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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So here is the thing. We are living in an India where voices can be muffled, and young cartoonists can be jailed for creative dissent and protesters can be beaten up and shown that the State is intolerant of inconvenient points-of-view whether they are about dams or nuclear plants or corruption. And it is […]
It was the Anna phenomenon that threw the Indian middle class into the limelight. For the first time since 1947, a swathe of humanity lifted itself up and marched into the Ramlila grounds and the gaze of the waiting TV cameras. Until that moment, the lot had remained invisible; they did not vote, they did […]
As crowds gather to occupy Wall Street in one part of the world, people jubilant at the end of dictatorship in another celebrated their freedom in macabre and bloody images and I wonder if a similar angst is existent in us, and if it can be fueled by injustice to an extent that we too can […]
I have always suspected that we Indians are schizophrenic. On one hand, we send our children to the best schools and colleges, hoping that they would get a seat in the best professional colleges across the world, earn money in dollars, travel to Hawaii and the Far East for holidays. On the other, we would […]
What we felt today was a surge of pride. In Indian democracy. In the idea of people power. It was time for the two to meet. Because for a long time, they have existed in isolation. Today instead of uncultured politicians throwing chairs and abuses at each other, we saw in Lok Sabha, a certain […]
It is really upsetting to hear Kiran Bedi’s language and public statements like, “When the resolution is passed, the parliament will become a Pavitra Mandir.” The parliament is NOT a mandir, Madam, it is an institution. A democratic institution which has rules that must be obeyed. To say “jab tak resolution pass nahi hota , […]
I sincerely hope that the 74-year-old leader will now end his fast. Kiran Bedi proclaimed recently that Anna Hazare will continue the fast until the Jan Lokpal Bill is passed. Why doesn’t Madam go on a fast herself? Jokes apart, Anna Hazare should be a responsible leader now. He has established himself as leader of so […]
Truth is hard to speak. And harder to live. No one knows that better than a journalist. After 16 years of working in the media and assorted newspapers, I have no illusions left about the purpose of reporting. The hunger for truth does not alone drive the media houses. They tell little but sell a lot more. Yes, new stories […]