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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The urge to learn a new language breathes down my back the most when I realise how a treasure trove of heart-rending music remains beyond my reach. The Malayalam movie Mayaanadhi’s (2017) rendition of Bawra Mann (cue: Swanand Kirkire, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi) took me to Sachin Siby’s rendition of Kanmani Anbodhu, of which I understood […]
What we learn from Naseeruddin Shah’s autobiography And Then One Day..A Memoir (Penguin Books India/Hamish Hamilton), is what we need to learn. No more, no less. Nothing extravagant about milestones reached, rewards gathered, boxes ticked. Like tempered chocolate or like a quintessential Naseer performance, the writing is perfectly poised between a melting point and gradual, cool normalcy. This celebrity […]
An authentic actor’s face is unmistakable, unforgettable. The eyes speak volumes. Every frown stands out. Every snarl registers. When the lip curls, the nostrils flare, the forehead furrows, you watch without blinking, without a moment of doubt that the emotion playing out before you is real. To call an actor real is anomalous but what […]
When the sixties swung into the seventies to the beat of RD Burman’s Spanish guitar and Amitabh Bachchan’s angst, in retrospect, it was the end of the happy endings in Hindi cinema. 20 years into independence, the political reality of India had become far more complex, dark and divisive to allow films to be set on house boats, shikaras, […]
What the remakes of old classic films like Chashme Baddoor miss out on is an ingredient called innocence because you can’t ever recapture what is lost. Or fake the sense of wonder conveyed by Farooque Sheikh and Dipti Naval on their first date as they ordered a Tutti Fruity ice cream in a leafy […]
A sharply sculpted face with cheekbones bouncing off light. Hair, rippling like silk across the screen. Sensuality that was wide-eyed innocence in one instant and overwhelmingly dark and compelling in another. Crystal clear diction. It is hard to describe Parveen Babi in conventional terms. She was pure sunshine in Amar Akbar Anthony. A chatty, infinitely entertaining journalist in Kala Patthar. A poised lady in red in Deewar, […]
Every film loving generation in India has had a definitive Hindi film heroine. Suraiya was possibly India’s first female superstar and was a perfect fit for the cinema of 40s and the 50s that was rich with Urdu poetry and elemental stories of passion and sacrifice. She was the reigning queen of the developing Talkie […]
On October 10, 1964, the whole nation was shocked to hear about the sudden and tragic death of the great stalwart of Hindi cinema Guru Dutt. Not only because he was a great film director, producer and actor; but because he was only 39 years old. His fame was defined by four films Pyaasa, Kaagaz Ke […]
My first memory of Rajesh Khanna is the song, “Accha Toh Hum Chalte Hain (Aan Milo Sajna, 1970) and of me sighing exaggeratedly like he did in the song. And of listening to his songs from Mere Jeevan Sathi (1972) in an Assamese cantonment and trying to sing, “Mera Naam Hai Shabnam” (Kati Patang 1970) and then […]
Heard of the itch that must be scratched? Indians have many such itches. Cricket. Politics. Films. Film stars. Views on religion. Food. Sentiments. To name a few, serious! But across all the languages we speak in this country, officially or unofficially, the language of cinema is loved like no other. We take our movies very seriously, […]
Just an observation. No one filled a T-shirt quite like Joy Mukherjee. Remember him pulling a rickshaw (in a striped T-shirt) with the fragile Sadhna in his debut film Love in Simla? Or him serenading Sharmila Tagore with Dil Ki Awaz Bhi Sun in Humsaya (yes, again in a t-shirt, red this time) and he and Saira […]
The good thing about cheaper DVDs flooding the market is that one no longer has to think twice before picking up a film. My recent acquisitions include Raj Kapoor’s Prem Rog, Raj Sippy’s kidnapping caper Inkaar, Gulzar’s Khushboo and a few others just for a song. None of the above films are masterpieces from any […]