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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Someone I know, recently shifted to an old age facility. Another resident, (in his nineties incidentally), asked her within days of her arrival , what languages she was conversant with. When she named Bengali in the list, he snapped, “I will report you to NRC people.” Hate you see gives a sense of purpose to […]
On the day freedom fighters and lifelong friends Ramprasad Bismil and Ashfaq Ullah Khan were hanged, and a few weeks after the death of Shaukat Kaifi, I heard Shabana Azmi on a channel, quoting the famous couplet penned by her father. “आज की रात बहुत गर्म हवा चलती है, आज की रात न फ़ुटपाथ पे […]
That viral video of Kangana Ranaut on a dummy horse without legs , issuing a blood curdling cry is emblematic of the kind of fake nationalism we are being asked to adhere to these days. It allows the lady in question to diss anyone she dislikes from Alia Bhatt to Shabana Azmi without watching her […]
When a television serial right in the middle of an innocuous narrative about a controlling mother and an independent daughter-in-law weaves in a little banter about demonitisation with one of the characters hailing it, when a plug inserted between ads on FM radio says, “Desh ko line pe laana hai toh line mein lagiye” and […]
How easy it is to judge folks whose shoes we have not walked in. The largely lonely battle Karan Johar fought to save his film from hyper nationalist bullies and his desperate video which I could not bring myself to watch, the patriotism tax of Rs five crore and the backlash that followed did not […]
”They said, for the sake of the country… But the country isn’t the earth beneath our feet, it is the people. Have any of you ever spared them a glance? Oppression for the sake of the country is oppression of the country. But you won’t understand. Travel as far on the road as you can […]