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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Every so often, a movie will come along that works like a magic sequence for its once-forgotten star, and for the unique message it carries. It happened last with Mickey Rourke in ‘The Wrestler’. The same Mickey who made films that went into the archives they were so damn good; ‘A Prayer for the Dying’, […]
Aatish Taseer is at it again. Rooting in the past, referencing our shared history, seeking answers to painful questions of love, loss, alienation. In The Way Things Were, we meet Skanda, Sanskrit student, son of a Sanskrit scholar, collector of cognates, conveyor of his father`s dead body to its final resting place by the river Tamasa […]
I loved DDLJ when I first saw it. I saw it twice in a single screen hall and once with my niece dancing in the aisles. People in the hall were laughing, cheering. The way they would have when Raj Kapoor’s Bobby first hit the screens in the 70s and as Shahrukh Khan once famously […]
Dear Reader, I have always loved letters but in my 22 years and 11 months of existence, I have only received two letters and written one. When I was younger, I’d write long letters on the back of my notebooks namely to anybody I knew back home, then I’d carefully re-write them, tuck them into […]
In the 80s, a book shop in an old, musty structure in Patiala’s Adalat Bazaar was where you went for magazines and English fiction. I remember being given Rs 20 by my grandmother on my birthday and buying The Fountainhead. I read it without being aware of the capitalist subtext or the glorification of materialism. I […]
Aatish Taseer straddles many worlds within one. The legacy of being an Indian, the son of a Sikh mother and a Pakistani father, and a writer who draws his material from pluralism and divides, from two nations that though hacked in two bleeding halves share a strangely collusive relationship with each other, from people who […]
It is the season of awards in the Hindi film industry and it isn’t often that small films get their own share of confetti and applause on podiums reserved for glistening blockbusters. But director and actor Rajat Kapoor and the Ankhon Dekhi team were taken by surprise when their little film with a big […]