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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Someone I know, recently shifted to an old age facility. Another resident, (in his nineties incidentally), asked her within days of her arrival , what languages she was conversant with. When she named Bengali in the list, he snapped, “I will report you to NRC people.” Hate you see gives a sense of purpose to […]
The first picture is from the protests in Delhi’s Ramjas college in 2017. The second is from the ongoing JNU protests. There was another picture that I can’t find now. “Apno ki khushi aapki zimmedari hai, ” said a public service message on a board in the picture. And right in front of it […]
The blood they shed in your name in my name in our name runs in the veins of this country as the music of Baba Allauddin Abdul Kareem Khan saheb Amir Khusrau Ustad Amir Khan Begum Akhtar Ustad Bismillah Khan and so many who sang of Ram and Allah of your heart, my spirit […]
The US elections saddened me beyond belief. I didn’t know that an election process in a part of the world so far away from mine would impact me to such an extent. Truth be told, it has. I’ve considered myself an optimist and have always banked on the hope that the world is slowly gaining momentum towards […]
The important thing to learn from this time in human history is that appealing to people’s better judgement, their higher selves, their intelligence and sense of decency and right and wrong no longer works. If you appeal to their baser selves, their misogyny and irrationality, their hatred for the loathed ‘others’ (be they women, the […]
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 ? […]
For years, like a homing pigeon I’d return to a small salon In the backlanes of my home The door opened with tinkling bells Where beyond a pink curtain, red dragons flew across the wall I surrendered myself to the gaggle of girls With smiling eyes and poker-straight hair Who spoke a […]
Acclaimed author of The Dollmakers’ Island, Anu Kumar brings a treat for the readers of Unboxed Writers in the form of an unpublished novella that will be carried in nine parts. Here is a brief introduction. Three generations of a family have maintained a hotel that suddenly finds itself close to a new boundary line when India and Pakistan are partitioned. And as guests […]