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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There is something sickening and violating about the way Sunanda Pushkar’s life and death are being played out round the clock on our TV screens. Her voice, images, letters, life and death make for compulsively watchable television. One channel even played an “exclusive” mobile camera footage of the suite where […]
Yes, the Garbo analogy is the easiest to draw from. It is the only easily available reference point to understand Suchitra Sen. The fact is we will never really know what made her withdraw from the public life that had created layers of myth, mystery and cinematic lore around her. She had had enough perhaps. […]
Some meetings are life changing. Some people meant to enter your life to show you that nothing is random, that life has a design or like Mary Morgan quotes Rumi to emphasise just incase you missed the point, ” Someone else is driving the caravan.” ** I met her quite by chance last year and […]
Honesty..passion and connection are words that Kunal Karan Kapoor uses a lot in his conversation. Every sentence either begins or ends or draws from what these words stand for. After chatting to him today, I was watching a tribute to RD Burman and someone said about him, “he always believed that rhythm was within. […]
Linear perfection. Monastic lines. Reductionist volumes. Unadorned surfaces. Geometric harmony. That in a nutshell was the work of Louis Isadore Kahn (born Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky), widely known as one of the most influential architects in the world. There was something starkly original and intellectually stimulating about his work. His buildings were like mathematical theorems, well-realised to the last brick but with […]
A few weeks back, I discovered the joy of using a tool I did not even know the name of. I spent an engrossing afternoon, etching a wooden tile with a Buddha head, burnishing it and feeling rewarded. Being an artist sometimes limits you to one way of looking at the world and interpreting it. […]
** It was May, 2005. I stumbled late into a press conference with my seven- year- old and panic in tow. As the child of a working mother, my son was used to sitting quietly through interviews and media events. It was I who sometimes mismanaged time and this was one such occasion.Farooque Shaikh was […]
There is no easy way to understand death but when it comes after prolonged suffering, it brings with it release for the one who departs. It leaves behind a sense of emptiness because a life has ended. It leaves behind the fullness of grief that in time finds solace in a sense of closure. There […]
There may come a time when there won’t be enough land for vegetation to grow upon. When we will have more buildings than trees and open tracts of green will be a fading memory. Look around you. It is already happening. The land feuds. The scramble to build more and more concrete jungles where an overture to a […]
”The script sits in front of you. The writer’s translated into ink what is in his spirit and his soul and his mind. I come along, I pick it up, and the ink goes into my eyes, into my mind, into my body, flows around and that part starts to inhabit me. And I know […]
Taj Mahal. A beautiful mausoleum that in popular culture, in poetry and in cinema, has come to embody deathless romance. Princess Diana on her much celebrated visit to India posed alone on a bench with the Taj as a backdrop just to rub her loneliness in and to make the absence of her spouse obvious . […]
Whether you are waving trishuls, brooms, an imperious hand or a Supreme Court Verdict before the masses, it is all about control, isn’t it? How can we control minds, lives, body parts, power centres, vote banks? And control those we do not approve of, dislike, or cannot understand or do not give a damn about? […]