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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Every year when I see the saree, it seems to disintegrate a little bit more – much like a memory of a marriage. Thread by thread, zari flower by zari flower. Ma was always reticent about the story behind her wedding saree . And each year, I take it out once to remind myself what it […]
Often when my auto whizzes past a school campus on Bangalore’s Hosur Road, I can smell the breezy trees and instantly feel the pine and fir fragrance of Palampur flooding my senses. Palampur was my happy place as a teenager because a favourite aunt lived here, in a house by a pine hill overlooking the craggy Dhauladhar range. […]
It’s no secret, how over the course of time, we tend to do things we don’t want to, loved people who didn’t love us back, got betrayed, hurt, wounded, until the heart was shredded apart…all of these, making small knots on the fabric of our soul, serving us as reminders…reminders so that we never let […]
On the day of her Shradh, everything is normal. The maids come and go, people go to work, children go to school, the trains and the buses struggle to run on time; the sun rises, it will rise to its highest position at noon, and then disappear, letting the moon take over. It is just […]
Let your voice for once, listen to your feelings, For words and tears wait for none, Let those eyes be as silent, Else they might voice your bitter heart Yes I remember those sleepless nights, And those lamps, lit with your memories, the black crisp petals are still fresh, I can still smell the […]
The needle point of pain is fire and ice it’s the knowing and the not knowing the near and the far presence and absence the found and the lost A pain both old and young that knows how to smile at itself and be petulant. It is home in the cozy grooves of the heart. […]
She gazed at the Morez clock ominously crawling towards six, dangling precariously on the cracked wall behind her. Her nose wrinkled unceremoniously as the smell of antiquated books rose from the dust, settling on the moist sheet of glass, mixing with the smell of sodden earth to form a film of nostalgia she couldn’t escape. Her […]
He rode quietly, feeling the wind on his face, feeling her snuggling up to him, his pillion rider wife. The song he had caught off the radio at a snacks store still auto-played in his head. 11 children, all in their khaki shorts, scratches healing on their rugged knees, scuttling between lanes with bats on […]
Memory is nothing but a compound a distillation an essence a coming together seeping together staying together of everything that the eyes drank the skin tasted the breath sang the soul heard and never forgot and that is why when breeze mixes with rain you suddenly smell pine needles and distant snow and damp roses […]
I always thought I was a visual person. That sights would remind me of places, of people. Turns out, I was wrong. That day, when I caught a whiff of a certain face wash, I felt like I was back in my hostel in Bangalore. Because I used it then. So I closed my eyes […]
Prettiness and peaches. Suffolk homes. Salmon returning to breed. Scallops and kabibe shells. Baby feet. Frosted lipstick. Rashes and raspberries. Onions and radishes, Cadillacs and corals Jordan’s sand art bottles and Bahamas’ beaches Sheer silk, satin pyjamas and flowerbeds of phlox Marshmallows and candy treats The rudeness of being jobless and beat Flamingos and Floyd […]
As I am growing older, festivals are not so much about looking forward to something as they are about looking back. Being nostalgic and turning into an uncle who’s always remembering the past. Last month I was invited to inaugurate a Durga Puja. The organizers asked me to speak a few lines. They must have […]