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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I have tried not to write, after the hopeless events in December 2012, when along with an enraged India, I last reacted to the brutal rape of an innocent girl in New Delhi, in broad urban limelight. The hopelessness that grips me is unbearable as I watch some leaders of the nation promise action and swear punishment to the […]
The rape and murder of the young 23- year- old in New Delhi on December 16, 2012, has unleashed the suppressed angst of millions of men and women in India and has led to endless debates and discussions across all media, which are not going to finish too soon, but will die down nonetheless, over time.Meanwhile, rapes, […]
At a recent event, I was meant to give a talk on “Mumbai and the power of collective conscience”. I went prepared for the speech, but the unimaginable happened.Something that has never happened to me before. The moment my turn came, and I stepped on to the stage to speak, I blanked out and lost complete […]
Like Jism, Jism 2 is unapologetic and deals with a subject that all of India is shy to discuss but that which all of Indian media devours and exploits to gain the TRPs, the readership and the viewership at every opportunity it gets, be it the molestation of a young girl outside a nightclub in […]
For the last few months, I have turned away from news on the television as well as the morning papers every single day. I had decided to see what my life would be like if I were to know nothing about what is happening around me. Obviously I had no choice but to know what was going […]
“I have a feeling that we are going to be a generation which is going to fail this country,” I remember my father saying to some friends of his in Kota, Rajasthan, where he was posted between 1970 and 1973 and where we went to school when we were really young. ‘We have fallen into […]
I woke up some time back to the disturbing picture in the papers, of a 14-year-old housemaid who was battered by a TV starlet for having eaten some shrikhand from her refrigerator without taking her permission. I have been watching some discussions on television on the subject but there are no solutions. Should children be […]
As crowds gather to occupy Wall Street in one part of the world, people jubilant at the end of dictatorship in another celebrated their freedom in macabre and bloody images and I wonder if a similar angst is existent in us, and if it can be fueled by injustice to an extent that we too can […]
I am a procrastinator by nature and at all given times I live with the stress of having to do too many things which I have pushed aside with the gentle stroke of one excuse or another. While I do take credit for all the good things that happen to me, I also blame my own self […]
India, for the first time after many decades is looking inwards. And as it does that as a nation, it has started to stare at the truth right in the eye and express itself with an honesty which had become as alien to us as the cinema we had started to make in the eighties […]
A writer came to me with a script today and his own story was more interesting than the one he had written. I might have offended him by spending far more time listening to him about his own search for recognition than listening to the reams of material on his laptop he tried to engage me with. This young boy […]