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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Recently, I sat down with a cup of lemon tea and watched The Lunchbox and Piku in one long stretch. To reassure myself that the world was still made up of serendipitous conversations tucked in fleeting moments when strangers connect and make soul contact. Sometimes via little notes that talk of the smell of spent […]
Vicky Kaushal in Masaan was unflinching and brave without any of the manufactured bravado we associate with a Hindi film debut. He was just part of a narrative, a face in a rich and teeming ensemble cast but then you started to notice a shy smile, a gaze that lingered when he sparred over the spice […]
Soon after the completion of this year’s sleeper hit Masaan, actor Richa Chaddha told Vicky Kaushal and Shweta Tripathi, “Say bye bye to anonymity.” Prophetic words in retrospect and Shweta relearns their truth everytime she wants to retreat to anonymity. She smiles, “This is an industry where appearance matters and there is no denying that. It’s […]
Actor, author, columnist, passionate aesthete, Padma Shri Tom Alter has just arrived in the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore to deliver a lecture on ‘Sports & Arts in Modern India’. If he is tired, it doesn’t show because Tom is used to being many things all at once. Over the last few days, he has […]
Rebecca Ferguson in a gold gown, climbing towards a precarious vantage point so that she can disrupt an opera with a stray bullet. Yes, the camera lingers on those sculpted legs, the sinewy shoulders but it is to drive home the fact that this woman is liquid steel. When someone calls Tom Cruise the manifestation […]
During one of the many special screenings of Masaan in Mumbai, Shabana Azmi came up to Vicky Kaushal and said incredulously, “Tum kaun ho? Kya kaam kiya hai tumne! (Who are you? What an amazing job!) Come, you must meet Javed saab!’’ Javed Akhtar who was coming out of the theatre just at that […]
The imperishable memories Shweta Tripathi gathered while playing a small-town girl in Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan include the night when she sobbed over the end of a beautiful story. She recalls, “I cried not for what was happening to my character but for what was happening to her story with Deepak. I just lay, looking up […]
Debutant director Neeraj Ghaywan grasped that both life and death can co-exist in the same river when during a recce around the Ganges, he saw loss interwoven with the infinitude of existence and hope. A man sitting still in a boat holding a shrouded baby, looking at a distance.. unable to let go. And a corpse […]
A katori of kheer as an ice-breaker between a sulking father and a daughter. The birthday gift of a recorder that plays back the voice of a beloved interspersed with romantic songs. A furtive phone chat on a terrace amid clothes drying under the sun. The banter with a roadside chaat vendor. Strings of […]
Tu kisi rail si guzarti hai..main kisi pul sa.. thartharata hoon (You pass by like a train…I shudder, pulse like a bridge). These lines from a Dushyant Kumar poem in Neeraj Ghaywan’s debut film Masaan, take you back to the terrace of a small town home where in the middle of the night, you heard […]