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
Kitaab Bazaar or the Patri (pavement) Book Market in Darya Ganj, in the walled city of Old Delhi, is an institution in its own right. The pavements of this oldest commercial hub of the Capital, which bustles with activity from Monday to Saturday, continue to be the venue of one of the largest known markets for […]
Everybody loves a love story, especially a real life one. But, while stories of people who had the courage to break the bounds of convention hold universal appeal, there also exist real life stories of deep and abiding love between people who live out their lives within the shackles of convention, in soul-destroying conditions, and […]
Delhi summers are to die of. Not for. Come school vacations and Delhiites head for the hills in droves—the middle class to domestic hill stations and the affluent to ‘foreign’ ones. Those constrained by work schedules take refuge in air conditioned offices and homes. Shopaholics abandon the open air markets and head for air conditioned […]
I don’t think we ever saw eye to eye About anything under the great blue sky; In fact, as Dad often says: We were a pair of book-ends, looking opposite ways. But now, as I see my own child grow In a mould that I, oh! so intimately know, I’ve come to realize so many […]
A neighbour’s teenaged children leave home every evening for about an hour when it’s time for him to come home. Visits to friends, trips to the market, or to the sports complex, are all scheduled around this time to avoid Dad, who comes home spitting and snarling as a result of having battled Delhi’s office […]
Yesterday’s newspapers were ablaze with the horrendous story of the five year-old child in Ghaziabad who died as a result of sexual assault while the parents kept the incident under wraps as the perpetrator was a family member. According to statistics released by Tulir Centre for Prevention and Healing of Child Sexual Abuse (CSA), 40 […]
“Every time I come to Delhi, I find it completely changed”, wails a childhood friend who has lived away from the city of her birth ever since she got married. Indeed, she has reason to lament. Her annual, long visits to the capital are enlivened by manic shopping excursions to all the main markets of […]
During Navratri, the nine-day festival of the Mother Goddess, the entire five-mile radius around the Jhandewalan temple complex on Rani Jhansi Road in central Delhi is a beehive of activity round-the-clock, giving a whole new meaning to the term, ‘the city never sleeps’! The sight of the affluent in all their finery, arriving in large […]
It’s the Basant Navratri again—the nine day spring festival that heralds the onset of the New Year according to the traditional Hindu Vikrami calendar—when devotees observe fasts that culminate in the celebration of Durga Ashtami on the eighth lunar day and Ram Navami (the birth of Lord Rama) on the ninth day. “Now, who will […]
As India took to the streets at midnight to celebrate the World Cup victory, my grandfather’s reminiscences about the night of independence, when the whole of Delhi converged to the Red Fort to usher in freedom from British rule, came to mind. The only difference was that this time the crowds converged to India Gate, […]
‘A textured experience’ is how a friend, returning to Delhi after nearly two decades spent in various parts of the world, describes the city. Although it has been bestowed with numerous epithets, both complimentary and opprobrious—a melting pot of cultures, a medley of the old and new, a confluence of influences, a city with many […]