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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“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 […]
When a television serial right in the middle of an innocuous narrative about a controlling mother and an independent daughter-in-law weaves in a little banter about demonitisation with one of the characters hailing it, when a plug inserted between ads on FM radio says, “Desh ko line pe laana hai toh line mein lagiye” and […]
Ramachandra Guha’s Democrats and Dissenters (Penguin) contains essays on subjects of great contemporary relevance like threats to freedom of expression in India . About the book: Democrats and Dissenters is a work of rigorous scholarship on topics of compelling contemporary interest, written with elegance and wit. The book covers a wide range of themes: from […]
Sometime back, Aamir Khan was reviled because his wife was disturbed by what she read in the newspapers and for the sake of their son, wondered if they should settle in another country. Khan said loud and clear that it shocked and devastated him that his wife could feel that level of fear. In the […]
A coal blackened board welcomes us as we drive through ‘Desh ki Koyla Rajdhani – Dhanbad.’ Coal and Capital. Our country’s current obsession. Just a few people shy of complete coverage of human rights issues in all of Jharkhand’s 24 districts, a colleague (at the time snoozing on the back seat) and I were travel-tripping […]
Like many expats I too went through the various phases of resettling back in India: ‘touristy’ excitement, disorientation, annoyance and frustration, gradual adaptation and finally bi-culturality that has now allowed me to find my own sense of belonging in what I still consider my hometown, Bangalore. This is not the Bengaluru I left in 1978. […]
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, […]
“Democracy,” began our political-science teacher in her high-pitched nasal voice and her staccato accent, “Is a government of the ‘peeple,’ by the ‘peeple,’ for the ‘peeple.” I remember nothing else. I did mug it all up though, that and the rest of it, for the Board exams. Did pretty well too, come to think of […]
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 […]