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
Jonzie Kurian was effortlessly natural on air. His humour and sense of music never ever faltered because he understood the medium, grew playfully risque but never crossed the line and never faked an attitude or an accent. It all began when he won a wacky verse contest. The ‘grand prize’ was the chance to sit in […]
She is hard to classify or sum up in stock phrases that are usually used for a mainstream female actor. She strains against the tyranny of preconceptions about women and their bodies in cinema and in life. She speaks passionately against misogyny at every level. In language that does not sound like sloganeering but […]
“Gehrai mein kuch nahin hota..sirf khauf aur beyakini hoti hai,” says the female hero of Pakistani serial Zindagi Gulzar Hai, currently playing on Zee Zindagi. The point being, the deeper you go in a problem, the more complex it gets and the simpler life is, the better it is. The phrase reminded me of beautiful episodes of Dhoop Kinare […]
There was a lot of Victor Fleming and Gone with the Wind in Mehboob Khan’s Aan even though the first film came in 1939 and the second in 1952. The sunsets, the panoramic sweeps of the earth and the sky joined by a twisted tree in the middle, long shots of horses running fretfully, […]
In his world, trees are ancestors, rivers are mumbling old men, pines are charcoal sketches, mountains are Christmas cards painted in water-colours. Children running down hill slopes are fruits spilling out of baskets, rain is a rude intruder pounding on doors with wet knuckles , snow in Manali is a stealthy interloper that takes […]
Priya Ganapathy, former RJ, also the unforgettable lilt of Lingo Leela and Sister Stella remembers a night in the studios when her playlist was so exciting that she decided to not pack up. She grins, “I loved the playlist so much that I broke the rules and did an eight-hour talk marathon chatting up insomniacs and […]
Some of the best scenes in Bobby Jasoos unfold between Vidya Balan and Rajendra Gupta. Gupta is the taciturn abba who rules his household with forbidding silence and occasional bitterness because his eldest daughter is a joyous, guilt-free, 30-year-old with no intentions to interrupt her ‘career’ as a jasoos for marriage. She tries often to […]
The other day I was caught in a downpour or maybe I caught it. I could have walked back into the office but then there is something I would have missed. The feeling of being stoic and vulnerable together. Of not being insulated from experiences that make us human and real. A long time ago, […]
The world of music has always been divided between populists and spiritualists. So though there is a Yo Yo Honey Singh, thankfully, we also have a Mohammed Vakil. Vakil, who won reality show Sa Re Ga Ma (Mega Final) in 1998, is now an established ghazal and sufi singer, the scion of the Jaipur gharana […]
In 2003, Mike Tollin directed a film about a real life character called James Effinhimer Robert ‘Radio’ Kennedy — a nickname he acquired because he was fascinated with radios and would carry one everywhere. The film was called, yes, Radio. How powerful and dangerous radio can be as a medium was captured in Talk Radio, […]
It is easy to grit your teeth at the irony of FM radio commercials. One entreats you like Gandhi, to become the change you want to see in the world because when a small change occurs, it could lead to a big one. Like living in a gated community named after an American valley, or […]
Nostalgia has a name. It is Ameen Saayani. For those of us who cut our teeth on Hindi film music via Binaca Geeta Mala (later rechristened as Cibaca Geet Mala) in the 70s, Saayani was the voice that brought it all together. The music of Naushad, Shankar-Jaikishan and SD Burman. The liquid gold of mega […]