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 am a fan of luxury and comfort and bikes don’t offer much of either. So when I started my bike trip from Bombay to Harihareshwar, I thought I will come back and write a post titled ‘The diary of a reluctant biker girl’. I might still pen that on a later date but for now […]
I write this today with a deep sense of sadness, anger and helplessness. Animals in India have lost a warrior. In 2011. I was living in Delhi, training to be fund raiser for an animal shelter. Part of my job entailed having a good idea of existing infrastructure, so I requested that I be allowed […]
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, […]
I wish the world would understand what we look like when the stars see us. A blimp in the blackness of the universe. A sole blazing sun supporting this delicately balanced eco-system. Perhaps we would then stop rampaging through this world and her resources without a care. We as a race completely fail to see […]
Housing is one of the key issues facing our overstretched planet today. According to UN reports, over 30 per cent of the planet’s urban population lives in slums, in great deprivation without fundamental amenities like water, sanitation, adequate space. 35 per cent of the rural population does even worse and more than 2 billion people all over the world […]
I live in a small town, with cement roads and dust smitten air. We relish the small town luxury of maintaining a garden, in the front as well as in the backyard of our bungalow. We never got a landscape designer or a planner for the garden. Instead, through the years, we just collected […]
There may come a time when there won’t be enough land for vegetation to grow upon. When we will have more buildings than trees and open tracts of green will be a fading memory. Look around you. It is already happening. The land feuds. The scramble to build more and more concrete jungles where an overture to a […]
In the Kamal Haasan starrer Pushpaka Vimana (1987), the story unfolded in the suites, balconies and gardens of a five star hotel. The idea was to pit a few ordinary mundane lives against excessive luxury. The idea of luxury then was limited to carpetted rooms, fluffy beds, marble floors and blinding chandeliers. Over the years however the idea of […]
Fourteen years ago in November, I was in Odisha when the cyclone hit the coast. Co-incidentally it was Durga Pooja even then. It was a surreal experience. Winds lashing at 118 miles an hour coupled with heavy rains. Water had filled into the flat that I was living in. Within hours we were disconnected from […]
It was a hectic morning as always. Driving for a full 10 minutes in rush hour Mumbai traffic and successfully crossing the grid-locked Khodadad circle, I was ascending the Tilak bridge at a crawl. Looking out of my window, I saw this beautiful and tall bougainvillea vine that had crawled on the top of a […]
It started with the first visit to the Sanjay Gandhi National Park or Borivali National Park and we were amazed that we lived so close to such a large expanse of nature, and hadn’t explored it for so many years! And so we headed back next week to the Upper Kanheri Trail. The guide was […]
The Sanjay Gandhi National Park or Borivali National Park, as it is popularly known, lies in the Northern suburb of Borivali, Mumbai. It is acres of forest surrounded by the traffic, noise and the chaos of one of the most populated cities in India. It is remarkable that such a large National Park exists INSIDE a […]