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 irony hits you only in retrospect. When you remember that Saeed Jaffrey played Mr. D’Silva, a jolly and down-on-luck owner of a shabby chic bar in Ramesh Sippy’s wannabe romantic opus Saagar, while his former wife Madhur played an imperious matriarch overseeing an empire. You did not notice anything other than two actors in character because […]
A couple of months ago, on a stormy night, I packed my bags, held Boo’s leash, and boarded an auto, after walking out of a life which I thought would get better. To my dismay, the life that I had lived for a decade had just disintegrated. I was torn between taking another big leap of faith, […]
Writer’s note : This post was published first in The New Indian Express, Bengaluru on October 12 In a tranquil home that is over 35 years old but is as timelessly evocative as a piece of great literature, author and Padma Shri awardee Shashi Deshpande is nursing a cup of tea. She is grateful that the […]
We all have Rashomon realities. We may be living one story but those watching us maybe seeing something very different. The Rashomon effect of course is the offshoot of a Kurosawa classic where colliding interpretations swirl around a crime. Not hard to see why Vishal Bhardwaj would choose the same technique to tell the story […]
Indian television does not usually allow a great deal of space for symbolism and subtlety but sometimes while surfing channels, you come across something that is done right, with a certain amount of empathy. Epic Channel for instance is replaying Tagore’s memorable fiction and even though nobody can redo Charulata after what Ray imbued the […]
The idea of entitlement is not new to the Indian film industry. Nor is the hegemony fuelled by privileged stars and their coteries. So it took someone of Nawazuddin Siddqui’s talent, 15 years to land his first solo lead in Manjhi (though he played a pivotal part in Gangs of Wasseypur) but all it took […]
“I was never a dancer, never a gymnast, never naturally peaceful, patient or confident. I generally felt socially awkward, private, introverted, comfortable reading and studying but not talking, sharing. I never ever felt beautiful or elegant, always felt like the small girl in the corner. Then one day after many years of Yoga practice, I […]
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 […]
About a week ago, I visited Charminar in Hyderabad. My friends and I had been quite excited about the trip and couldn’t wait to shop for trinkets and try the much talked about biryani and kababs. However,the minute we stepped out of the cab, it started pouring, and the harassment began. It’s not like I […]
During one of the many special screenings of Masaan in Mumbai, Shabana Azmi came up to Vicky Kaushal and said incredulously, “Tum kaun ho? Kya kaam kiya hai tumne! (Who are you? What an amazing job!) Come, you must meet Javed saab!’’ Javed Akhtar who was coming out of the theatre just at that […]
The imperishable memories Shweta Tripathi gathered while playing a small-town girl in Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan include the night when she sobbed over the end of a beautiful story. She recalls, “I cried not for what was happening to my character but for what was happening to her story with Deepak. I just lay, looking up […]
Over a decade ago, at Alliance Francaise de Bangalore, I spoke with a youthful conviction on why Hindi cinema must never be dismissed as just another drug to keep the masses oblivious to the real issues of governance, poverty, disenfranchisement, corruption and more. When gently asked by the moderator, why Hindi cinema could not be […]