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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A friend once shared how her daughter was stopped by a teacher in her school and told , “Your breasts are too big for you to walk like that.” She went on to develop an apologetic, stooping posture for life. Shame is coded in the DNA of a young girl. And docility is force fed. […]
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 […]
Shah Rukh Khan does not make political statements.He does not say much about the state of the country he has seen become a bit snappy and rude and yes, intolerant over the decades. Aamir Khan tried to opine but learnt to then know better. These two are in a unique position unlike Salman Khan from […]
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 […]
August 1947 was a watershed moment in the history of the Indian sub-continent. India – the jewel in the British crown – became an independent nation as it broke away from its imperial past of over 200 years. The joyful moment however was short-lived as independence unfortunately came at a heavy price in the form […]
Penguin presents Reporting Pakistan by Meena Menon. While there are many similarities between India and Pakistan, comparisons, though inescapable, are odious . . . As sinister plots, spy games and terrorism continue, cloaked by attempts at bonhomie, the stories here centre on life, about ordinary Pakistanis and are not always about firing on the LoC or the Taliban, […]
Symbols matter. Symbols sum up ideals that are bigger than phraseology and represent the best of humanity. And no one knows how an intangible idea brimming with something vast and indefinable, gets distilled into a symbol and comes to belong to all of us. When artist Shepard Fairey created the iconic Barack Obama poster emblazoned with the word “Hope” in 2008-2009, […]
A national distraction A national auction Your money for your patriotism Your hand on your heart Feet on clouds of fervour Head completely emptied Cocooned by propaganda Cushioned by heart’s-talk Robbed of all volition A slave to wild hope And daydreams of destiny Craven, coward, compliant Complicit in a conspiracy Masquerading as a country Pic: […]
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 […]
For the longest time, cinema in the subcontinent referred to daughters as, “betiyan toh ghar ki izzat hoti hain.” The mindset being that women must always think first of the family honour because they always have to be accountable to the world and its honour keepers for what they say, think or do. A few […]
“Katrina and her cousin went on a short trek nearby, and by the end there were 60 or 70 leeches on her. Poor thing, she is a city girl, didn’t know what to do! When she came back we removed all the leeches, then I had to sweep the blood off the floor with a […]
I was in Goa last weekend and I’m infused with susegado tinted peace. Yes, that much abused word when it comes to all things Goan. A number of people have messaged me asking for a list of recommendations for great eating joints. And being a vegetarian, I believe that if a place in Goa has […]