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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It’s a scary place to be. The vast openness in front of you. Myriad intertwining paths stretching across the horizon as far as the eye can see. Fear immobilizes you. One wrong step and you think all will be lost. How sad it is sweet child that you have forgotten where you have come from. […]
You can be surrounded by a room full of people and still feel alone…alone in your frustrating circumstances, grappling with seemingly inconsequential problems that no one really sees as problems. How you wish you had someone who would understand. And you could draw strength from your loved ones and fall back on their support. And […]
I have always been proud of the fact that my family embraced different cultures and religions with equal love and joy. My father is a Hindu Rajput from Gharwal, Uttrakhand and my mother a Muslim from Srinagar, Kashmir. They fell in love in the 80’s and got married after a little resistance from some of […]
What is it that binds one human-being to another? The thread of empathy, recognition that the other is not the other after all but part of the same human experience? Their pain is not theirs alone? That their joy is also yours? Because as poet Shahid Kabir once said poignantly, “Galiyon galiyon jiska charcha hai..woh […]
We are fragmented beings at many levels, living in a fragmented world, trying so hard to patch together our fragmented lives. The chinks, the cracks, the scars and the wounds leave us feeling incomplete. This hole we try to fill with things we seek on the outside, failing to realize that they can never make […]
We believe that God made this Universe and populated our World with His creatures including his masterful creation, humankind. Strangely, we also believe that He then called all those he had made in his own image and said, “I now pronounce you Hindu and Muslim. And Jew and Christian and Buddhist and Jain and Sikh.” […]
Every one has their own equation with religion, some take it very seriously, some don’t, some have questions but keep it to themselves, some question it. I don’t know exactly which category I belong to, do I believe in God? Yes, I do. Do I have doubts about certain practices adopted by my religion ? […]
If you are like me, then you expect to be given what you have asked for. At least that is how I imagined the wish-fulfilling department of heaven worked! You check off items on a catalogue, place an order and then wait for it to arrive within the next 30 days. I gave up the 30 day rule a […]
The world has become unbearable to me. The more I try to center myself and tap into inner peace, the more junk it throws at me. I love the trash-to-treasure idea but what do you do with random acts of violence with absolutely no motive or reasoning? It’s hard to erase those images from […]
God has a way of keeping his favorite children close. Every time I begin to settle for something, he has a way of shaking me. God: This is not what I planned for you; your destiny is greater than just settling into the mundane, then just making do with what is available. I am on my way to […]
Religion is a just a life jacket But in a storm you need more ** Not all storms come to destroy Not all islands offer refuge ** God is not a ritual Evil is not outside The terrors we see around us often begin within ** Even when we are adrift we are getting somewhere […]
I started jotting down my prayers in a journal sometime in early July this year. I was intrigued by the maid Aibileen in The Help who wrote down all her prayers in a prayer book. Everyone thought her prayers worked. I read about the same thing in Write it Down, Make it Happen. So I […]