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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When Poonam Dhillon was in her 20s and already a well-known film actor, she received the news of her father’s demise. On the way home, in a flight, as she battled a haze of tears and grief, she was surrounded by fans who wanted a picture, an autograph, a smile. This moment, and many […]
Between a film shoot in Shimla, a personal tragedy, rehearsals and performances of his new play Hamlet-The Clown Prince, actor Vinay Pathak talks on the phone like someone who has travelled a lot, is exhausted but knows he has miles to go before there will be a snatch of silence. He wants to tick off […]
The issue with the casting of Sanjay Leela Bhasali’s grand production Mary Kom is that it does not reflect what Mary Kom stands for. Does Priyanka look like Mary Kom? No, she looks like Priyanka Chopra with an accentuated pout and a lot of muscle. Do we need a North-Eastern face to play a North-Eastern […]
BANGALORE: Is Hamlet you and me and everyone in between? Is he, denuded of his geography and history, just someone torn between his possibilities and his realities? Aren’t we all? Is he a man of suppressed humour, someone craving to laugh at the injustice of it all, aching to discard the accoutrements of […]
Sometime around 1973, author Shashi Deshpande lived in the campus of the KEM Hospital in Mumbai and would often see a young, sprightly nurse pass by. Sometime later, she learnt that this young woman was Aruna Shanbaug. And that all the promise of her life had been snatched away by a ward boy who […]
There was a time when young children in small Northern towns, regardless of their religious denominations, learnt Urdu. And when they grew up, many young men like my father could recite the Gita and write and read Urdu as if it was the most natural thing to do. ** The generation after his, caught up […]
1980 was the year when Khorshed and Rumi Bhavnagri, a Parsi couple living in Mumbai lost their two young sons Vispi and Ratoo in a freak, automobile accident. In the absolute heart of darkness, they stumbled upon, what to them became a new lease of life. They were facilitated by a strange turn of circumstances […]
Recently a young colleague wrote a Facebook post about being stared at for the way she dresses or even otherwise. The point of the post was that a woman’s body is her business. It is not an offering or a piece of public property. The post went viral and was shared by various websites and […]
Actor and former VJ Purab Kohli is enraged by the recent rape of a child in Bangalore and the crimes against women in the rest of the country. “I thought, after the December 12 case in New Delhi, these incidents would stop but they seem to be spreading like an epidemic. I just sat […]
Former VJ, actor and Internet entrepreneur Cyrus Sahukar is an entertainer even on the phone. He recreates a rainy evening and a traffic jam in Mumbai with little inflections and you can sense his life is a blur. A happy one, we suppose though he says, even his mother doesn’t get the hectic thrum of […]
Richa Chaddha has the kind of face that the camera conspires with and talks to. It is not a one note face preoccupied with bland prettiness. It has character, strength and in her silence, you can hear the deep roar of an ocean. Watch her in her debut cameo in Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! […]
The ego’s primary job is to take offence. To feel insecure. To get defensive. To find fault. To point fingers. To never feel enough. To feed on lacks, fears, jealousy. To constantly bicker and chatter and never be at peace. If you watch how it flits from one slight to another, imagined or real, you will […]