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 were regular young people, seeking love and financial independence in a busy metro. They fleetingly locked eyes […]
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 are still unmarried. The mother also preying on the male interest in her life to figure if […]
“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 the end of the ten part series The Last Dance, co-produced by ESPN Films and Netflix. Directed […]
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 horror of those times. The trains full of bodies. Hungry migrants forced to cook on the flames […]
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 basic is impulse control. At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal (Hotstar) is a […]
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 boy travelling in a train, lynched over ‘suspicious’ looking meat chunks in his lunch box. A lower […]
We can’t pretend to be shocked by the Instagram group chats of young, potential rapists. There is a consumer base for rape videos in India, remember? The NGO, India Child Protection Fund (ICPF) reported in April that consumption of child pornography content in India spiked by over 95 per cent amid lockdown. That there was […]
How empowering that the final scene of Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (Now showing on Amazon Prime) does not end under a rain drenched umbrella with a romantic proposal but a close up of Jo March’s ( a perfectly cast Saoirse Ronan ) face as she watches her book being printed and brought to life for […]
Aah, the Utopian politics of Madam Secretary. No mention so far (I am on Season 3) of white lone wolves with “mental health” issues shooting down people, no pro Nazi rallies, no racism, no out of control police officers shooting black kids (one mention in passing) or the debate about reproductive rights of women, the […]
So Ajay Devgan will now be shaving his head to play Chanakya. And the original Chanakya, Dr. Chandraprakash Dwivedi recently said that when he first pitched the show to DD sometime in the mid-1980s, it was rejected. He also was at pains to add that this baffled him as historical shows like Tipu Sultan were […]
Remember how In 2016, Donald Trump, then justa presidential candidate played ‘We Are the Champions’ at the Republican National Convention, while he emerged in near slow motion on a foggy stage? Remember Russian President Vladimir Putin’s long walk in 2018 to his inauguration before starting another six years in power at the Kremlin? His […]
The holocaust did not begin with the gas chambers in Germany. India’s dehumanisation too began much before hungry migrants were sprayed with sodium hypochlorite. It takes a long time to desensitise a large swathe of a country’s population to bring it to a point where the unthinkable becomes normal. Germany took its time to normalise […]