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 Marriage Story (now streaming on Netflix), there is a moment so infinitesimal that you can miss it if you just blink. A child caught between his politely but stubbornly adversarial parents, is seen playing with two toys in a quiet corner. And then he speaks as one toy to another, “I was falling and […]
Someone I know, recently shifted to an old age facility. Another resident, (in his nineties incidentally), asked her within days of her arrival , what languages she was conversant with. When she named Bengali in the list, he snapped, “I will report you to NRC people.” Hate you see gives a sense of purpose to […]
On the day freedom fighters and lifelong friends Ramprasad Bismil and Ashfaq Ullah Khan were hanged, and a few weeks after the death of Shaukat Kaifi, I heard Shabana Azmi on a channel, quoting the famous couplet penned by her father. “आज की रात बहुत गर्म हवा चलती है, आज की रात न फ़ुटपाथ पे […]
In a country where women are raped and occasionally burnt by packs of predators, the most powerful image in the past few days was this. A few young women from Jamia Millia Islamia protecting a cowering young man from police violence. And the women of Bangalore, forming a protective circle around men to shield them […]
Soni (now streaming on Netflix) captures what it feels like to walk in a woman’s body on deserted streets, even when you are not a marked victim but a law enforcer in disguise. It also shows the futility of the police uniform on the body of a woman when she wants to do more than […]
Mohan Rakesh’s Ashaadh Ka Ek Din has served as a stencil for many stories about love, ambition and regret. Sarthak Dasgupta’s Music Teacher (on Netflix) is also a retelling of that familiar story of a romantic, Himalayan idyll interrupted by ambition, with a gender switch thrown in. There are also traces of A Star is […]
There is a telling scene in Ritesh Batra’s film Photograph (playing on Amazon). Two scenes in fact that mirror each other. In both, Miloni (Sanya Malhotra marvellously exuding a contained wistfulness) is at a shop to buy a dress. The first scene shows her standing noncommittally before a mirror while her sister and mother argue […]
I chanced upon The Wife, Colette and Big Eyes in a serendipitous sequence and all films are about the complicated reasons women allow their life and work to be appropriated by men. And also because societal constructs do not easily grant them their autonomy as creative, complex beings. The Wife is directed by Bjõrn L. […]
Kabir Singh is not an anomaly. He is just the ultimate culmination of the privilege that male protagonists have enjoyed in Hindi cinema for a long time. Raj Kapoor slapped and manhandled Nargis in Awara (1956) because she playfully called him ‘Junglee.” But he had a messy, heartbreaking backstory so she had to rescue him […]
Decades before Article 15, a certain film delivered a stunning cinematic punch line against oppression. A woman of privilege who lives in the “upper” regions of a fictional city, appears in front of men who have gathered to decide whether a nullah running through the “lower” parts of the city is dirty or not. The […]
“You have to break up a nation first if you want to put its pieces together the way you want.” These words attributed to Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign manager Steve Bannon sent chills down my spine. The Great Hack, a Netflix documentary about the Cambridge Analytica scandal and how the company played a key role […]
Onir’s anthology I Am (2010) remains one of the most deeply felt and insightful cinematic statements on Kashmir where Juhi Chawla’s Megha (a Kashmiri Pandit) and Manisha Koirala’s Rubina (a Kashmiri Muslim) connect after twenty years of estrangement amid barbed wires, abandoned, crumbling homes with bullet riddled walls and layers upon layers of anger and […]