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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Long minutes, maybe a few hours were spent this week in the heart of a police station where I for the first time witnessed the daily workings of a place we usually associate with dark images of intimidation, apathy and incompetence, especially if you are a woman with a complaint. This one was surprisingly..for want […]
Was it coincidental that I wrote the introduction to the Chicken Soup for the Indian Woman’s Soul on the eve of Woman’s Day? As I wrote it many years ago, I recalled women who have triumphed in big and small ways and changed lives and perceptions without ever being acknowledged. Women who don’t bail out easily […]
A raindrop falls, hits the ground, disintegrates and is no more. The last light of the day leaves Imagine a home in the country Imagine a garden, rose beds Think of the sun in the flowers, Imagine your children playing, Carefree and happy. Are the seams in your shirt straight? Imagine a girl who wanted […]
I walk with my hands stuck to my sides when I’m alone, usually very quickly without realising it. When there’s a man behind me (however nice and harmless the poor chap may be) I stop to let him walk forward before continuing on my way. I dodge ‘boob brushes’ by effortlessly moving my shoulders […]
I have been crying. There have been images on the TV, reports in the newspaper and talk on the streets. I understand the anger against the perpetrators, the concern about the victim and the frustration with the government. But my thoughts have been with the mother of the girl. ** Like me, she would have […]
She wakes up to a hopeful morning, having left her dreams behind, yet holding on to them firmly, for her dreams are what gives her the wings to fly by through each long day. She smiles when she feels like crying and she sheds tears when happy. She is strong during the toughest of weathers […]
Women suffer. By habit, choice and circumstance. We feel inadequate most of the time. As home makers we wish we were out there, validating ourselves by earning money. When we have careers, we worry that the kids are growing up without good food on the table, without ironed clothes, without supervised homework. We don’t ever […]
When the burqa debate was raging across the world, a young Pakistani women’s rights activist, who doesn’t wear a headscarf as a rule, travelled to Jalalabad in Afghanistan to see for herself what it meant to wear one. This is her story. Gulalai Ismail, a 24-year-old university student in Islamabad, needed to go to Afghanistan […]
We’ve all heard those sayings: “beauty is only skin-deep”, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Clichés? Sure, but many of us find them reassuring too. Sadly, societal expectations and pressures can make it so hard for us to retain confidence in our individual beauty. I’m pretty sure you’re all familiar with – if […]
The happiest fallacy is that life is forever. Many of us have seen from painfully close quarters that it isn’t and that one afternoon when you are just watching it go by, it will stop. Just like that. As the years rush by, the idea of mortality, especially your own, fades away as other things take over. The everyday bustle of […]