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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August 1947 was a watershed moment in the history of the Indian sub-continent. India – the jewel in the British crown – became an independent nation as it broke away from its imperial past of over 200 years. The joyful moment however was short-lived as independence unfortunately came at a heavy price in the form […]
HarperCollins Publishers India is pleased to announce the release of Footprints on Zero Line- Writings on the Partition by Gulzar Translated by: Rakhshanda Jalil The Partition of 1947 has influenced the works of an entire generation of writers, and continues to do so. Gulzar witnessed the horrors of Partition first-hand and it is a theme that […]
“He was chewing on his paan, slowly and thinking. Thick jets of sticky, tobacco-mixed gob was swishing in his mouth. He felt as if his teeth were grinding his thoughts and blending them with his saliva.Maybe that was why he didn’t wish to spit out the gob of chewed-up paan.’’ Muhammad Umar Memon’s translation of […]
In the opening credits of MS Sathyu’s Garm Hava, you hear Kaifi Azmi’s lament, “Taksim hua mulk toh dil ho gaye tukde; Har seene mein toofan, wahan bhi tha yahan bhi Har ghar mein chita jalti thi, lahraate the sholay; har shahar mein shamshan, wahan bhi tha yahan bhi Gita ki koi na sunta, na koi Quran ki sunta; […]
Padma Shri awardee, filmmaker, cinematographer and one of the key figures of independent cinema in India, Govind Nihalani has just walked into Bangalore’s Ranga Shankara cafe and a young volunteer is asking him if she can get him coffee. He asks, ‘What kind?’ She smiles nervously,”Filter?” He looks relieved and nods. Yes, he would very […]
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 […]
(Pic courtesy sify.com) A few months ago, on a Facebook thread, I read a few comments against North-Eastern women, about North-Eastern people and their irrelevance to India, to a city like Bangalore. I was teaching at that time in a college and many of my students were North-Eastern, some of whom had already shared […]
Every Indian at some time or another has come face-to-face with communal disquiet. A few such memories and stories found their way in my first book Perfect Eight. For a young girl brought up in a uncompromisingly secular home, the Babri Masjid demolition was a devastating event. As were the 1984 riots. Both shattered this […]
“I have a feeling that we are going to be a generation which is going to fail this country,” I remember my father saying to some friends of his in Kota, Rajasthan, where he was posted between 1970 and 1973 and where we went to school when we were really young. ‘We have fallen into […]
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 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 become witness […]