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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Many years ago, I met writer and gourmet food specialist Karen Anand at a Bengaluru hotel for an interview and her manner was crisp and measured just like her approach towards cooking. She seemed ready for the next chapter of a life that had by now spanned books, TV shows, a brand of her own […]
Aatish Taseer straddles many worlds within one. The legacy of being an Indian, the son of a Sikh mother and a Pakistani father, and a writer who draws his material from pluralism and divides, from two nations that though hacked in two bleeding halves share a strangely collusive relationship with each other, from people who […]
Just a few days before December 16, the second anniversary of the Nirbhaya tragedy, actor, producer and activist Dia Mirza was in town. The Uber rape case was on her mind, as were the sexual crimes against young girls in Bengaluru’s schools. She said, “What kind of man rapes a woman… a little girl? This […]
With every message that leaves novelist Bilal Tanweer’s email account, travel these famous lines from Aleksandar Hemon’s 2008 novel, The Lazarus Project: “All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.” It is easy to see […]
When was the last time you saw a Hindustani music legend in a video that reformulated the conventions of popular and classical idioms? Chances are that the image of Shubha Mudgal orchestrating monsoon in a chawl will flash through your mind. You will remember her rousing vocals in Ab ke saawan and in Man ke […]
“I fell in love with my then girlfriend and now wife over a bowl of fish curry she cooked for me. The best I have ever tasted. She is a chef too and favours more modern flavours. And we have two kitchens in our home. An open contemporary one where she does her modern stuff […]
Taslima Nasrin’s Lajja, one of the most controversial bestsellers in the world has turned twenty. As bibliophiles across the world celebrated the Banned Books Week from September 21-27, Nasrin, an award-winning author of 37 books, memoirist, physician, humanist and human rights activist looked back at the long road she has travelled with Lajja. Across continents, through death […]
In Bangalore to address the students of Indian Institute of Management, legendary Architect B V Doshi strolls around the campus. As he pauses to make a point, he is framed by a flowering creeper, crests and hollows of green grass and thousands of trees. It is simple to see in this snapshot, the sum of […]
A few days after Kishore Kumar’s birth anniversary, the ring tone of his son and singer Amit Kumar echoes a song befitting the occasion, Ye mahfil yun hi sajegi.. ye duniyan yun hi chalegi… jo dhadkan kisi ki ruke tum ruko naa..(The celebrations will continue, the world will go on…if a heartbeat stops somewhere..don’t stop […]
Actor and former VJ Purab Kohli is enraged by the recent rape of a child in Bangalore and the crimes against women in the rest of the country. “I thought, after the December 12 case in New Delhi, these incidents would stop but they seem to be spreading like an epidemic. I just sat […]
Jonzie Kurian was effortlessly natural on air. His humour and sense of music never ever faltered because he understood the medium, grew playfully risque but never crossed the line and never faked an attitude or an accent. It all began when he won a wacky verse contest. The ‘grand prize’ was the chance to sit in […]
She is hard to classify or sum up in stock phrases that are usually used for a mainstream female actor. She strains against the tyranny of preconceptions about women and their bodies in cinema and in life. She speaks passionately against misogyny at every level. In language that does not sound like sloganeering but […]