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 can count the number of movies I have cried in. Anjali, Taare Zameen Par, The Notebook and Titanic. This week I added a new one to my tearjerker list – Dolphin Tale. It is a tale of triumph. Overcoming odds. Resilience. The American Heritage dictionary defines resilience as the ability to recover quickly from […]
The Communication Skills session ended, I walked out and then someone said ” Excuse me Ma’am.” I turned around to find a bunch of ladies. One of them said, “Usha wants to share her story, she has written it down for you.” I had given an assignment in class about sharing a real life experience. Usha […]
It is not easy, to love yourself, when you seem unimportant and seem to not contribute to a life It is not easy, to believe in yourself, if you are not doing anything apparently meaningful It is not easy, to see that, what you’ve built your entire life on, is a shaky foundation ready to crumble anytime It […]
You can’t unmake or remake .. or break her.. because she picked her scattered bones from the womb of the earth, from thirsty sands and ocean pits and glued them to her soul with warm blood, hot tears, sweat and sticky hope.. and built herself limb by limb from a faint heart beat, a fading pulse. You can’t because she […]
Women suffer. By habit, choice and circumstance. We feel inadequate most of the time. As home makers we wish we were out there, validating ourselves by earning money. When we have careers, we worry that the kids are growing up without good food on the table, without ironed clothes, without supervised homework. We don’t ever […]
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 […]
Time heals all wounds, it also wounds all heals. Patience fills the thin gap between cure and disease. Like a barbed wire, Time entangles the feet… Digging into the flesh. Biting the heels. It won’t let you run. Can we escape to redemption? Maybe. Time heals all wounds only if you break free from the shackles and run. Run […]
Everybody loves a love story, especially a real life one. But, while stories of people who had the courage to break the bounds of convention hold universal appeal, there also exist real life stories of deep and abiding love between people who live out their lives within the shackles of convention, in soul-destroying conditions, and […]
Last year around this time, we mourned the passing of Sher Khan. One year on, we still have not got over his departure, but we remember him with love and gratitude. The day he died, just about everyone at Cattitude (the Trust we run in Chennai for cats in distress) was crying. The trustees, the shelter […]