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
Aarey Milk Colony was envisioned in 1949 by Dara Nusserwanji Khurody (winner of 1963 Ramon Magsaysay Award with Dr Verghese Kurien) and inaugurated with the planting of a sapling by the then PM Jawaharlal Nehru in 1951. Over the decades, it has grown to be one of Mumbai’s most cherished lung spaces. Weeks before the […]
The first picture is from the protests in Delhi’s Ramjas college in 2017. The second is from the ongoing JNU protests. There was another picture that I can’t find now. “Apno ki khushi aapki zimmedari hai, ” said a public service message on a board in the picture. And right in front of it […]
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 […]
Actually she isn’t. That headline was only meant to grab eyeballs. She fought again odds to educate herself. No not just school or college. She dared to go to the university. And then get herself a post graduation degree. Though she married my father through an arranged marriage, there was nothing ‘arranged’ about her marriage. […]
Symbols matter. Symbols sum up ideals that are bigger than phraseology and represent the best of humanity. And no one knows how an intangible idea brimming with something vast and indefinable, gets distilled into a symbol and comes to belong to all of us. When artist Shepard Fairey created the iconic Barack Obama poster emblazoned with the word “Hope” in 2008-2009, […]
The US elections saddened me beyond belief. I didn’t know that an election process in a part of the world so far away from mine would impact me to such an extent. Truth be told, it has. I’ve considered myself an optimist and have always banked on the hope that the world is slowly gaining momentum towards […]
When a television serial right in the middle of an innocuous narrative about a controlling mother and an independent daughter-in-law weaves in a little banter about demonitisation with one of the characters hailing it, when a plug inserted between ads on FM radio says, “Desh ko line pe laana hai toh line mein lagiye” and […]
Let’s begin with a story. A poor woman, a mother of five, is divorced by her husband. Uneducated, with no means of income to support her, she approaches the court for alimony to keep her body and soul together and take care of her children. After the usual delay that the legal procedure is wont […]
The important thing to learn from this time in human history is that appealing to people’s better judgement, their higher selves, their intelligence and sense of decency and right and wrong no longer works. If you appeal to their baser selves, their misogyny and irrationality, their hatred for the loathed ‘others’ (be they women, the […]
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 […]
“Kaanch ki haandi ko kitni baar chadhaenge ?” How many times will you put a glass bowl on flames and pretend to cook something in it? Last night, this question was asked by Kanhaiya Kumar as he addressed a charged gathering of hundreds of young JNU scholars who with joyful irreverence laughed at […]
I have always been proud of the fact that my family embraced different cultures and religions with equal love and joy. My father is a Hindu Rajput from Gharwal, Uttrakhand and my mother a Muslim from Srinagar, Kashmir. They fell in love in the 80’s and got married after a little resistance from some of […]