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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“Live Responsibly or Anticipate Death and Destruction” reads the title of an article on the death of model Sonika Chauhan. “We want ‘equal rights’ – we want to be able to go out late at night as men do, bar-hop, drink and relax, have several rounds of drinks. It’s our ‘right’. We too need to […]
“Job Offer” read the subject of an email I had been waiting to receive for over two months. I finally had a job in Bombay- a city I’d wanted to move to for two years. I was ecstatic, and then of course, terrified. You see, I have a special knack for always finding the bad […]
Years ago I watched the The Matrix and it seemed like a fantasy with no element of truth in it. But when I watched it when I was older, it seemed not too far fetched from the reality we wake up to every day. The daily grind. Put your nose to the grindstone and chug away. Work […]
I see this Laughing Buddha every weekend when I go cycling. Do you see the crow, perched on the board he is holding? Do you see how small it looks? This Laughing Buddha is gigantic. He is at VGP Golden Beach, Chennai’s first theme park. That part, where the Laughing Buddha was installed, of the […]
“It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.” — Wild: From Lost […]
Father was always a fast walker; his strides were long, his gait effortless. When Calvin and I managed to match his pace during our morning walks in Boat Club, I panted more than my canine companion. I was a teenager then and Calvin was just two. Father was faster, brisker, and more focussed than most […]
“The moon is a loyal companion. It never leaves. It’s always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day it’s a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human. […]
“I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.” — The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini Hurt announces his arrival with a deafening cacophony of cymbals and trumpets and accordions. He slips into a tuxedo and a […]
I became a citizen of the Facebook universe in circa 2006 and tasted for the first time, the pleasures of rampant social networking. Despite coming from the professional field of Public Relations and having represented the buzzing world of hotels for the better part of my career, I always seemed to saddle the fence between extroversion and […]
She sat there with a large box of KitKats. It was a multi-pack, with maybe twenty or so pieces. Her knapsack was on the floor and despite her Western attire, she had the red and white bangles of a newly married woman and a long, deep sindoor streak to go with it. We were at our boarding […]
As I leafed through some old albums, I came across a photo of my grand father sitting on his battered teakwood chair. The chair had hosted multiple generations of children, grand- children across genders, age groups. The chair stayed in the semi open living room area and that was where my grand father would supervise […]
Every year when I see the saree, it seems to disintegrate a little bit more – much like a memory of a marriage. Thread by thread, zari flower by zari flower. Ma was always reticent about the story behind her wedding saree . And each year, I take it out once to remind myself what it […]