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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The tyranny of perception management. Only a few hours after she gave birth, Kate Middleton posed with a big smile for the cameras with her baby daughter in her arms. Her flawless, yellow dress hugged her perfect, postpartum body and as she cooed over the baby and waved at the invisible crowds, you forgot […]
This year, Vijay Anand’s Guide turned 50. And when the seasons unfurl in Yahan Kaun Hai Tera even today, you watch without blinking. Dev Anand’s Raju sheds his past visibly and morphs from an ex-convict to a wanderer to a yogi by default when a monk covers his curled up body with a saffron shawl. […]
What can you say about a woman who loved Urdu poetry, a cat named Jadoo, Pink Floyd, Steve Jobs and human connections? And who, in her own words, fell in love with a Macintosh Plus computer over two decades ago? The computer changed the course of her life as it helped her to shape an, […]
In 1996, one Father Verghese in charge of Bangalore Oniyavara Seva Coota (BOSCO), a non governmental organisation working with the young at risk in the city since 1980, had responded to a late evening call by this reporter and come to MG Road to counsel a destitute teenager addicted to white ink. BOSCO, in retrospect […]
There is a scene in Shonali Bose’s incredibly direct and brave film Margarita With A Straw where Laila (Kalki Koechlin), the protagonist is passing by a library in her wheelchair and looking through a glass wall at ‘normal’ people on the other side. This glass wall, as the film teaches us is not just something […]
A certain section of Internet users need scapegoats and heroes. They need constant debate. About whether the cat is coming down or going up the staircase. Whether a dress is blue or white and gold. Whether Prince Harry was right in refusing a selfie with a fan. Some of us want to see the last […]
Director and writer Shonali Bose after the painfully direct Amu (2005), a film that revisited the 1984 Sikh riots, is back with another story that is close to her heart. Margarita With A Straw draws from a personal tragedy and also the life of a close relative who suffers from Cerebral Palsy ( A […]
He is the casting director of films like Lootera, Shanghai, Shor in the City, LSD and more. And also the man who has created extensive workshops for the cast of NH10, Detective Byomkesh Bakshy, Daawat-E-Ishq, Queen, Ladies vs Ricky Bahl and counting. In an industry largely driven by stars, he is a technician who […]
If adversity challenges us to be stronger than our pain, Eby N Joseph has been there and done that. Many times over. The Kerala based artist was diagnosed with cancer and has not just survived the disease but is now helping other survivors with the one gift he has always relied on to climb out […]
In the mid 90s, Waheeda Rehman was negotiating a cusp in her life. After spending a few blissful decades in Bengaluru with husband Kanwaljit (with whom she had starred in the 1964 film Shagoon) in a sprawling hacienda called ‘Gharonda,’ raising two children, initiating an organic cereal brand with friend and neighbour Asharfa Sattar, she was […]
Cinema in the hands of Sohrab Modi, K Asif, Mehboob Khan, Kamal Amrohi and Salim Javed was pure verbosity and dialogue driven bravado. Gulzar, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Rahi Masoom Reza, Sai Paranjpay, Manu Bhandhari and Basu Chatterjee made cinema less confrontational and more conversational. Now cinema is driven by images and emotion that is […]
In Raj Kapoor’s Awaara (1951), Shashi Kapoor was a cherub with the eyes of a little devil. As the disadvantaged child of an impoverished mother, you see him brutalised by a cruel world, lose his innocent faith in life, in goodness and turn to petty crime to survive. This shift could not have been easy […]