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…
Read More
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…
Read More
“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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
You are browsing archives for
It was the Anna phenomenon that threw the Indian middle class into the limelight. For the first time since 1947, a swathe of humanity lifted itself up and marched into the Ramlila grounds and the gaze of the waiting TV cameras. Until that moment, the lot had remained invisible; they did not vote, they did […]
The two convicts in the Pune BPO employee rape-cum-murder case, Purshottam Borate and Pradip Komokate, were sentenced to death, sometime back. News of sexual violence against women sends me into an overdrive.I am approaching 50 but am as angry, as touchy about this business of the second sex as I was, 30 years ago. The reason […]
I feel woolly in the head, often. It’s a light, airy feeling, of a benevolent happy detachment, if pushed to analyse. Those are silent, reflective moments I break free in, to float away from the immediate so I can observe the circus in action, all around. I watch the cast, you and me and those […]
I am the child of the seventies. Childhood entertainment consisted of movies and Sunday trips to children’s park. Our eating out was made up of the occasional softie in Civil Lines after the matinee or a rolled newspaper cone of murmura and matar at the park, where our favourite plaything was the concrete elephant you […]
My grandmother lived by one abiding dictum, “Daughters must never be left alone anywhere, overnight.” She was obsessive about Mom’s friends and rationed her rare friendly visits to the last minute. In fact, she is known to have chucked a pair of scissors at her once, over a five minutes delay, returning home from a […]
What can one person do?” This is the theme song of India, circa 2011. It is there in our airwaves, living, breathing and engulfing the citizenry in a convenient cloak of invisibility and irresponsibility. The system is bad. The British left behind a servile mess. Corruption is a given. What can one person do? And […]
In a way, it was easier when you were chubby babies. Your needs were of the moment, simple to satisfy. An ice cream cone was all it took to turn the blue moments sunny. But I knew it even as you licked at the cone that these straightforward days would not last. A day would […]