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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Penguin presents Reporting Pakistan by Meena Menon. While there are many similarities between India and Pakistan, comparisons, though inescapable, are odious . . . As sinister plots, spy games and terrorism continue, cloaked by attempts at bonhomie, the stories here centre on life, about ordinary Pakistanis and are not always about firing on the LoC or the Taliban, […]
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 […]
One newspaper memory lingers from the terrifying months of the Kargil war. There were two photos side by side on the front page of a national daily. One celebrating India’s win over Pakistan in a World Cup match and another one referring to the Army recapturing a key sector, if I remember correctly. In their […]
For the longest time, cinema in the subcontinent referred to daughters as, “betiyan toh ghar ki izzat hoti hain.” The mindset being that women must always think first of the family honour because they always have to be accountable to the world and its honour keepers for what they say, think or do. A few […]
‘Dil ki choton ne kabhi chain se rehne na diya jab chali sard hawa maine tujhe yaad kiya’ (The wounded heart restlessly aches… Whenever the wind ripples, for you…I crave) ‘Iss ka rona nahi kyun tumne kiya dil barbaad Iss ka gham hai ki bahut der se barbaad kiya’ (I don’t mourn the fact that […]
With every message that leaves novelist Bilal Tanweer’s email account, travel these famous lines from Aleksandar Hemon’s 2008 novel, The Lazarus Project: “All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.” It is easy to see […]
Pakistani actor Fawad Khan is quoting playwright David Mamet and citing Brando’s brilliance in the 1951 classic A Streetcar Named Desire, minutes after he has been made to dance to a hit from his debut Hindi film Khoobsurat with Sonam Kapoor. He had danced to the rather inane Ma ka phone aaya, with a […]
If you go to the website of one of Pakistan’s best known contemporary art magazines Nukta Art (http://www.nuktaartmag.com/Nukta/), you will run into stimulating discourses about post modernist dilemmas, narratives woven around personal and collective histories and the artistic urge to blur orders, dissolve the idea of separation between countries, religions and go beyond “identity […]
Along the western border of Punjab where India ends and Pakistan begins (or the other way, depending upon which side you’re looking from), there lies a stretch of no man’s land, marked off by rusty barbed wire fencing. It hides the scar where a country was once cut into two. Overlooked by the bunkers of […]
“The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?” ― George Orwell, 1984 ** Do we understand this simple fact about terrorism and the state-sponsored terror that counters […]
Acclaimed author of The Dollmakers’ Island, Anu Kumar brings a treat for the readers of Unboxed Writers in the form of an unpublished novella that will be carried in nine parts. Here is a brief introduction. Three generations of a family have maintained a hotel that suddenly finds itself close to a new boundary line when India and Pakistan are partitioned. And as guests become […]
Acclaimed author of The Dollmakers’ Island, Anu Kumar brings a treat for the readers of Unboxed Writers in the form of an unpublished novella that will be carried in nine parts. Here is a brief introduction. Three generations of a family have maintained a hotel that suddenly finds itself close to a new boundary line when India and Pakistan are partitioned. And as guests […]