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 live in a colony called the National Media Centre in Gurgaon. It is one of the oldest housing societies in Gurgaon….well before the path of supposed progress made its way here with glass fronted buildings and unruly traffic increasing in direct proportion to basic amenities such as water, electricity and roads decreasing. ** A veritable […]
“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”-Benjamin Franklin ** It is 10 am and near Bangalore’s Austin Town Circle, a crowd is slowly gathering around the Ambedkar statue. Young students from St Joseph’s college, volunteers from NGOs, nuns, workers of assorted political parties, […]
What is the meaning of a republic? Is it a selectively amnesiac entity where bull dozers run over and flatten the lives and dignity and pets and homes and belongings of the poor while builders advertise gated communities protected from the “noise and the pollution” of the big metros for the benefit of those they […]
My wife drives. She is way ahead when it comes to this particular skill. Sometimes sitting next to her while she is driving helps me understand what she is up against whenever she gets behind the steering wheel. Most male drivers in the city don’t like women driving. This is regardless of the class they […]
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 […]
Most Indian parents follow a religion of making available to their kids all they missed out on. Some go a step further; wanting to give their kids all that they did not have plus what they think the next generation should have. A sport was on one such wish list for our girls. We […]
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 […]
I am an Indian based out of Singapore and this is a short chronicle of my feelings about my home since I left it to make a living in a foreign country in January 2006. My husband and I moved to Singapore in pursuit of our personal dreams and aspirations around six years back. Our […]
“I have a feeling that we are going to be a generation which is going to fail this country,” I remember my father saying to some friends of his in Kota, Rajasthan, where he was posted between 1970 and 1973 and where we went to school when we were really young. ‘We have fallen into […]
When you look at a tragedy, it is not the magnitude of statistics that counts in the end but the human cost, the value of each life lost. Yes, we are a democracy and that is why even after losing so many innocent citizens, the unprotected,the unprivileged, the unacknowledged ordinary people in countless terrorist attacks, […]
Shortly after I landed in Agartala towards the end of 1988, some seemingly philosophical questions confronted me. All for the wrong reasons, you know. Not because I was a Bengali who loved squandering time on theoretical balderdash. This was, after all, my first job and I intended to retain it. Come hell or high water. […]
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 […]