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’ve always been interested in stories. I guess it began with the bedtime stories crafted by Papa when we were kids. Carefully personalized for children. So there was He-Man, running alongside the warrior goddess, Teela Radhika . Stories of Himalayan heroics by grandfathers. Growing up in Bengal meant the inevitable fascination for the Durga Ma, the Mother Goddess, […]
“Finger on your lips,” in class “Silence please,” in the library “shhh…,” says a cute baby in the poster at the doctor’s clinic “Don’t talk when 2 adults are talking,” “keep quiet..” ** These are both, memories and scars from our childhood. It’s no surprise then that staying silent is the order, instruction, advice we […]
When you are a girl of about eight, and you tell your parents and relatives that you want to be a police woman, you get a pat on your back and a smile, but fast forward the same statement by 10 years, and the smile disappears into a smirk and you hear, ‘You’re a girl […]
Many a time, I scroll my Facebook wall, see my posts and tell myself, “Oh! My life is an open-book!” From posting myriad of status messages about trivial things to blogging about some earth-shattering topics, I’ve been constantly striving to record my life. Despite being self-expressive, I realised that I haven’t let a word out […]
I read this article in The Times of India the other day, with a growing sense of dismay. No – am not talking of accidents, murders or rapes. Those seem to be happening as routinely as clockwork, even now. I’m talking of Nirbheek (I believe that’s what it is called). Nirbheek is said to be India’s first gun for women, a […]
There is no easy way to understand death but when it comes after prolonged suffering, it brings with it release for the one who departs. It leaves behind a sense of emptiness because a life has ended. It leaves behind the fullness of grief that in time finds solace in a sense of closure. There […]
I have never really understood the concept of writing about rapes and condemning the act, because isn’t it obvious that it is wrong? Why do we need to state the obvious every now and again? And in spite of various magazines, television channels, celebrities, bloggers and ordinary men and women voicing their disgust and shock […]
I’ve been asking myself this question for quite some time now. The gang rape in Delhi served to make it more urgent. “Where is our country headed ?” I’m sure lots of other people too, pretty much like me, are echoing the despair that one feels within oneself. Our country is steeped in a shroud […]
She’s been named Damini, Braveheart, Nirbhaya and counting. Now we know her real name and to that 23- year- old girl from Delhi, I, for one, doff my hat. If ever we’ve seen a symbol of courage, of hope, of fortitude, of fighting against all odds, she’s been it. ** Having been subjected to the […]
Hard as it is to believe now, Tarun Tejpal was my hero. Not just from his early Tehelka days when he took on the establishment fearlessly and showed us what journalism was all about but from 19 years back when he was the features editor of Financial Express and I was a rookie reporter into […]
I had scoffed at Asaram Bapu’s statement when he said that a sure shot way to prevent rape is to call the would-be-rapist “bhaiyya”. The Khap in Haryana added more flavour by coming out with statements that pointed towards Chinese food as the culprit behind rapes, not men. Mohan Bhagwat went a step further by claiming Western […]
In two seemingly unrelated incidents, a woman was brutally attacked in a Bangalore ATM..and in another..a woman journalist assaulted in an elevator by a high-profile editor in a fit of what he says, was an appalling “lapse of judgement.” In the first instance, the weapon of attack was a machete. In the second, the sense […]