” is the opening line of my neighbour after the usual good mornings. A ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ answer will determine the cosmic quality […]
The muffled thrum of the boat is the only sound in the mist coated forests of one of the world’s largest estuarine deltas. The mangrove forest of the Sunderbans forest breathes in an out in drips. Trees emerge eerily in the dew soaked exhalation of the land. Within the rise and fall of the tides, […]
The Gods would have taken one giant stride to reach Dunagiri from Almora, I took the road less travelled. A road that unravelled through fields governed by the Kumaon Mothers of the Earth, all of whom are busily engaged in turning the tapestry of their agricultural blanket into the rich colours of autumn. Grasses and […]
Good Sadhu Babas should never be as you expect them to be and Rocket Baba is no exception. Though over 70, he has the body of a fit 30-year-old, his skin and eyes are clear and his voice just booms. He arrives at the house of his student, my rakhi brother Gopal, like an angry […]
I have always been a fan of slow travel and fast talking. In the beginning years of being on the road, it was cheaper anyway to settle down in one place and get to know it rather than hurtle from place to place like a Paparazzi tourist. Also there was the hassle of moving from […]
The chaotic streets of Cambodia’s capital give a sense of the turbulent history of this land of contradictions and surprises. As our car nudges its way inch-by-inch through the melee, where motorbikes and luxury cars jostle with heavily laden bullock carts at the point where Charles de Gaulle Boulevard intersects with Mao Tse Tung Road, […]
All civilisations rise and fall but at Angkor, the remains of the great days of the ancient Khmer civilisation slumbered deep in the heart of the jungles of North Western Cambodia like a sleeping beauty waiting to be discovered for centuries. Abandoned finally by the Khmer after being sacked by the Thai in 1431, Angkor […]
Having been cocooned in two great resorts managed by Habitat Hotels in the Corbett Park recently, I was less than prepared for What Happened Next.Two days at the dreamily remote from the world Riverine Woods ended abruptly with an early morning call at a time that was still actually night. The monsoon had arrived and swollen […]
Chacha ji is my balcony buddy in Vashisht, in the North Western Himalayas during the summer season. A balcony buddy is someone to sit and watch the human traffic pass beneath and around us with, someone to make the odd comment to or interjection about anything and everything with. Someone to pass time with. From […]
I reckon there are probably not too many people who travel these days without the benefit of a guidebook but for those of you who do, you may be interested to note that it is not permitted to walk across the Friendship Bridge that marks the no mans land between Laos and Thailand. Don’t ask […]
“Hello, it’s Diana this side.” This side of WHAT you may ask? “This side of the phone!” When my office boy decided to drive me insane with his efficient inefficiency, one of his tactics was to wait until I had finished giving him instructions at his desk and had walked into my own […]