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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Satyajit Ray would have approved (if you disregard the product placements). Shoojit Sarkar goes back to his roots literally and cinematically with Piku, a film about nothing in particular when it trundles, carrying a baggage of eccentricity and family history from Delhi to Kolkata in a taxi. But in retrospect, it is about the little […]
A certain section of Internet users need scapegoats and heroes. They need constant debate. About whether the cat is coming down or going up the staircase. Whether a dress is blue or white and gold. Whether Prince Harry was right in refusing a selfie with a fan. Some of us want to see the last […]
In the mid 90s, Waheeda Rehman was negotiating a cusp in her life. After spending a few blissful decades in Bengaluru with husband Kanwaljit (with whom she had starred in the 1964 film Shagoon) in a sprawling hacienda called ‘Gharonda,’ raising two children, initiating an organic cereal brand with friend and neighbour Asharfa Sattar, she was […]
There is a scene in Farah Khan’s Happy New Year where Boman Irani takes out a fully iced cake from a bag and says to himself, “I am going to have my cake and eat it too.” Two seconds later his face is buried in the gooey stuff and when he faces the camera, a […]
Be afraid. Be very afraid. Especially, if you are a woman. A cleavage pointer is headed your way like a missile to show the world what it would have missed if it only looked at your eyes instead of your breasts. If someone looked in your eyes, really really long….they would not have seen what […]
At a recent reality show, Rohit Shetty ribbed a young contestant about why he watched Shahrukh Khan only on TV. Did he not watch movies in the theatre? The young boy replied that in his village, there was no movie theatre. Shetty smiled good-naturedly and exulted, ‘If Chennai Express becomes a hit, I will build a movie […]
First things first. This is not the first time Prakash Jha has made a film on education. He made Hip Hip Hurray (1984), possibly the first Indian sports film set in a school. It was among other things, a comment on the equation between students and teachers. He never was a creative opportunist. Or someone […]
Ramesh Sippy’s cinema. Hema Malini’s Geeta grinning with happy malice atop a ceiling fan. Sanjeev Kumar shooting at the handcuff linking Jai and Veeru during a train robbery. Shakaal grimacing in a surreal den. Dum Maro Dum‘s opening credits recall some of these moments and the one thing you understand as the film unfolds is this. That some of the biggest hits in […]