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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Actually she isn’t. That headline was only meant to grab eyeballs. She fought again odds to educate herself. No not just school or college. She dared to go to the university. And then get herself a post graduation degree. Though she married my father through an arranged marriage, there was nothing ‘arranged’ about her marriage. […]
Romeo Montague (Italian: Romeo Montecchi) is one of the title characters in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet. Romeo, the son of Montague and his wife, secretly loves and marries Juliet, a member of the rival House of Capulet. Forced into exile by his slaying of Juliet’s cousin, Tybalt, in a duel, Romeo commits suicide […]
My baby She woke up crying For the fifth time, tonight I gathered her in my lap and put the bottle into her mouth At 18 months, she does not understand black money, demonetization or national interest. *** Meanwhile, three men died in the queue, waiting for their daily share Of 2000 rupees, which would pay […]
Let’s begin with a story. A poor woman, a mother of five, is divorced by her husband. Uneducated, with no means of income to support her, she approaches the court for alimony to keep her body and soul together and take care of her children. After the usual delay that the legal procedure is wont […]
Feminism is evil. Feminism destroys families. Feminism is anti-men. Feminism teaches women to see men as perverts, bullies and misogynists. Anyone who has had anything to do with feminism has heard these sentences being repeated again and again in different ways. A cursory search on the Internet for the memes on feminism throws up […]
Subamma was old, helpless and on the streets. Being paralysed from waist down she lived on just one spot on the earth – in the corner of a busy street in a small town in South India. She seemed to have appeared from nowhere. One morning, office goers found her lying there, wearing a torn saree caked with […]
Having made the heartbreaking choice of studying journalism for my Master’s degree instead of my first love English literature, I marched off to the University to master the art of reporting and editing. All was well, till I learnt that folks in the English Department next door were studying Dostoevsky. Knowing that I would be […]
So, I was out in Mylapore this evening. And there was a mela all around. The pavement shops were selling everything from terracotta pots and pans to herbal oils for mosquito bites to cheap plastic toys and knick-knacks. Fortune tellers sat on the roadside with their parrots picking out fortune cards for hopeful clients. […]
When I came to Chennai to join a newspaper as the chief sub-editor, I did not know this city. I had no friends here. I could not speak the language. There was just one thing I was absolutely clear about — this city was too hot, too crowded ( I was coming from Mangalore, […]
Let us call her Divya. Because that is her name. And this is not a story that merits a ‘name changed to protect identity’ clause. Divya lived in a small town and was studying to be a nurse. And had the same dreams for her life like any other 21-year-old – a good job, a decent […]
Lesson for today: If you don’t force bedtime on your one- and- a- half-year old daughter , she will spend the last half hour in her day trying to pack in as much as possible. She will run around the room screaming like a banshee, speak to the mirror, chew off the tail of a […]
I have always suspected that we Indians are schizophrenic. On one hand, we send our children to the best schools and colleges, hoping that they would get a seat in the best professional colleges across the world, earn money in dollars, travel to Hawaii and the Far East for holidays. On the other, we would […]