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 have been watching the skin on the back of my mother’s hands very closely. In consonance with the changing texture and folds of skin, there has grown in my head a sketch of what it means to watch one’s parent get on in years. There was a time when the hand was smooth and unblemished. […]
Something about the Aarushi Talwar case tugs at my heart. I feel transfixed every time the TV splashes Aarushi’s childhood pictures and videos. The normalness of the images is chilling in that they bear no hint, not a shimmer of the terrible fate that awaits this family round the corner. The clips reveal a regular, attractive […]
Mothers are born flawed. If they don’t see imperfections in themselves, which is unlikely, someone else will. But these questions and doubts a mother faces today are unique to the times. Our grandmothers were different. They were undivided souls. They did not, most of the time, think of themselves as creatures of personal ambition. My […]
I am the child of the seventies. Childhood entertainment consisted of movies and Sunday trips to children’s park. Our eating out was made up of the occasional softie in Civil Lines after the matinee or a rolled newspaper cone of murmura and matar at the park, where our favourite plaything was the concrete elephant you […]
When our daughter first started going to play school, I was beyond excited. My girl was a big girl. I positively loved checking her diary each day to see what they had been up to. When we heard she had to dress like a flower for some role play thing, I went a little mad. […]
The other day, I picked a fridge magnet that read; ‘Mirror mirror on the wall, I am my mother after all’. I liked the line; I liked the quirky design of the magnet. But most of all, the line hit home. My Amma and I, like I often say, are poles apart. We have nothing in […]
Following a conversation about the trouble with birthday parties, a wiser friend called and suggested something very simple. It made a lot of sense and hence it finds itself replicated here. Birthday invites tend to come in at the eleventh hour… then begins the rush for finding a suitable gift and packing it. There is always […]
My grandmother lived by one abiding dictum, “Daughters must never be left alone anywhere, overnight.” She was obsessive about Mom’s friends and rationed her rare friendly visits to the last minute. In fact, she is known to have chucked a pair of scissors at her once, over a five minutes delay, returning home from a […]
In a way, it was easier when you were chubby babies. Your needs were of the moment, simple to satisfy. An ice cream cone was all it took to turn the blue moments sunny. But I knew it even as you licked at the cone that these straightforward days would not last. A day would […]
“My son just doesn’t listen to me. Every day we argue about petty things. I just don’t know how to handle that teenager of mine. Now I know what my mother must have gone through…..” was the frantic cry of a mother on the other end of the phone. I made suitable soothing noises but […]
Action and reaction, ebb and flow, trial and error, change – this is the rhythm of living. Out of our over-confidence, fear; out of our fear, clearer vision, fresh hope. And out of hope, progress. ~ Bruce Barton I met a few mommies recently who told me they changed their kids’ school. Some changed at pre-school […]
“What we really heal when we are intimate with someone is our relationship with our own self.” – Deepak Chopra. Actually speaking the truth about my self is the most difficult thing to do since there is so much self righteousness ingrained from childhood. A childhood that is sadly always trying to fit into an […]