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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For years, like a homing pigeon I’d return to a small salon In the backlanes of my home The door opened with tinkling bells Where beyond a pink curtain, red dragons flew across the wall I surrendered myself to the gaggle of girls With smiling eyes and poker-straight hair Who spoke a […]
From a helpless young girl being pawed by a pack of hounds in Guwahati, the media focus has shifted now to a sinewy Manipuri woman punching her way to international attention. Some shift. I wonder how the powerful women competing in the Olympics come across to the moral sainiks. Women swimmers, gymnasts, weight lifters, […]
A few days back I found a petition forwarded by Richard Loitam’s parents in my inbox. The same Richard who was brutally beaten to death a few nights ago in a reputed Bangalore college. A few months in a college in the capacity of an occasional teacher made me react to this news with far more […]
I was in the first batch of inward fellows of the National Foundation of India’s ‘Northeast Media Exchange Programme’. It was 1996-97 and I went to Mizoram. My subject was ‘Changing traditional patterns and the youth of Mizoram’. Though this travel piece has nothing to do with my fellowship subject, it is a by-product of […]
“Democracy,” began our political-science teacher in her high-pitched nasal voice and her staccato accent, “Is a government of the ‘peeple,’ by the ‘peeple,’ for the ‘peeple.” I remember nothing else. I did mug it all up though, that and the rest of it, for the Board exams. Did pretty well too, come to think of […]
If a river is the highway of life, cultures and commerce then the Brahmaputra is beyond par in this respect. With the effortlessness of a patriarch, a unique family of man gathers at his side, worships at his feet and accepts his rule with resignation tinged with respect.