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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It is a girl. She is walking down an uneven path on the barren hillside, placing her feet carefully on the loose stones. Her thin brown fingers are curled around some ferns with white spore smeared undersides that she uses to stamp Christmas tree shapes on her skin. She places a leaf at the back of the hand clasping […]
I could speak for myself. But would you believe me, if I told you? Writers have a room inside their head where whatever they want comes true. It’s like magic. Really! Only sometimes, things start going horribly wrong. But then that’s an occupational hazard. And since it’s happening inside the head, nobody knows. Thank God […]
Memory 1 It’s summer time in Lansdowne. The hydrangeas are in full blue bloom. The bumble bees are bumbling along. There’s a nice warm sun smiling outside the house. Inside, temperatures are close to freezing. My 18-year-old long haired, long nosed cousin, referred to in family circles as The Genius (he shares a birth date […]
In the small hill town of Kotdwar in Pauri Garhwal, this is the fortnight of the cross-dressers. This is the only season in these lazy hills, known for their laid-back men and hard-working women with alabaster complexions and frown-lined foreheads (you can well understand why), that the bhullus and the bhaijis (younger and elder brothers) […]
It’s an old friend. And he’s calling to tell me that he has found the pretty Kashmiri girl he had a big crush on in college. (Well, actually he just, sort of, casually mentions it towards the end of 25 minutes of waning conversation with a self-conscious cough that warns me something important is coming […]
It is day two of the (wo)man-animal conflict, and I have just finished kicking the little green frog out of the kitchen who has been jumping over my feet and jeering at my nail paint. I love animals so long as they stay in their own space but when they start invading my territory, […]
Since I belong to the mountains, I speak for them but this might just hold true for other places in the world too. The memories you come back with depend upon the season you go in. For me, the mist is the most overpowering impression of Sikkim in pre-monsoon June. It seeps through the […]
Long time before I found my way to the big city of Delhi and discovered a slice of cake called Black Forest at Nathu’s Pastry Shop in Bengali Market, I knew another Kalu Danda (that’s black forest in my native Garhwali). It was the name of my shady pine forested hometown that the British came and […]