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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Ordinary people do not interest Hindi cinema anymore and that is why even if Mani Ratnam’s artifice free protagonists from OK Kanmani (who did not think it was necessary to interrupt their love story to endorse Vero Moda, Coca Cola and Anita Dongre’s wedding wear) are channelled in Ok Jaanu (a Karan Johar production), they […]
It is hard for directors to treat Hrithik Roshan as ‘normal.’ He is either Jalluddin Mohammed Akbar or Krish or a vaguely challenged Rohit or an ace thief who can be a dwarf, a queen in drag, a superman vrooming to the beat of ‘Dhoom..dhoom‘ or a self-made chawl don spouting Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s Agnipath […]
There is an unavenged little boy in Karan Johar. A son who saw his naively golden-hearted father not getting his due in an industry driven by merciless opportunism so it is apt that Johar should pick a Father India metaphor to replay and remake in the memory of Yash Johar. Karan Malhotra’s Agneepath tries to avenge […]
In Barsaat, yes, all the way back in 1949, when Raj Kapoor and Prem Nath went to the hills in a car, braving the wind and perhaps egged by boredom, they ran into love, tragedy, heartbreak and a life lesson or two. There have been many memories on wheels, intrinsic to narratives like Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi but why are we digressing? In 2001, […]
On the eve of the release of Zoya Akhtar’s second film Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, I went back to her debut and the clear-sightedness with which she revealed to us, the industry she works and lives in. It was with much relish that she added, little asides to the bonfire of celluloid vanities in Luck By Chance. The self-absorption of star makers. […]