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…
Read More
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…
Read More
“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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
You are browsing archives for
We cannot let go of her. Of her parents. Or their tragedy. Or the speculations about what could have happened on the night of 15-16 May, 2008 in an upper-middle class Noida home. And so (they changed the ‘w’ in the title to ‘v,’ just in case) a film about her death will hit the […]
Ever since I stopped watching Grey’s Anatomy, I’ve turned to Pinterest for my daily dose of lessons on life and love. All my free time is spent on this insanely addictive app, and a few days ago, I found a quote that really stayed with me : “The older I get, the more I […]
A frantic series of emails and phone calls impolitely disturbed what had till then been an uneventful May morning at the Video Volunteers office. At a human rights and media organisation like ours there are many days that shake the very foundations of one’s belief systems; this had turned into one of those days. A Community Correspondent was covering […]
She was no Nirbhaya…. Not born in the age of fast news; No voices, no candles, no protests, Grieved for her! She hadn’t gone out with a friend; No jeans; no mobiles; No reason for fingers to be pointed! Being a woman, her only fault! Half the world missed her story… A story…. Of […]
Aruna Shanbaug died this week. Officially. She now merits tributes and a formal farewell though cognitive and full-bodied life, as she knew it, ended in 1973. How can anyone make sense of how the light in her was snuffed out with a dog chain during a rape so ghastly that it rendered her comatose for […]
Every Bangalorean has a Church Street memory. From NASA, the grounded spaceship cum pub in the mid nineties to RR restaurant which was supposedly the favourite of Raj Kapoor for its Gongura chutney, avakai pickle, gunpowder and the secret recipes from Guntur and Nellore that sang to you from a plantain leaf. Dahlia, the little Japanese eatery […]
Actor and media personality Shenaz Treasury has had an eventful week. As a spontaneous reaction to the Uber rape case in Delhi, she posted an open letter on her Facebook page. The letter was addressed to influential thought leaders in India, all of them men incidentally. She shared personal episodes of violation and stated that […]
On November 19, Men’s Day was celebrated across the world and promotional videos by consumer companies tried to remind us of the men we could always count on in our lives.Coincidentally, in the season finale of Satyamev Jayate, various participants debated the meaning of a ‘good man’ and how misunderstood the idea of masculinity was in […]
Entrepreneur and mother Deepa Kumar has issues with the blanket terminology that surrounds the issue of Child Sexual Abuse (CSA). “To start with, I don’t quite agree with the distinction between a ‘good touch’ and a ‘bad touch.’ If there is a touch that a child needs to distinguish as good or bad, we are already in dangerous […]
The ‘anniversary’ of the Shakti Mills rape has come and gone. Three of the five accused have been sentenced to death and the media jamboree has moved on. In search of another story. Another survivor who must be identified and paraded before a hungry audience while the convicts are taken to whatever hell they have been consigned to […]
Sometime around 1973, author Shashi Deshpande lived in the campus of the KEM Hospital in Mumbai and would often see a young, sprightly nurse pass by. Sometime later, she learnt that this young woman was Aruna Shanbaug. And that all the promise of her life had been snatched away by a ward boy who […]
Recently a young colleague wrote a Facebook post about being stared at for the way she dresses or even otherwise. The point of the post was that a woman’s body is her business. It is not an offering or a piece of public property. The post went viral and was shared by various websites and […]