Decades before Article 15, a certain film delivered a stunning cinematic punch line against oppression. A woman of privilege who lives in the “upper” regions of a fictional city, appears in front of men who have gathered to decide whether a nullah running through the “lower” parts of the city is dirty or not. The […]
“You have to break up a nation first if you want to put its pieces together the way you want.” These words attributed to Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign manager Steve Bannon sent chills down my spine. The Great Hack, a Netflix documentary about the Cambridge Analytica scandal and how the company played a key role […]
Onir’s anthology I Am (2010) remains one of the most deeply felt and insightful cinematic statements on Kashmir where Juhi Chawla’s Megha (a Kashmiri Pandit) and Manisha Koirala’s Rubina (a Kashmiri Muslim) connect after twenty years of estrangement amid barbed wires, abandoned, crumbling homes with bullet riddled walls and layers upon layers of anger and […]
Vidya Sinha passed away on 15 August 2019. A look back at possibly the most memorable film of her career. *In Sujoy Ghosh’s 2016 film Kahaani 2, Vidya Balan’s Durga Rani Singh shares a fleeting romantic interlude in what is primarily a dark and tumultuous life. Her suitor plays for her the title song from […]
Right at the end of the messy Season 3 of 13 Reasons Why (Streaming on Netflix), a character quotes Tolstoy’s War and Peace to say (without attribution of course), “Let the dead bury the dead.” And even though we are supposed to make do with that statement, this season like the other two before […]
The rehabilitation of those tainted by the #MeToo movement has begun in the Hindi film industry. On June 1, just before the release of Super 30’s first trailer, director Vikas Bahl, accused of sexual harassment by a former employee of the now defunct Phantom Films, was given a clean chit by an “internal committee.” The said committee […]
Says a woman cop in Unbelievable, a wrenching new Netflix original, “Rape has three crime scenes. The body of the victim. The body of the rapist. And the place where the crime actually happens.” The series also adds another crime scene to the list without naming it. The mind of the victim. Against which, a […]
Aarey Milk Colony was envisioned in 1949 by Dara Nusserwanji Khurody (winner of 1963 Ramon Magsaysay Award with Dr Verghese Kurien) and inaugurated with the planting of a sapling by the then PM Jawaharlal Nehru in 1951. Over the decades, it has grown to be one of Mumbai’s most cherished lung spaces. Weeks before the […]
The Joker of 1993 was Michael Douglas’ William Foster in the film Falling Down. The protagonist Foster did not wear a mask though. He in fact, took off the masks of civility, politeness, political correctness, self-control and compassion to fall into a vortex of a toxic sense of personal persecution. His litany of woes? […]
The hate around us is like the Amazon on fire. Instigated to scorch everything tender and infinitesimal. Random cruelties are as commonplace as laughter emojis and when genocides (silent as well as triumphantly boisterous), are taking place under our watch, it is hard to take the troubles of Modern Love seriously. The anthology web series, […]
Shah Rukh Khan does not make political statements.He does not say much about the state of the country he has seen become a bit snappy and rude and yes, intolerant over the decades. Aamir Khan tried to opine but learnt to then know better. These two are in a unique position unlike Salman Khan from […]
The first picture is from the protests in Delhi’s Ramjas college in 2017. The second is from the ongoing JNU protests. There was another picture that I can’t find now. “Apno ki khushi aapki zimmedari hai, ” said a public service message on a board in the picture. And right in front of it […]