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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Sometime in 2008, Talat Aziz was singing at a concert when the audience began to request a Mehdi Hassan ghazal. Hassan was grievously sick back home in Pakistan but on an impulse, Aziz called him from the stage and put the conversation on speaker mode so that the ailing maestro could hear chants of, […]
The world of music has always been divided between populists and spiritualists. So though there is a Yo Yo Honey Singh, thankfully, we also have a Mohammed Vakil. Vakil, who won reality show Sa Re Ga Ma (Mega Final) in 1998, is now an established ghazal and sufi singer, the scion of the Jaipur gharana […]
On June 27, India will commemorate trend-setting music composer R D Burman’s 75th birth anniversary. Something unprecedented will also happen. For the first time ever, a mainstream television channel will showcase a documentary on prime-time. Pancham Unmixed: Mujhe Chalte Jaana Hai (an unending journey), a national award-winning feature-length documentary on R D Burman will be […]
I have been thinking of pain lately. The pointlessness of it. The inevitability of it. Why some people court it and others shun it. Some hide it and others hide from it. Some people gather painful moments like they were spring flowers. Their life is defined by pain, what it did to them, will do […]
Tragedy does not respect fame or talent or abundance. It strikes with cold precision and takes away what it must. And also destroys the notion that the rich and the successful are impervious to loss. The suicide of writer Varsha Bhosle, is a blow not just because it is such a shocking tragedy but also because […]
2011 made us bid goodbye unwillingly and sorrowfully to… (Tribute: http://unboxedwriters.com/2011/12/satyadev-dubey-the-resilient-cactus/) Satyadev Dubey who wrote film dialogues like he was unaware of all the cliches and conventions that do not let cinematic characters breathe. And produced and directed theatre with a fierce passion that sought and demanded nothing but absolute attention and commitment from those […]
Every lover of ghazal has a Jagjit Singh memory. My first one is part of my book Perfect Eight and recalls a cassette my father brought home to play on our first tape recorder. Kal Chaudvani Ki Raat Thi, sang the Sikh who sounded like an Urdu poet and occasionally like a Sufi pir. His […]