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…
Read More
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…
Read More
“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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
You are browsing archives for
American satirist Sarah Silverman recently sat down with New Yorker’s editor Andy Borowitz and said that Trump was infact a mirror of a section of the American society that believes in the xenophobic, narrow version of American nationalism. A nationalism that hates, excludes and wants to always be ‘Number One.” In what she asked, […]
“He was chewing on his paan, slowly and thinking. Thick jets of sticky, tobacco-mixed gob was swishing in his mouth. He felt as if his teeth were grinding his thoughts and blending them with his saliva.Maybe that was why he didn’t wish to spit out the gob of chewed-up paan.’’ Muhammad Umar Memon’s translation of […]
Long before the Rachel Cut was made famous by Jennifer Aniston in F.R.I.E.N.D.S, there was the Sadhana Cut. In 1960, a frothy Love In Simla gave us an unforgettable romance with a little pixie in the lead. She was Sadhana and in a key scene, turns from a Cinderella to a princess when her grandmother […]
There was a lot of Victor Fleming and Gone with the Wind in Mehboob Khan’s Aan even though the first film came in 1939 and the second in 1952. The sunsets, the panoramic sweeps of the earth and the sky joined by a twisted tree in the middle, long shots of horses running fretfully, […]
“Groom her and she will go places. She has the potential to become a biographer someday,” said Dilip Kumar to SS Pillai, the editor of Screen many decades ago. He was of course referring to Udaytara Nayar, the woman to whom destiny would entrust the task of putting together his autobiography in 2004. Over the […]
Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan) is walking out of a police station with his black-listed benefactor who has just bailed him out of jail. Ashwini Kumar (Dilip Kumar), a revered police officer and his father warns, “If you go too far on this path..you may not be able to return.” Vijay turns to face him and […]
Pandit Ravi Shankar passed away today. Rajinikanth turned 62. Dilip Kumar turned 90 yesterday. Smita Patil passed away almost 26 years ago on December 13. Births, deaths. Years counted, measured, emptied out. filled up. This whole idea of time and that somehow it should be accounted for in terms of achievements, milestones, awards, body of […]
I learnt at five just what Hindi cinema means to middle class India when I heard my father talk about Dilip Kumar’s death scene in Ganga Jamuna.“Tabahi macha di,” (he was devastating) he said. Films were a part of everything we lived through in Patiala. Terrorism, joy and grief. Happiness meant a scooter […]