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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There is something quite charming about the Indian use of English, something quite contagious about the wonderful Hinglish used in India that is something between Hindi and English. Before I entered into the Office English of India, I was content to muddle along in India speaking a mix of English, Hindi, hand signals and head […]
Take a small detour from the famous Spice Route of old into a relatively undiscovered part of rural Rajasthan and one of the world’s only open-air art galleries. Painted houses fade like painted ladies of old. Their stately presence, battered shutters and pigeon filled lofts disguise an ancient beauty now fading into red tinged sunsets. […]
If a river is the highway of life, cultures and commerce then the Brahmaputra is beyond par in this respect. With the effortlessness of a patriarch, a unique family of man gathers at his side, worships at his feet and accepts his rule with resignation tinged with respect.
Remember when hacking was something you did with horses? Remember when you dropped friends or just ‘lost touch’ with them deliberately? Remember when doctors gave you a medicine for a virus? Remember when tagging was something done in a clothing factory?
As the sun sinks into the cold breath of night, the fishwives of Matata roll up their fishing lines, hang the catch on the handlebars of the motorbike and head home to heat the pan.
She is sacred, fertile and the source of life that feeds and cares for all living beings in her womb. She is in permanent balance, harmony and communication with the cosmos.
What do you know?
Now you are inside the mystery looking out,
and I am on the outside?
It’s because I grew up in the last century, my romantic vision of myself as a nice little grey haired old granny who lives in a cottage that is always ripe with the smell of cakes baking belongs back there too.That was my grandma. She grew flowers, baked delicious puddings and granted me the absolute freedom to run barefooted through her village and spend long days fishing or idling in a tree with a book in hand
We all know by now the devastation that an Earth Event brings to the communities it visits. As the city of Christchurch struggles gamely to her feet, tourists are left wondering just how safe it is to visit New Zealand. While none of us can second guess Mother Nature, the people of New Zealand are […]
Far beyond the reactive doomsday predictions and twittering, there in the rubble of worlds torn apart resides that beautiful compassion of the human spirit and for me that is where true heroism begins.
Children are the biggest casualties whichever way you look at it. If you extrapolate the annual figure of current death from UXO in Laos and multiply it by the amount of years it will take to clear the land then 900,000 people who haven’t even been born yet are doomed to die.
“The first time I came here, a black man leapt out of the shadows and screamed at me -‘What to you want? Boy? Girl? Heroin?’ ” Gunnar nods towards the corner of memory as if his arrival were yesterday. “I was absolutely terrified! I thought he was asking if I was a boy or girl! […]