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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We can’t pretend to be shocked by the Instagram group chats of young, potential rapists. There is a consumer base for rape videos in India, remember? The NGO, India Child Protection Fund (ICPF) reported in April that consumption of child pornography content in India spiked by over 95 per cent amid lockdown. That there was […]
A friend once shared how her daughter was stopped by a teacher in her school and told , “Your breasts are too big for you to walk like that.” She went on to develop an apologetic, stooping posture for life. Shame is coded in the DNA of a young girl. And docility is force fed. […]
Me too. Me too. Me too. No matter how many times I say it, it won’t be anywhere near enough. Strangers on the street, boyfriends, acquaintances at parties, “friendly” uncles, neighbours- the reality that our bodies belong to everyone but ourselves is one that women realize rather early into their lives. The first time I […]
The US elections saddened me beyond belief. I didn’t know that an election process in a part of the world so far away from mine would impact me to such an extent. Truth be told, it has. I’ve considered myself an optimist and have always banked on the hope that the world is slowly gaining momentum towards […]
Internet sensation Ssumier S Pasricha’s recent video about Pammi aunty mocking a dark, overweight woman at a Teej function evoked mixed reactions. Was he mocking, dark and overweight women? Or was he mocking the women who mock them? If you watch his videos closely, every little narrative is about a woman deriding another woman, establishing the […]
Being accustomed to receiving information about the outside world through the NDTV app on my phone and articles on Facebook, it’d been a while since I read an actual newspaper. However, paranoia emerging out of rumours about the city I live in being on “high alert” led me to pick up a copy of the Deccan […]
Hello again! The ad I am taking up for the “Conditioning is for Hair, Not Minds’ series in collaboration with The Spoilt Modern Indian Woman is by TVS tyres- watch it here and cringe once again at Indian TVs favourite misogynist, Kapil Sharma. The commercial starts with Sharma offering a lift to a young man holding […]
I am taking up yet another commercial rife with regressive clichés about Indian women and their “place”. This one, a part of Mother Dairy’s “Ma Jaisi Koi Nahin” campaign almost made me barf harder than a glass of sour milk. Watch the ad here (and try not to cringe, I dare you). It begins with […]
Recently a young colleague wrote a Facebook post about being stared at for the way she dresses or even otherwise. The point of the post was that a woman’s body is her business. It is not an offering or a piece of public property. The post went viral and was shared by various websites and […]