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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For all its commercial heft and cinematic records, Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay did not win any awards except one for editing. Editor MS Shinde who gave an incredible finesse to the blockbuster with his taut sense of timing and understatement, was the only one in the film crew to have won a popular award. And yet […]
When the sixties swung into the seventies to the beat of RD Burman’s Spanish guitar and Amitabh Bachchan’s angst, in retrospect, it was the end of the happy endings in Hindi cinema. 20 years into independence, the political reality of India had become far more complex, dark and divisive to allow films to be set on house boats, shikaras, […]
In the 70s and the 80s, cinema was an Eastman colour, 70 mm or cinema-scope as the case may be, ‘cannot bear to miss a scene’ event. And if you have not watched Trishul and Deewar or Kala Patthar or Sholay in a cinema hall, you will never know what it was like to be in the heart of […]
One of my favourite AK Hangal performances is that of a smiling, chess obsessed patriarch in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Guddi. He has a little room to himself at the entrance of the home that he shares with his son, his daughter-in-law and a teenaged daughter played by Jaya Bhaduri. All the old man lives for is a […]
There is something beautiful about hunger. Especially when it oozes out of an actor on the screen and sears you bone to soul. You see this hunger in actors who are destined for extraordinary success. In the way their eyes blaze, their bodies bristle, their nerves twitch. The way, they throw themselves into a role and turn it into a pulsing, […]