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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The fierceness of the wind The iciness of the air The melancholia of the clouds The heavens weeping in spiritlessness The wails rebounding off lifeless trees The wait cleaving your heart apart They beckon waiting for the stringless lyre. Your naivete was your deed Your solitude was your birth Your anguish lingered on for me […]
I was in the first batch of inward fellows of the National Foundation of India’s ‘Northeast Media Exchange Programme’. It was 1996-97 and I went to Mizoram. My subject was ‘Changing traditional patterns and the youth of Mizoram’. Though this travel piece has nothing to do with my fellowship subject, it is a by-product of […]
I was idling away a lazy winter afternoon at office, about nine years ago, when I got a frantic call from a friend. Her youngest sister’s husband had been diagnosed with dengue. There was reason to be worried. They needed blood, latest by nightfall. There was only this one sure-shot place in Delhi where you […]
In July this year, the Editor of Mint, R Sukumar, created a bit of a flutter when he wrote of an anchor with a business news channel who got three times her earlier salary, for agreeing to leave the top two buttons of her shirt unbuttoned, after switching jobs. Sukumar admitted that the column was […]
[This article was published in ‘Communalism Combat’s’ tenth anniversary issue in 2003. However, the arguments still remain relevant.] 10 years is a numerically compulsive occasion for retrospection. Both for Javed Anand, Teesta Setalvad and their team, and for those well-wishers like us who have seen them wage a lonely battle since 1993. The introspection bit […]
The Supreme Court, in 2006, had passed a landmark judgment directing all State governments and the Union government to reform the way police forces function all over the country. One of the directives was that Police Complaints Authorities (PCAs) should be set up in all states. The intention was to make the police accountable for […]
The Indian film industry is one of the largest in the world, and Indian cinema is unmatched in its variety. Tracing the history of Indian cinema through the traditional methods is not tedious – it is too gargantuan a task. This is just an attempt to revisit the Indian film history, and look at various […]
I was a tad surprised when he told me that he wouldn’t be able to meet me late evening since it was late, and he would have to return home. You don’t always expect guys to rush homewards just because it is a trifle late. We had initially planned to meet early evening, but another […]
Shortly after I landed in Agartala towards the end of 1988, some seemingly philosophical questions confronted me. All for the wrong reasons, you know. Not because I was a Bengali who loved squandering time on theoretical balderdash. This was, after all, my first job and I intended to retain it. Come hell or high water. […]
The first time that I set my eyes on her, she managed to steal my undivided attention. As she flitted from person to another, I sat there a bit mesmerised, a bit intrigued. Not quite like a dead leaf of the fall, yet she almost went past with gay abandon, virtually rudderless. And then landed […]
Indians, by and large, don’t need to be told about the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, leave alone reminded. We know Mohandas Gandhi had remarked at the time: “Plassey laid the foundation of the British Empire; Amritsar has shaken it.” We remember Rabindranath Tagore renouncing his knighthood given by the British. We also have been told of […]
The tell-tale photographs of the street protests in Srinagar and elsewhere in Kashmir that raged during the summer of last year are difficult to forget. Pitched battles were fought between Kashmiri youths and Indian security personnel. Indian authorities came down on the protests with a heavy hand and on the protesting youths too. Much was […]