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
The writing in Revolver Rani winks at the seventies and the jargon of hero-centric block-busters so “Police ne tumhe chaaron taraf se gher liya hai ” becomes, “Police ko hamne chaaron taraf se gher liya hai.” The menace of a hero or a villain once conveyed through lines like, “Teja..Tejja..Teja..kaun hai yeh Teja,” turns into, “Alka..Alka..Alka..kaun hai […]
It is not enough to be Shahrukh Khan. He has to be Fair and Handsome and atleast in an ad attribute his success to a tube of fairness cream. Fairness is the door to great jobs, marriage proposals for women in our ads and beauty many have many shades, but in India, for a majority of […]
Housing is one of the key issues facing our overstretched planet today. According to UN reports, over 30 per cent of the planet’s urban population lives in slums, in great deprivation without fundamental amenities like water, sanitation, adequate space. 35 per cent of the rural population does even worse and more than 2 billion people all over the world […]
Dear God, how time flies. Kumar Gaurav, of melting , caramel eyes and bee-stung lips and the signature blue jeans and red jacket that he wore along with the coolest vibe we had seen a young hero sport in the 80s, for a while atleast, is in his mid 50s! I watch him sometimes in […]
A TV channel has recently been scaling high TRPs with the story of Jodha Akbar. It has a cost-effective set design that uses a few stock locations for every scene and uses wind-blown curtains, outdoor shots, ambient lighting and expensive furnishings to convey opulence. A few years ago, Ashutosh Gowarikar’s film of the same name […]
Very few modern landmarks have the kind of instant recall as The Louvre Pyramid, designed by Leoh Ming Pei. It even featured in the Dan Brown bestseller The Da Vinci Code and the cinematic version celebrated the angular mystery of the structure. ** It is a radical departure from its historic context and had attracted a lot […]
The second half of Prem Rog is marked by the brilliant verbosity of dialogue writer Jainendra Jain but there are a few scenes that belong to Nanda. She plays the quietly suffering wife of a Zamindar who routinely beds an outspoken, ‘lower caste’ woman but won’t let his own widowed daughter find love with a […]
My first job as a sub-editor in The Economic Times in 1994 brought me in touch with many people. Some were just colleagues, some were mentors and a few became life-long friends. It is hard for me to categorise Madhuri Velegar K. She headed Bangalore’s Femina desk and we hardly spoke though we worked for […]
Have they come for you yet? They could be anyone. A new oraganisation committed to keeping women out of pubs, jeans, self-hoods and a sense of freedom. Khap elders calculating whether you can fall in love with a boy in the same village and if you do, whether you should be hung in public or […]
Every inch of Blue Ginger (Taj West End, Bangalore) is a snapshot. Fringed by wild grass, curvy water bodies dappled with lily pads and sunshine, the restaurant walks a languid line between formality and leisure, and is packed with Vietnamese aesthetics and the aromas of a mysterious yet instantly engaging cuisine. The crunch of […]
Spices, herbs, fruits, vegetables, pulses, grains, nuts, family favourites, history in a whiff and a mouthful. That sums up the experience of Syrian Christian food served recently in course after course at Karavalli (The Gateway Hotel), Bangalore’s favourite coastal food restaurant. The only thing missing was the wood fire smoke filling up the senses. […]
While watching the opening shots of Queen, I remembered a machine knitted, beige pull-over I have not worn in years. The heroine’s grandmother brought back memories of a grand-aunt in Delhi who plucked her eye brows even in her 80s, had a smart bob and would pull up a high stool in her kitchen to […]