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…
Read More
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…
Read More
“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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
You are browsing archives for
Towards the end of the 19th century, Estelle Arpels, the daughter of a dealer in precious stones met Alfred Van Cleef, the son of a stone-cutter and what followed was a great love story and a jewellery design legacy unlike any other. Van Cleef & Arpels is today not just a French brand with a global recall […]
What is memory? A place you no longer live in? What is history? A street that has been renamed? Are boundaries only geographical? Can they be erased and redrawn? And when memory, geography and history can all be given a political context, what do you remember? The human experience or its politicised version. Questions like […]
Last year, over 100 Broadway stars, directors, producers, musicians, choreographers, designers and technicians gathered in front of the police station in Times Square, New York, while a poem titled ‘I Can’t Breathe‘ was rendered by Daniel J Watts. This was done to register a protest and start a conversation about police violence, which had claimed […]
Every Bangalorean has a Church Street memory. From NASA, the grounded spaceship cum pub in the mid nineties to RR restaurant which was supposedly the favourite of Raj Kapoor for its Gongura chutney, avakai pickle, gunpowder and the secret recipes from Guntur and Nellore that sang to you from a plantain leaf. Dahlia, the little Japanese eatery […]
A lot of advertising revolves around the horrors of growing old. They remind you again and again, your face needs to defy age. There are serums and potions out there that can erase signs of ageing. Magazines tell you how to fight cellulite. How to get rid of the muffin top belly. How to work […]
When we call young HR professional Theja Harjani, she is in the bylanes of Shivajinagar, distributing blankets to the homeless. “I do this around Christmas every year and this is the fifth year,” she says. She became sensitive to the plight of the homeless when, on her way back home after a night shift, she […]
In a city thrumming with festive cheer, the monastic stone structure on Hosur Road, synonymous with the Little Sisters of the Poor, reveals just a few overtures to Christmas. A crib, a tree, some modest festoons bring cheer to the elderly inmates being served a modest lunch, with the help of two young […]
Perspective. That sets what we see apart from what really exists. Like the blind-folded men who touched different parts of an elephant and proclaimed that a trunk was the whole elephant or perhaps the tail was, we see the world in our likeness. When in reality, as Rajkumar Hirani’s PK reminds a religious absolutist, “You […]
Actor and media personality Shenaz Treasury has had an eventful week. As a spontaneous reaction to the Uber rape case in Delhi, she posted an open letter on her Facebook page. The letter was addressed to influential thought leaders in India, all of them men incidentally. She shared personal episodes of violation and stated that […]
Just a few days before December 16, the second anniversary of the Nirbhaya tragedy, actor, producer and activist Dia Mirza was in town. The Uber rape case was on her mind, as were the sexual crimes against young girls in Bengaluru’s schools. She said, “What kind of man rapes a woman… a little girl? This […]
With every message that leaves novelist Bilal Tanweer’s email account, travel these famous lines from Aleksandar Hemon’s 2008 novel, The Lazarus Project: “All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.” It is easy to see […]
When was the last time you saw a Hindustani music legend in a video that reformulated the conventions of popular and classical idioms? Chances are that the image of Shubha Mudgal orchestrating monsoon in a chawl will flash through your mind. You will remember her rousing vocals in Ab ke saawan and in Man ke […]