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 read an article in the newspaper a while ago, about the ‘worst things to put on your online dating profile’- one of them was ‘loves to travel’-because who doesn’t? Saying you love to travel is kind of like stating the obvious- very few would give up the chance to see the world if money […]
In the 1940s, a Tamil studio attempted a pan-Indian epic that cost over Rs 3 million and told the story of two royal siblings warring over the kingdom and a woman. The film was Chandralekha and it had a scale that till then had been seen only in Hollywood films. The famous drum scene […]
Last week, it was Shruti Seth and Kavita Krishnan. This week, it is Amartya Sen who is being hounded on Twitter. For saying that the government is interfering too much in the functioning of educational institutions among other things. All it needs is a dissenting view-point to get the Internet mob to spew vitriol. […]
I overheard a conversation at a parlour here a couple of weeks ago that has been on my mind ever since. A woman was getting her hair cut, and the hairdresser suggested that she highlight her hair blonde-to which the woman replied: ‘Oh no, he wouldn’t let me. He likes my hair dark.’ Then, laughingly, she added, […]
“May I be protector for those without one, A guide for all travellers on the way;” ~ Shantideva, in A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life. The gorgeous Goan monsoon is washing my windows squeaky clean, and as I’m lying around in bed, I’m suddenly thinking of Sealdah railway station. I was there just […]
At about 7.50 am on Wednesday, architect Bijoy Ramachandran of Hundred hands messaged his acquaintances: “Sad news. Correa passed away at 11.45 pm, Tuesday night.” For those who had heard 84-year-old architect, planner, activist and theoretician Charles Correa at the JN Tata Auditorium in Bengaluru last year, this moment brought a sense of personal loss […]
Confessional writing can tear you apart, plunge deep into your darkest memories and like EM Forster would say, spread them out in the sunlight so that you as well those reading you can know the meaning of them. But there is confessional writing that seeks to understand and resolve pain and writing that just wants […]
The Maggi controversy has tainted the glow of memories that were formed as an entire nation gathered to watch Hum Log in the early eighties and to salivate over a new wonder snack that was, ‘‘fast to cook and good to eat.” Hum Log was Manohar Shyam Joshi’s seminal story about a lower-middle-class Indian […]
Over the years, I have chronicled a bunch of places and experiences that I will remember for the rest of my life. This doesn’t mean that this is an all-encompassing list, but each place is unique. They are all in India as that was the intention, except for one in Bhutan. And it isn’t in […]
Madhuri Dixit recently received a notice from the Haridwar Food and Drug Administration for endorsing the nutritional value of Maggi, after the UP government found dangerously high levels of lead in a batch of noodles. While a debate rages about whether brand ambassadors can be held responsible for the quality of products, there is another side to the […]
A few years in the Goan villages have earned a morning ‘hi’ from many households I pass on the way to work. I’ve developed a deep respect for the local lifestyle, with a few years with Rose and Peter, at their Addams Family-esq estate in North Goa. Rose is an enigma, smooth faced and soft […]
The closest we came to hearing jazz in a Hindi film in the ‘70s, was when Amitabh Bachchan’s dock-worker turned underworld apprentice Vijay, smoked away his foreboding in a bar; and Parveen Babi in a red gown slithered close to him with ‘I am falling in love with stranger’ playing in the background. The film […]