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…
Read More
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…
Read More
“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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
You are browsing archives for
‘Dil ki choton ne kabhi chain se rehne na diya jab chali sard hawa maine tujhe yaad kiya’ (The wounded heart restlessly aches… Whenever the wind ripples, for you…I crave) ‘Iss ka rona nahi kyun tumne kiya dil barbaad Iss ka gham hai ki bahut der se barbaad kiya’ (I don’t mourn the fact that […]
Curtains of fog cloaked the ancient city of Agra at the crack of dawn in early January. A fog so thick that walking through it felt like ferreting through a bucket of whipped cream. Despite the hindrance it posed to daily lives, the streets had already begun whirring into action. Store shutters were noisily rolled […]
With every message that leaves novelist Bilal Tanweer’s email account, travel these famous lines from Aleksandar Hemon’s 2008 novel, The Lazarus Project: “All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.” It is easy to see […]
Zipping past me on my right were lush green fields, sleepy hamlets, rain washed forests with abundant open spaces while on my left, in contrast, was cramped nothingness with frozen unknown faces- each looking lost in their own reverie. Soon it started raining again and water started trickling in. I struggled to shut the rickety […]
Pakistani actor Fawad Khan is quoting playwright David Mamet and citing Brando’s brilliance in the 1951 classic A Streetcar Named Desire, minutes after he has been made to dance to a hit from his debut Hindi film Khoobsurat with Sonam Kapoor. He had danced to the rather inane Ma ka phone aaya, with a […]
Being born an Indian means inheriting a big book of rules, principles and society norms as soon as we are born. We are taught from an early age that our behaviour reflects our family’s reputation and status, to listen and obey is considered a sign of goodness, to compromise and sustain a bad relationship is […]
Like textured tapestries hung in mountain cabins, internationally acclaimed, Japanese American artist Rima Fujita’s works have the warmth of a log fire. They bloom and flow and vibrate like all the colours of nature and imagine what secret gardens of the soul look like. Fairies and transcendent humans and animals co-exist in valleys and meadows […]
If you go to the website of one of Pakistan’s best known contemporary art magazines Nukta Art (http://www.nuktaartmag.com/Nukta/), you will run into stimulating discourses about post modernist dilemmas, narratives woven around personal and collective histories and the artistic urge to blur orders, dissolve the idea of separation between countries, religions and go beyond “identity […]
The capital city of Meghalaya, Shillong offers a perfect mix of old world and modern charm. Tucked away in East Khasi Hills, this city offered a much needed respite from continuous travelling, through gruelling road conditions in much of the rest of North-East. The Shillong travel circuit can easily boast best roads, connectivity and tourist […]
So, I was out in Mylapore this evening. And there was a mela all around. The pavement shops were selling everything from terracotta pots and pans to herbal oils for mosquito bites to cheap plastic toys and knick-knacks. Fortune tellers sat on the roadside with their parrots picking out fortune cards for hopeful clients. […]
I read this article in The Times of India the other day, with a growing sense of dismay. No – am not talking of accidents, murders or rapes. Those seem to be happening as routinely as clockwork, even now. I’m talking of Nirbheek (I believe that’s what it is called). Nirbheek is said to be India’s first gun for women, a […]
Fireworks were exploding over Sultanahmet square in Istanbul, as we strolled back after dinner. It was our last night in Turkey, a country that had thrown quite a few surprises our way, all of them pleasant. The term Turkish delight could be applied to more […]