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…
Read More
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…
Read More
“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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
You are browsing archives for
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. […]
When the soul remains shrouded In the dead silence of a few past days, When the heart lies curled up Too heavy to move; When the sky remains overcast With smoking clouds of pain and agony When words lose their meanings And protests their fire; When things remain As they had been; I look vacantly […]
Remember the Dalit girl being dragged through the streets of Muktsar? And Pushpa and Murti, the Dalit teenaged girls in Badaun in 2014 whose rape and hanging was referred to by the shocked Western media as India’s Mango tree case? A case that was dismissed by CBI director Ranjit Sinha with this statement, “Our probe […]
“As the picture of the drowned Syrian boy went viral, the emotional outpourings on social media left me somewhat cold,” so says an article in an online magazine, trying to convey that though the death of the young child, (clad fetchingly, it says, in a red T-shirt and blue jeans) was tragic, it showed […]
When you call activist Harish Iyer, you hear instead a hilarious warning by Quick Gun Murugan to not waste too much of the gentleman’s time. Compliment Harish on all the work he is doing for rape survivors and LGBT rights and he feigns sadness and says, “But all this is not enough to get me […]
“This incident was a storm which came and went. And what was there before it, and what is left behind after it, this is what we need to see.” (Nirbhaya’s father) This is the parting message that Leslee Udwin’s film ‘India’s Daughter’ closes with. And this is what the film proposes to do. To see whether […]
Just a few days before December 16, the second anniversary of the Nirbhaya tragedy, actor, producer and activist Dia Mirza was in town. The Uber rape case was on her mind, as were the sexual crimes against young girls in Bengaluru’s schools. She said, “What kind of man rapes a woman… a little girl? This […]
Sometime around 1973, author Shashi Deshpande lived in the campus of the KEM Hospital in Mumbai and would often see a young, sprightly nurse pass by. Sometime later, she learnt that this young woman was Aruna Shanbaug. And that all the promise of her life had been snatched away by a ward boy who […]
Many a time, I scroll my Facebook wall, see my posts and tell myself, “Oh! My life is an open-book!” From posting myriad of status messages about trivial things to blogging about some earth-shattering topics, I’ve been constantly striving to record my life. Despite being self-expressive, I realised that I haven’t let a word out […]
Last night in Bangalore, the cast of the play Nirbhaya got a standing ovation, each one of us standing for our own private reason. I for one stood because I thought it was admirable, how the cast made public perhaps the most painful truths of their lives. The tears were real, this was no acting. […]
I’ve been asking myself this question for quite some time now. The gang rape in Delhi served to make it more urgent. “Where is our country headed ?” I’m sure lots of other people too, pretty much like me, are echoing the despair that one feels within oneself. Our country is steeped in a shroud […]
She’s been named Damini, Braveheart, Nirbhaya and counting. Now we know her real name and to that 23- year- old girl from Delhi, I, for one, doff my hat. If ever we’ve seen a symbol of courage, of hope, of fortitude, of fighting against all odds, she’s been it. ** Having been subjected to the […]