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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Onir’s anthology I Am (2010) remains one of the most deeply felt and insightful cinematic statements on Kashmir where Juhi Chawla’s Megha (a Kashmiri Pandit) and Manisha Koirala’s Rubina (a Kashmiri Muslim) connect after twenty years of estrangement amid barbed wires, abandoned, crumbling homes with bullet riddled walls and layers upon layers of anger and […]
“Agar Firdaus bar rōy-e zamin ast, hamin ast-o hamin ast-o hamin ast.” If there is paradise on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here.That’s what Persian poet Amir Khusrau, said of Kashmir in 13th Century.Fast-forward to now and this is what I heard from friends and acquaintances: “There’s a constant sense of […]
I have always been proud of the fact that my family embraced different cultures and religions with equal love and joy. My father is a Hindu Rajput from Gharwal, Uttrakhand and my mother a Muslim from Srinagar, Kashmir. They fell in love in the 80’s and got married after a little resistance from some of […]
In his first book, The Collaborator, Mirza Waheed spun a stunning story, thinly veiled as fiction, of the hapless Valley and its hapless residents. Here, he tells us a tender love story. The serious young man with fine features and a talent for papier mache art, naqashi, is Faiz, a Sunni. The girl is the […]
When I was a kid I had a favorite TV show, called Jungle Book. It was a time when India and Doordarshan had good shows, even animations or adaptations. Jungle Book was an animation of the celebrated book ( directed by none other that Fumio Kurokawa) and since the book was written in India, perhaps […]
In parts, Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider replays keynotes from a classic Shakespearean dirge with a sly wink. So we are offered the jovial grave diggers. The skull gnashing in glee. The sinner in a moment of redeeming prayer. The ghost who is not a ghost afterall but is Roohdar..the keeper of another man’s soul and all its agony. […]
“I don’t care how big and fast computers are, they’re not as big and fast as the world.” ~ Herbert Simon When was it that the travel bug bit me? Was it when I started to read travel books? Or was it during my trip to the Valley of Flowers? Or perhaps my annual trips back […]
The brutal beating of senior advocate Prashant Bhushan in a Supreme Court chamber for his comments on Kashmir has established one thing that the art of graceful disagreement is truly lost. Even something as apolitical as hindi film music on YouTube attracts hate mongers stewing in rabid nationalism,regionalism or religion and politics. A popular website […]
I was a tad surprised when he told me that he wouldn’t be able to meet me late evening since it was late, and he would have to return home. You don’t always expect guys to rush homewards just because it is a trifle late. We had initially planned to meet early evening, but another […]
The tell-tale photographs of the street protests in Srinagar and elsewhere in Kashmir that raged during the summer of last year are difficult to forget. Pitched battles were fought between Kashmiri youths and Indian security personnel. Indian authorities came down on the protests with a heavy hand and on the protesting youths too. Much was […]
Nafisa sat perched on the edge of her terrace, reading a poignant tale of lost love. Kemal was trying to absorb the fact, that his beloved Fusun was now a happily married woman. Each word in the story reflecting his pain and piercing through Nafisa’s chest. Just then the sky boomed with the soulful sound of the […]
Bahadur looked up as Abdullah patted his silky mane, They walked side by side as he held his reins. Bahadur’s body looked weak and eyes looked old As they stood and watched the Valley of Gold.. Where the sun sprinkles beams on shiny white snow Where the pine trees are arranged neatly in rows […]