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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22-August is celebrated as Madras Day. A tribute to the city I love.. The black cow is heavily pregnant. She walks into the lane where we live. Our 400 square feet box is the first house. With a large writing pad on my lap, I am sitting at the threshold. My pen is in mouth, ‘complex’ maths in […]
‘‘It says willing or not. What do I opt for?” asked my mother, then a mere 18- year-old girl. The question was aimed at her brother who had accompanied her to the Employment Exchange. “Not.. means no. Negative. So say yes. Choose Willing,” was his advice to her and perhaps the most valuable one that […]
Duckback raincoat Bata shoes Camel ink Hero pen Nataraj pencils I’ve reached a point Where lists of things Once familiar Comfort me But I don’t believe things are worse The world Was always burning The skies Were always red And the end Was always near Near enough to smell The burning Of time But with […]
Take me back where dreaming was the only goal Life wasn’t a race… Playing, the only chore Everyone had one face Noise was just the waves ebbing No rules applied to choices Freedom spanned like the sky Peace was a meadow Little was enough for you and me Take me back To the perfect […]
In this quiet corner of the Northern hemisphere, where I am currently living, spring is just a metaphor. There is no warm sun, no green foliage and of course, no scented breeze. The roads and buildings never recover from the winter gloom. seriously, by the time they manage to peel off a layer of gray, the winter arrives with […]
‘2639’ that was my library number at the local library I visited while I was growing up. I regularly went there during my early teenage years. Located between my high school and church, it also had a video library and provided services like photocopying. It was run by a father-son duo and was called Kings Library. I stopped […]
A pea-shaped face peeked from behind a set of rusted iron doors at the Taj Mahal palace as I firmly rapped the heavy door-knocker against its metal backrest. “I wish to look around”, I said determinedly in response to the quizzical expression that stared back at me. The possessor of the tiny, question-marked face – Abhinav, a […]
The city of Bhopal is like a mysterious old bard. In a tattered gunny bag swung over one of his atrophied shoulders, he hides a treasure trove of rare gems plucked right out of history books. It takes effusive flattery, gentle persuasion and an unrelenting perseverance to get him to allow a peek into his […]
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. […]
When I came to Chennai to join a newspaper as the chief sub-editor, I did not know this city. I had no friends here. I could not speak the language. There was just one thing I was absolutely clear about — this city was too hot, too crowded ( I was coming from Mangalore, […]
The aircraft had to land on this narrow piece of land that led straight to a valley. And that valley was where an ill-fated aircraft had crashed a few months ago, it had just gone on and off the runaway! That is all I could think of during my entire descent into Mangalore. I held […]
Hard to tell if memory inhabits me or I inhabit memories ** of magazines lining my mothers tin trunks smelling of the 70s and recipes of apple fritters songs on radio a window seat that opened to dreamscapes painting themselves in my head life that went on flowing unabated through everything .. memories of homes […]