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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Kabir Singh is not an anomaly. He is just the ultimate culmination of the privilege that male protagonists have enjoyed in Hindi cinema for a long time. Raj Kapoor slapped and manhandled Nargis in Awara (1956) because she playfully called him ‘Junglee.” But he had a messy, heartbreaking backstory so she had to rescue him […]
Onir’s anthology I Am (2010) remains one of the most deeply felt and insightful cinematic statements on Kashmir where Juhi Chawla’s Megha (a Kashmiri Pandit) and Manisha Koirala’s Rubina (a Kashmiri Muslim) connect after twenty years of estrangement amid barbed wires, abandoned, crumbling homes with bullet riddled walls and layers upon layers of anger and […]
Internet sensation Ssumier S Pasricha’s recent video about Pammi aunty mocking a dark, overweight woman at a Teej function evoked mixed reactions. Was he mocking, dark and overweight women? Or was he mocking the women who mock them? If you watch his videos closely, every little narrative is about a woman deriding another woman, establishing the […]
Kanchan Chander is known for her versatility. She has consistently, and indeed successfully, shown an impressive diversity in her art practice that ranges from large-scale paintings replete with sensuous and spiritual feminine forms to intricate miniature style mixed media works on both canvas and paper. In her latest solo show at Gallery Art Positive, titled […]
I discovered Guru Dutt rather late in life. As a teenager, I always found him too intense. Someone who reminded me of dark, forbidden corners within. Of spiralling gloom you could lose yourself in, just the way he had. Even though he had made sunlit films like Baazi, Jaal, Aar Paar, Mr and Mrs 55; […]
There is something beautiful about hunger. Especially when it oozes out of an actor on the screen and sears you bone to soul. You see this hunger in actors who are destined for extraordinary success. In the way their eyes blaze, their bodies bristle, their nerves twitch. The way, they throw themselves into a role and turn it into a pulsing, […]
Many many years ago, I saw a bit of Mani Kaul’s debut film Uski Roti on Doordarshan and what struck me even though I was a child then, was a cinematic vocabulary unlike any I had seen or had been exposed to. This film had pauses and long moments of silence when no one seemed in a […]