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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In the Kamal Haasan starrer Pushpaka Vimana (1987), the story unfolded in the suites, balconies and gardens of a five star hotel. The idea was to pit a few ordinary mundane lives against excessive luxury. The idea of luxury then was limited to carpetted rooms, fluffy beds, marble floors and blinding chandeliers. Over the years however the idea of […]
Stonehenge is a befuddling prehistoric monument in Wiltshire, England and is one of the most famous heritage sites in the world with its mysterious ring of standing stones. There is a similar quality to sculptor Henry Spencer Moore’s work. It has a dormant energy, a powerful sweep, an organic quality that is of this world and […]
In two seemingly unrelated incidents, a woman was brutally attacked in a Bangalore ATM..and in another..a woman journalist assaulted in an elevator by a high-profile editor in a fit of what he says, was an appalling “lapse of judgement.” In the first instance, the weapon of attack was a machete. In the second, the sense […]
Umm..passion. It is about to peak for Ram and Leela in a lodge called Madhu Chanda (literally translated..Honeymoon). In a room where everything is white and wispy, including the moonlight and there is a big mural or picture of goddess Lakshmi on one of the walls, there is a balcony overlooking the twinkling town the […]
In the end the bulldozer wins every argument. The war for real estate in India is waged brutally and with precise, cold blooded violence and the builder-politician mafia wins every time because we are not a democracy. We are a country where people like you and me rights only in theory and you just had […]
Whoever has planted bougainvillae bushes right in the middle of the Bangalore- Mysore Highway has my vote. In the middle of dusty wilderness, driving past a splash of pink, white and green makes the heart sing. You also learn as you watch wild bushes on the side of the road thick with pink blossoms that […]
That architecture is an art is understood by few but for a few creative geniuses architecture reflects who they are and their faith in divinity. It is colour, texture, flow, light, space, energy, emotion, prayer and surrender to a higher power. For Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí (25 June 1852 – 10 June 1926)), architecture was […]
An article on Frank Lloyd Wright on smithsonian.com summed up his work in one perfect sentence, “He was there first.” Wright explored the word ‘organic’ as early as 1908 and unlocked architecture and set it free from conventional notions of what a building was supposed to be. He made us see what a building could […]
Housing for all is a challenge faced by every developing country where the distance between the rich and the poor expands by the day. In cities today we see land being gobbled by real estate sharks, countless buildings and mall sprouting up but living amenities shrinking for the poor. The contrast between the gated communities […]
Around 12 years ago, I travelled for hours to a lesser known neighbourhood in Bangalore to find and interview Manna Dey. He lived on the first floor of an independent home and it was probably a rented space.and there were really no flourishes of fame and legendary success anywhere. ** This was a middle-class home […]
Mediocrity is king on Indian television. Nothing demonstrates this better than Sanjeev Kapoor walking into the set of Junior Master Chef India on a red carpet to the tune of Azeemo-shaan Shehenshah! The Shehenshah in question has multiple shows on his imaginatively titled channel Food Food and another one on a mainstream channel. Sometimes he […]
A dear friend recently went to Switzerland and took a chiffon saree with her just in case a Yash Chopra moment struck her. And she is not even a Hindi film aficionado like me. Just goes to show, doesn’t it? How in a moment when memory meets reality, a snatch from a loved film comes […]