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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A couple of years ago, film maker Tom Shadyac, known for blockbuster comedies like Liar Liar, Bruce Almighty, Patch Adams and The Nutty Professor walked into his luxurious new 17000 sq ft Beverly Hills home which had more bedrooms, bathrooms and uninhabited spaces than he would ever enjoy and he had an epiphany. That this success was just an idea […]
What is it that binds one human-being to another? The thread of empathy, recognition that the other is not the other after all but part of the same human experience? Their pain is not theirs alone? That their joy is also yours? Because as poet Shahid Kabir once said poignantly, “Galiyon galiyon jiska charcha hai..woh […]
Maya Angelou, American author, poet and activist, wrote on her Facebook page on May 26: “An unexpected medical emergency caused me to cancel my visit to the Major League Baseball Civil Rights Game ceremony. I am so proud to be selected as its honoree. However, my doctors told me it would be unadvisable for me […]
If you go to the website of one of Pakistan’s best known contemporary art magazines Nukta Art (http://www.nuktaartmag.com/Nukta/), you will run into stimulating discourses about post modernist dilemmas, narratives woven around personal and collective histories and the artistic urge to blur orders, dissolve the idea of separation between countries, religions and go beyond “identity […]
Writer’s note: I have been writing on the negative mind-set against Aishwarya Rai for years. Years ago, when she was targetted for choosing a man younger than her, a story I wrote for a newspaper invited negative backlash. Some of my pieces on her have appeared on this website where I have tried to […]
In the eighties, it was enough for a hero to have intense eyes. If the wiry Jackie Shroff (who once admitted to have mixed Sunil Dutt’s jaunty walk with Dev Anand’s tenderness to become a hero) squinted at the camera like someone was stripping band-aid off a wound, we all winced in pain too. […]
Amole Gupte, the chairperson of the Children’s Film Society of India, the villain of the forthcoming Singham 2, the sensitive maker of two clutter breaking films (Stanley Ka Dabba and Hawa Hawai) and the heart and soul of Taare Zameen Par is a self-confessed fakir, a muflis, someone without the baggage of manufactured fame. Who […]
When a spokesperson for NDTV GROHE Design and Architecture Awards, called up Professor Krishna Rao Jaisim and told him that he had won a Lifetime Achievement Award, he hung up. Even though he is one of the country’s most eminent architects with a distinctively green design idiom, Jaisim’s immediate reaction to the good news […]
Often when my auto whizzes past a school campus on Bangalore’s Hosur Road, I can smell the breezy trees and instantly feel the pine and fir fragrance of Palampur flooding my senses. Palampur was my happy place as a teenager because a favourite aunt lived here, in a house by a pine hill overlooking the craggy Dhauladhar range. […]
Very rarely does a film become a visual sock in the gut like Pather Panchali or irrevocably changes the way we think of cinema. The images linger. An unloved old woman trapped in her impoverished life, singing a wedding song, longing for human contact, and then one day deciding that she has had enough. She […]
The immediacy of pain and loss . the kind that One Hundred Years of Solitude narrates is not so much as fiction, as it is life. The life we invest hope and love in when we wake up every morning, watch a day go by, sometimes lose a part of us and occasionally find a missing piece. And so […]
The joke is always on her. The middle-aged bua who cannot get married because she is not eligible any more for love and so must be laughed at. The spirited young woman played by a man in drag who must be insulted because ‘she’ is fat and must be compared to a bull-dozer and assorted […]