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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In 1983, BR Ishara (arguably the first director in Indian cinema to shock middle class sensibilities with films like Chetana and Zaroorat that treated supposedly ‘wanton’ women with sympathy) made a film called Log Kya Kahenge. The film starring Shabana Azmi, Navin Nischol, Shatrughan Sinha and Sanjeev Kumar had some startlingly honest dialogues about a woman […]
For the first writing workshop by Unboxed Writers, the Leanin’ Tree Art Café is the perfect choice. Here is a piece that I did on Leena Chethan, the driving force behind the cafe in April 2015 for The New Indian Express. Art has been a passion for Leena Chethan for as far back […]
A 1981 film Itni Si Baat (starring Sanjeev Kumar and Maushami Chatterjee) tried to flip the idea of a conventional marriage like a drippy omelette that crash lands on the chef’s face. So we had the husband burning the food and fumbling through daily domestic chores with a song, “Raja o Raja, tera baj gaya baaja, ” playing […]
The death of Pratyusha Bannerjee underscores the distance between Indian television’s most popular narratives and reality where women do not always have monochromatic inner lives and a monumental forbearance that is almost as fake as the jewels worn by the Simars, the Gopis and the Anandis. ** The irony could not be more cruel. Pratyusha […]
An old woman bashes a bunch of puppies to death because she cannot stand the noise they and their mother are making in the neighbourhood. Visuals of a man killing stray dogs in Delhi go viral. A mother elephant and her babies are stoned randomly on the Wayanad-Mysore NH. A man is beaten and tied […]
Watching Shakun Batra’s Kapoor & Sons (Since 1921) is like reading a book you are slowly but surely falling in love with. A book that you read curled up in a window seat on a rainy day, with a cup of tea by your side, hoping that the story will never end because it makes you taste […]
Many years ago when Javed Akhtar along with Shabana Azmi was touring the country to present the stage adaptation of Shaukat Azmi’s book Kaifi Aur Main, I had asked him at a press meet if the Ganga Jamni tehzeeb he represented so beautifully would fade away after him along with a few remaining voices […]
“It is not enough to be interesting..you need to be interested,” said Jennifer Aniston once to explain how she deals with fame. She shared how the joy of creating something worthwhile keeps her from being jaded and cynical. Especially when she leaves a film set and runs into the invasive fame machinery that consumes […]
“Kaanch ki haandi ko kitni baar chadhaenge ?” How many times will you put a glass bowl on flames and pretend to cook something in it? Last night, this question was asked by Kanhaiya Kumar as he addressed a charged gathering of hundreds of young JNU scholars who with joyful irreverence laughed at […]
I did not know Valsa Mathew but sometimes, you do not need to know a person too well to imbibe instantly and with absolute certainty that there is something very special about her. I first saw Valsa nearly a decade or so ago when accompanied by my mother, I went to her son Vivek Mathew’s […]
*Now the world knows Neerja Bhanot’s story, all thanks to Sonam Kapoor’s realistic and apt portrayal of Neerja. *It’s Sonam Season In Bollywood. Neerja is turning out to be for Sonam what Queen, Cocktail and Paa were for some of her peers. The question was always going to be, can Sonam Kapoor, carry off that demanding […]
There is a scene in the 2005 film Capote where the attention-seeking Truman Capote is working a room full of adoring listeners and Harper Lee passes him by. There is a brief conversation that tells us everything about both writers. Capote and Lee were childhood friends and Lee supposedly helped him in the research of […]