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
There is a scene in Farah Khan’s Happy New Year where Boman Irani takes out a fully iced cake from a bag and says to himself, “I am going to have my cake and eat it too.” Two seconds later his face is buried in the gooey stuff and when he faces the camera, a […]
Entrepreneur and mother Deepa Kumar has issues with the blanket terminology that surrounds the issue of Child Sexual Abuse (CSA). “To start with, I don’t quite agree with the distinction between a ‘good touch’ and a ‘bad touch.’ If there is a touch that a child needs to distinguish as good or bad, we are already in dangerous […]
There are many ways to find a spiritual connect with life. You can find it in a concert, in a cinema hall, at a bus stop, at an animal shelter, in a book, in rain falling down on parched earth, in your mother’s cooking, in a phrase painted behind an auto, in a dream, in […]
Success is so overrated in a world where mere survival is a great gift. Robin Williams’ recent suicide proves once again that just success is not enough to keep us all afloat and yet we celebrate success more than the courage it takes for ordinary people to keep going regardless of the hardships life throws […]
The play Taoos Chaman Ki Myna, was recently staged at AD Rangamandira in Bangalore and it was the culmination of an alchemy between Naiyer Masud, Gillo,Theatre Repertory and Atul Tiwari. The genesis of the play is interesting. For starters, Masud, a Persian and Urdu scholar is along with Manto and Qurratulain Hyder, part of a holy trinity of writers who truly transcend the […]
What we learn from Naseeruddin Shah’s autobiography And Then One Day..A Memoir (Penguin Books India/Hamish Hamilton), is what we need to learn. No more, no less. Nothing extravagant about milestones reached, rewards gathered, boxes ticked. Like tempered chocolate or like a quintessential Naseer performance, the writing is perfectly poised between a melting point and gradual, cool normalcy. This celebrity […]
Wo aa rahen hai jo biimaar kii dawaa ke liye Khamosh baithe hain sab chaaraagar duaa ke liye (he is expected to arrive with a cure for my pain..and the healers quietly wait too, with their hands raised in prayer) These lines are from a ghazal Begum Akhtar wrote though few know just what became […]
In parts, Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider replays keynotes from a classic Shakespearean dirge with a sly wink. So we are offered the jovial grave diggers. The skull gnashing in glee. The sinner in a moment of redeeming prayer. The ghost who is not a ghost afterall but is Roohdar..the keeper of another man’s soul and all its agony. […]
You can touch the surface of life or live it inside out. You can just see what is visible or sometimes close your eyes and open your mind. And perceive the intangible as well. Few films manage to make you realise the difference between connecting with life and just skimming through it but Sai Paranjpye’s Sparsh did […]
It is hard for directors to treat Hrithik Roshan as ‘normal.’ He is either Jalluddin Mohammed Akbar or Krish or a vaguely challenged Rohit or an ace thief who can be a dwarf, a queen in drag, a superman vrooming to the beat of ‘Dhoom..dhoom‘ or a self-made chawl don spouting Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s Agnipath […]
Taslima Nasrin’s Lajja, one of the most controversial bestsellers in the world has turned twenty. As bibliophiles across the world celebrated the Banned Books Week from September 21-27, Nasrin, an award-winning author of 37 books, memoirist, physician, humanist and human rights activist looked back at the long road she has travelled with Lajja. Across continents, through death […]
Filmmaker Onir’s soon to be released film Chauranga taps into the prevalent politics over love and caste. It narrates the story of a 14-year-old Dalit boy in rural India who is killed for writing a love letter. Irene Dhar Malik, Onir’s sister and film editor, is busy with the post-production of the film and took […]