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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‘Dil ki choton ne kabhi chain se rehne na diya jab chali sard hawa maine tujhe yaad kiya’ (The wounded heart restlessly aches… Whenever the wind ripples, for you…I crave) ‘Iss ka rona nahi kyun tumne kiya dil barbaad Iss ka gham hai ki bahut der se barbaad kiya’ (I don’t mourn the fact that […]
Working with acclaimed art director Suzanne Caplan Merwanji (whose work in Farhan Akhtar’s film Dil Chahta Hai gave Hindi cinema, a new design template) in the capacity of a photographer, Meenal Agarwal never really thought she would get sucked into the world of creating multi-dimensional cinematic contexts. Contexts where stories can live, breathe and […]
The girl mocked into silence by a devastating shaming campaign is speaking again.To claim the right to tell her story. She, who became fodder for 49 rap songs, recalled in a recent TED talk, with poise collected over the span of a decade or more, the names she was called by the media, by online […]
This International Women’s Day, as we celebrated sheroes who have shown us how to own their power and impact lives positively, I was reminded of an article adapted from Debora L. Spar’s new book Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection. She is the president of Barnard College and says something really pertinent […]
Director Navdeep Singh’s journey through the Hindi filmscape has been a bit like the perilous road trip in his latest film NH10. He uses words like ‘crash’ and ‘burn’ to describe the years that followed his first film Manorama Six Feet Under (2007). This moody and atmospheric interpretation of Polanski’s Chinatown won critical acclaim […]
Like all good actors, Aamina Sheikh is a chameleon. Her strong, striking face exudes both resilience and quiet simplicity in Pakistani soaps like Maat and Shikkan (now playing on Zee Zindagi) and yet when she wants to play a global citizen, she transforms herself in a second into a woman who drips effortless pizzazz. Born […]
When you call activist Harish Iyer, you hear instead a hilarious warning by Quick Gun Murugan to not waste too much of the gentleman’s time. Compliment Harish on all the work he is doing for rape survivors and LGBT rights and he feigns sadness and says, “But all this is not enough to get me […]
Suzette Jordan was not a name. Or a face, Or a person. For most part of the last years of her life, she was just a news headline. A controversial rape story. A cautionary tale about what a single woman must never do on a night out with her girl friends. She should not go […]
There is very little talk in Navdeep Singh’s NH10 but there is one chilling conversation summing up the heart of the darkness that India loses itself in ever so often. A cop is talking to Anushka Sharma’s Meera, almost as if, she, an urban woman, is an alien who must be educated about the laws […]
How do global business leaders manage their time? Very efficiently, if Vinita Bali’s example is anything to go by. She graciously takes calls from unfamiliar journalists but will not agree to a random interview. She wants you to do your homework and not ask scattered questions but once she begins to talk, there is no […]
Purple Skies, a documentary about lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders was recently screened at the Bangalore Queer Film Festival and the film’s director Sridhar Rangayan, also a profound thought leader of the LGBT movement and a conversation starter as far as gay rights go in India, was in town. When the award-winning filmmaker, editor of India’s […]
Many years ago, I met writer and gourmet food specialist Karen Anand at a Bengaluru hotel for an interview and her manner was crisp and measured just like her approach towards cooking. She seemed ready for the next chapter of a life that had by now spanned books, TV shows, a brand of her own […]