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 my home in Patiala, I had designed a little wall ornament with painted cherries and a quote, ”Enough is as good as a feast.” That statement comes back to me at the end of each year when I take stock of not what I earned but what I learned over a span of 365 days. […]
How does one explain evil? Paris? Syria? The tragedy of a refugee who is now a non-person in the absence of a home, a geographical, historical, personal reference point? Who has seen a missile tear into his home, his wife, his daughter and who now has to start again with what remains in a country […]
I haven’t seen Pakistani director Mehreen Jabbar’s acclaimed film Ramchand Pakistani but her television work has been an utter revelation. It is the kind of story telling that flows like life, lingers on window sills like sunlight, feels like the warmth of a coffee cup between your hands on a chilly morning and is […]
While watching Imtiaz Ali’s latest film Tamasha, Eckhart Tolle’s bestseller, A New Earth came back to me. He writes how accumulated memories of angst, humiliation, denial, emotional suppression and anger form an invisible pain body within our body. In most people, this pain body remains unreactive till a trigger presents itself. And then there is […]
In Pyaasa, Guru Dutt’s 1957 classic, the protagonist Vijay (He too is an anti-hero who takes on the establishment but his weapons unlike the edgy Vijay we saw in the 70s are poems, not punches) goes wandering in the lanes where young women are being bought and sold as objects of sexual gratification and sings, […]
The irony hits you only in retrospect. When you remember that Saeed Jaffrey played Mr. D’Silva, a jolly and down-on-luck owner of a shabby chic bar in Ramesh Sippy’s wannabe romantic opus Saagar, while his former wife Madhur played an imperious matriarch overseeing an empire. You did not notice anything other than two actors in character because […]
Nisha Madhulika looks like the aunt whose kitchen was your favourite haunt during your holidays. Yes, the one who had a warm, kind manner and knew how to satiate your soul’s cravings with meals that you will not find in any restaurant just because no chef can cook the way she can. She is in […]
A few weeks ago, I met author Shashi Deshpande to interview her in the wake of her resignation from the Sahitya Akademi Council. She spoke about her reasons to quit in a pragmatic, matter-of-fact way.She is not on Twitter or Facebook and unlike the best-selling authors of this generation, does not feel the need to […]
Writer’s note : This post was published first in The New Indian Express, Bengaluru on October 12 In a tranquil home that is over 35 years old but is as timelessly evocative as a piece of great literature, author and Padma Shri awardee Shashi Deshpande is nursing a cup of tea. She is grateful that the […]
In the days before relentless marketing made stars of one-hit wonders, there were legends like Kalyanji-Anandji pioneering live concerts all over the world, scoring thousands of hit songs in over 250 films, giving breaks to lyricists like Anand Bakshi, Gulshan Bawra, Qamar Jalalabadi, Anjaan, Verma Malik and M G Hashmat, and launching the careers of […]
There is something about actor, director and veteran theatre exponent Aamir Raza Husain that reminds you of James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter. In the ornate coffee shop of one of the city’s oldest hotels, a beam of sunlight finds the Padma Shree awardee as he says, “I don’t always like the spotlight. And I […]
During the 53rd edition of the Bengaluru Ganesh Utsava, veteran singer Vani Jairam was in Bengaluru to share the stage with fellow singers P Susheela and Vijay Prakash. When we caught up with the legend hours before her performance, she was struggling to find some quiet amid the din of rehearsals. Finding quietude has not been difficult […]