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 they scatter your ashes On the slopes of Landour Cantt. I will walk up Rajpur road And meet you there. On that bendy path by which, The Raj, in palanquins, was carried To its Summer Capital. Where we kicked at logs Laid out to ease the climb And marvelled at the old Abandoned chalk […]
I cannot recall the exact number of times I have interviewed or spoken to Yusuf Arakkal in the past 21 years. Possibly one of my first stories with him was when I interviewed him and his son Shibu Arakkal (a celebrated photographer) for a Sunday edition of a national daily. I remember meeting his […]
On July 27, 2015, the entire nation was shocked by the sudden demise of the revered Dr. Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam. ‘Dear Kalam Sir’ is a tribute to him, based on a concept that LetterFarms, a Kochi-based NGO hit upon. They ideated an art project, inviting people to write postcards expressing their sentiments about the […]
What can you say about a woman who loved Urdu poetry, a cat named Jadoo, Pink Floyd, Steve Jobs and human connections? And who, in her own words, fell in love with a Macintosh Plus computer over two decades ago? The computer changed the course of her life as it helped her to shape an, […]
Losing a wicket is a far far better thing to strive for. No batsman would say that under normal circumstances, but given Phil Hughes’ death, he would certainly say that. **The sight of a fast bowler tearing into a batsman has been one of cricket’s most romanticized images, especially in the pre-helmet era. It was […]
I could have written an article on Khushwant Singh, but I would rather share some very simple but precious memories. Neither do I claim to be a writer, nor had I ever met Khushwant Singh. I was initiated into his writings with Portrait of a Lady and Mark of Vishnu. Though he wrote about very simple and […]
An overcast afternoon and the paper lamps in Ranga Shankara cafe glowed and swayed in the breeze. Friends, colleagues and members of author, playwright, mentor, poet Vijay Nair’s extended family slowly filled up the empty spaces and occupied the benches, chairs and even the steps leading to the cafe. The event organised by theatre […]
Through a splitting headache and waves of shock, the snapshots come back. But it is too early to write them down in past tense. Too early to say anything except that death puts it all into perspective. It reveals just how pointless is the negativity, the greed, the competitiveness, the toxic energy and ingratitude that […]
During my school days my father would never get the names of my friends correct. And this was especially so whenever Sriparna and Suparna were mentioned in conversations. “Kaun? woh gori wali?” (Who, that fair one?) he would ask trying to distinguish one from the other based on their skin tones. In reply I […]
Silence the conch shells stop the dhakis at their drums the winter air this festive season nips sharp for the writer’s gone. His pen that spilled over into thousands of words and more will write no more. The writer whose words could make my father’s voice mellow and ruminative when he read him out […]
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 […]
What does a cinematographer or a photographer do that we can’t? Well, he reinterprets the world through his gaze, recreates it, focusses on moments that say, “Watch this. This is important. Beautiful. Relevant,” bleaches a frame of colour or suffuses it with rainbows. Catches butterflies. Dewdrops. Rain streaks across a window pane. Faces with all […]