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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My mother was a great cook and indulged in cooking as a fetish. Ma was a magician too, adding that special sparkle to anything she touched. She could even snip a handful of wildly growing, wayward Amaranth leaves, tease them with fiery red chillies, team them with un-skinned potatoes, turn them over in an iron […]
There are many ways to think about writing. And only one way to unthink the jargon. By just writing. And then writing some more. If you were to ask writers who have been published a lot just what they have learnt about writing, they will possibly give you different answers or a response that is […]
In my home in Patiala, I had designed a little wall ornament with painted cherries and a quote, ”Enough is as good as a feast.” That statement comes back to me at the end of each year when I take stock of not what I earned but what I learned over a span of 365 days. […]
When life gives you a hard time, just chill. It’s true. Papa said so. Like when he gave me a card which read “When life gives you a thunderstorm… Find a puddle to play in”. Inside was a little handmade picture of a little boy jumping in a huge puddle. The catharsis that comes […]
My first job as a sub-editor in The Economic Times in 1994 brought me in touch with many people. Some were just colleagues, some were mentors and a few became life-long friends. It is hard for me to categorise Madhuri Velegar K. She headed Bangalore’s Femina desk and we hardly spoke though we worked for […]
LOVE AFTER LOVE The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was yourself. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart […]
Honestly, before I visited Masai Mara, I never gave much thought to what an wildlife Safari would be like. I never wondered about wildlife. I didn’t watch much of National Geographic while growing up. But then, I got a chance to witness an African Safari in all its glory and I can’t be more thankful. […]
Freedom. That ‘apparently’ ever elusive feeling that many of us are after. All our lives we think, feel or believe that someone or something is constantly taking it away or keeping it away from us. That it is controlled externally, and we have to fight for it. Usually, it is our parents who we blame […]
We all love to read stories or hear stories or sometimes weave stories. Neil Gaiman once said, “Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you, it […]
It is interesting how parents teach kids to hate and despise anything that hurts them rather than reason out that this too is a part of life. While I waited for by delayed flight back home, I saw a child -two or three years old, whose legs got stuck in the chair. The kid was shocked and screeched […]
America is abuzz with talks about gun rights and regulations and I’m not particularly interested in this debate. But one bit of news got my attention and it was about Gabby Giffords speaking up about the need for gun control. Her whole life was turned upside down by one gun shot by a deranged man. […]
On her birthday today, I remember ‘Alone’, a poem by Maya Angelou. A poem that recounts a moment in all our lives when we lie awake at night with a soul niggle that asks, “How to find my soul a home..where water is not thirsty and bread loaf is not stone?” And then comes the […]