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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When one takes a good long look at the people around us, the world in general – what does one see ? Does one see peace, harmony, equality or does one see discrimination, prejudice, inequity ? One look and it is only too evident that if there is one thing definitely on the increase, it is intolerance. […]
These walls used to be lined with books. Now they hold imprints of a different kind. History was made here that day, and people unmade, in fire, in smoke, in blood and sticky gore. ** In the stillness of the empty room, you can still feel the heat, hear the hopeless cries, the sense of […]
What is the meaning of a republic? Is it a selectively amnesiac entity where bull dozers run over and flatten the lives and dignity and pets and homes and belongings of the poor while builders advertise gated communities protected from the “noise and the pollution” of the big metros for the benefit of those they […]
Only Bihari migrants rape. Women would not get raped if they wore overcoats, stayed in Bharat instead of aspiring to India, did not wear skirts to school, did not err like Seeta to cross the Lakshmanrekha , if they focussed only on housework, if they did not mix freely with boys, if they were not […]
On 13 November 2012, Omnishambles was named Word of the Year by the Oxford English Dictionary. Omnishambles is a neologism i.e. a newly coined word which is in the process of gaining sociopolitical acceptance; and it can be defined as an all-prevailing disorder or chaos; or a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, characterized […]
It’s 22 years almost to the day now and no one remembers him: The second person who immolated himself following the VP Singh government’s decision to implement the Mandal Commission recommendations. Surinder Singh Chauhan perished, unlike Rajeev Goswami (who died in 2004), pictures of whose burning body appeared in several papers and made him […]
I am just back from the movie Ishaqzaade. On the face of it, a usual and regular outing for us empty nesters. But this particular viewing turned out to be a very different experience. For one, we chose to go to Delite Diamond on Aruna Asif Ali Road to watch this flick. It is a very different world […]
“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 […]