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 was in Goa last weekend and I’m infused with susegado tinted peace. Yes, that much abused word when it comes to all things Goan. A number of people have messaged me asking for a list of recommendations for great eating joints. And being a vegetarian, I believe that if a place in Goa has […]
A few years in the Goan villages have earned a morning ‘hi’ from many households I pass on the way to work. I’ve developed a deep respect for the local lifestyle, with a few years with Rose and Peter, at their Addams Family-esq estate in North Goa. Rose is an enigma, smooth faced and soft […]
It is surprising how just three days of bone warming sun, soft sand, towering palm trees and chilled breezers with friends who have shared over a decade of my life, can expunge a couple of years of world-weariness. Which is why after a long hiatus, the first thing I felt compelled to write was a […]
Kochi sits in the middle of the state of Kerala, in south-west of India. Kerala is ‘God’s Own Country’ as the marketing campaign has been shouting for years. That’s true. You go to Kerala to learn that there are more greens than just bottle green and olive-green. But no, Kochi doesn’t succumb to the rest-of-Kerala’s diktat. And […]
The website says this is a homestay, but it’s not; it is a heritage hotel… but not the fancy kind like the Neemrana property near Jaipur… not the kind where I would be embarrassed to walk in with my chappals and sit cross-legged at the dining table! Vivienda Dos Palhacos is simple, elegant, welcoming and […]
That slow whirl of the fan directly above my bed was the first sound I heard as I woke up… it felt familiar, but I felt disorientated. I scrunched my eyes, closed them to dull my ‘am-awake-lets-go’ over-active morning senses and heard my brain ask, “Where am I?” ** Rarely do I stay in a hotel that […]
Travel for me is all about getting to know the local people through their culture, arts and traditions, and their food. While I don’t think I am a foodie from what I understand to be the modern sense of that word… I don’t understand ingredients, can’t guess what’s in the pot unless told, and I can’t […]
Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” – Miriam Beard I don’t believe in travelling to get away. Yes, there have been times when the city has thrown so much more than I thought I could handle, that I […]
** If you are a writer, you will always find a story or a story will find you almost as if someone had set up a moment for you to look at and pointed, “Take note..remember this..write this down.” On an unplugged holiday after almost a decade when I refused to carry even a laptop […]
So we went to Goa. Again. It is such a lovely place. I plan to retire there you know, like some 40 million others… buy a small plot of land near the sea, open a shack, not do much, eat a lot, go for walks and hang out with the locals. I love the […]
Two people met, became friends (not sure when love happened) and decided to get hitched for the better. Like any other inter-caste marriage, this Assamese-Bengali alliance also went through a lot of high drama before it could culminate into a marriage ceremony that seemed interminable as rituals followed rituals to appease Assamese and Bengali sentiments. […]
Imagine my excitement when I realised that the flight I was on would be taking off into the Goa sunrise. We took off with the help of runway lights, and as I admired the deserted beaches down below, the sky turned a dark purple.. beckoning me to take a look. As luck would have it, I was seated […]