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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‘Maang meri..sindoor tumhare naam ka..haath mere..choodiyan tumhare naam ki, kokh meri..khoon mera par baccha tumhare naam ka..tumhari iss duniya mein kya kuch bhi hai mere naam ka?” When Vidya Balan’s Vasudha says these words to her insanely possessive husband (the unerring Rajkumar Yadav) in Hamari Adhuri Kahani, you recall the 80s when Mahesh Bhatt basically […]
In the mid 90s, Waheeda Rehman was negotiating a cusp in her life. After spending a few blissful decades in Bengaluru with husband Kanwaljit (with whom she had starred in the 1964 film Shagoon) in a sprawling hacienda called ‘Gharonda,’ raising two children, initiating an organic cereal brand with friend and neighbour Asharfa Sattar, she was […]
The issue with the casting of Sanjay Leela Bhasali’s grand production Mary Kom is that it does not reflect what Mary Kom stands for. Does Priyanka look like Mary Kom? No, she looks like Priyanka Chopra with an accentuated pout and a lot of muscle. Do we need a North-Eastern face to play a North-Eastern […]
Some of the best scenes in Bobby Jasoos unfold between Vidya Balan and Rajendra Gupta. Gupta is the taciturn abba who rules his household with forbidding silence and occasional bitterness because his eldest daughter is a joyous, guilt-free, 30-year-old with no intentions to interrupt her ‘career’ as a jasoos for marriage. She tries often to […]
In The Dirty Picture (2011), she played the hero, the heroine, the vamp and the victim who lives the bitter truth, “Zindagi jab mayus hoti hai..tabhi mehsoos hoti hai.” In Kahaani (2012), she was not just a vengeful mother goddess but also Mahabharata’s Krishna and Arjuna and the mainstream hero with a woman’s body. Someone […]
Years ago, in an interaction , Dia Mirza had spoken about how human potential was not always an explosion but a slow release of energy and intention. Even then it was obvious that being a model and the winner of Miss Asia Pacilfic International was incidental for her because she did not seem in any […]
So how dirty is dirty on Indian television? A censored film is not sanitised enough for family audiences but home grown crime shows are? Especially the ones where in the guise of educating viewers about the dangers lurking in every neighbourhood and dark corner, gang rapes are recreated, victims are shown pleading for mercy as […]
This is what Vidya Balan has done. She has distilled the Indian film heroine beyond her size, skin colour, weight, objectification in item songs and orchestrated stardom created around the din of endorsements and tiny roles in big budget films to performance. And presence. The kind that makes you look at a woman beyond her […]
Though it was a night of glitz, glamor, and chutzpah crowded by the who’s who of filmdom, the underdogs clambered up the throne of entertainment at the recently concluded Filmfare Awards. And the biggies humbly accepted their defeat and made way for the path-breakers. Vidya Balan, who played a sex-bomb in a no-holds-barred performance in the Dirty […]
“Zindagi mayoos hoti hai tabhi mehsoos hoti hai,” is the final footnote of The Dirty Picture where a spent force of nature after having lived crazy dreams and nightmares, dizzying flights and spiralling lows, finds peace. Not the kind we would have wished for her but the kind that comes after life has been lived […]
Recently a small box in an entertainment supplement of a leading newspaper, claimed that actress Rani Mukherjee would be honoured with the Dada Saheb Phalke Award. Rani reportedly said, “I’m happy that people have loved my film (No One Killed Jessica) and my work. I have always let my work do the talking and I guess I have proved to […]
Ramesh Sippy’s cinema. Hema Malini’s Geeta grinning with happy malice atop a ceiling fan. Sanjeev Kumar shooting at the handcuff linking Jai and Veeru during a train robbery. Shakaal grimacing in a surreal den. Dum Maro Dum‘s opening credits recall some of these moments and the one thing you understand as the film unfolds is this. That some of the biggest hits in […]