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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So Gulaab Gang is not really about Gulabi Gang or Sampat Pal. They just decided the colour pink was fetching, the lathis provocative and the idea of a gang of self-willed, rustic women commercially viable and they went for it. The intention was never to give credit where it is due. I also find it […]
It was with a sense of dread that I watched the Geetika Tyagi ..Subhash Kapoor video. In a tastefully decorated room where friends possibly gather to discuss films and life..a conversation unfolded that could not have been easy for any of the people present. A young woman with naked pain and revulsion in her voice. A friend trying […]
Politics and wars decimate history, memory, geography, architecture, human life and art. No city knows this better than Baghdad. Baghdad has been battered by decades of war and has lost among other things a sense of normalcy that human existence thrives on. In the worst of times, art comes to the rescue of the human spirit and reminds it […]
In the last scene of Highway, Alia Bhatt’s Veera stands cradling Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her arms watching over two undamaged children playing in the valley stretched before her. She has run with the wolves and come home. It has been a long journey with a lot of motifs that we recognise by now from […]
He is a conjurer of narratives. The story teller who brings to life the rising of spring sap in a winter-struck tree and then creates the moment when the silence of months gushes out as maple syrup. ** He paints with his gestures the journey in a canoe of a man and a woman as […]
Every successful brand has a bite. A bar of Magnum literally lives up to that premise. You bite, it crackles..obliging you with a molten rush of Belgian chocolate. Simple idea. Vanilla purity. And the sinfulness of chocolate. And a business, that according to report published in 2013 has doubled by a billion Euros in the […]
To a question am asked often (Why do you write?), my answer is simple. I see people. Really see them. When I see a mind, a talent, an imagination at work, the world falls away. My own imperfections fall away. I connect with the energy at work and my own energy feeds on it and […]
Some chefs cook. Others create. Drawing inspiration from influences that may or may not have anything to do with food. And when they finish a plate, it is like finishing a poem or a story or a journey through the world of senses, memory, desire for something beyond immediate gratification and one dimensional pleasure. A […]
Can architecture have a gender? A feminine perspective maybe? Especially if it is a Zaha Hadid building? Frozen like a giant wave between the earth and the sky? Immovable but fluid? Like time made visible with its many flowing curves and pauses? The geometry in Hadid’s work demonstrates that the source of creation has no gender. A creative impulse […]
I have been thinking of pain lately. The pointlessness of it. The inevitability of it. Why some people court it and others shun it. Some hide it and others hide from it. Some people gather painful moments like they were spring flowers. Their life is defined by pain, what it did to them, will do […]
Structure is at times over-emphasised in architecture. It is not just what is seen and what can be touched that is important in a building but what flows inside it..what can be felt. Frank Gehry, arguably the most famous architect in the world today is a master orchestrator of subliminal experience. Of creating buildings that come across as […]
There is a moment in the 2003 Julia Roberts starrer Mona Lisa Smile where Katherine Ann Watson, an art lecturer introduces her students to Jackson Pollock’s art and there is a hush in the room as a larger-than-life canvas fills up the silence with a wordless roar. There is nothing to say really because Pollock’s art […]