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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“Utaar Ke Phenk De Sab Janjaal Beete Kal Ka Har Kankal Tere Talve Hain Teri Naal” ** So when you peel and throw all conflicts and let the skeletons of the past go and your heels are like hooves with horseshoes, then you don’t run. You fly. And sometimes in life, the full circle spans […]
An authentic actor’s face is unmistakable, unforgettable. The eyes speak volumes. Every frown stands out. Every snarl registers. When the lip curls, the nostrils flare, the forehead furrows, you watch without blinking, without a moment of doubt that the emotion playing out before you is real. To call an actor real is anomalous but what […]
It is the season of love gone wrong. From Aashiqui-2 to Raanjhanaa to The Great Gatsby to Lootera, it is as if we are being told, “watch out. Before you know, there will be a forest fire within that will spare nothing and no one.” As if love beyond a certain permissible degree of intensity […]
Happiness is self contained complete in its enclosed joy Complete enough to exist in a rainbow tinted bubble unaware of the next moment it seeks nothing more than the right to be and to live the moment that is neither the past nor the future but what is unarguably indivisibly the perfection of NOW.
He looks like a tousled philosopher, sounds like a Zen teacher, walks like a giant in a world crawling with Lilliputians and drives chefs to a point where the impossible becomes normal. He is Marco Pierre White, widely known as the father of modern cooking, the youngest British chef to get three Michelin stars and probably the […]
Hard to tell if memory inhabits me or I inhabit memories ** of magazines lining my mothers tin trunks smelling of the 70s and recipes of apple fritters songs on radio a window seat that opened to dreamscapes painting themselves in my head life that went on flowing unabated through everything .. memories of homes […]
“There is a sacred space between mindless surrender and cold logic.. I will meet you there. But wait, first I will meet myself. Because without me, there cannot be… you. “ ** My take on Rumi and on his absolutely intoxicating philosophy of love that dissolves the walls of the self in the other and […]
When the sixties swung into the seventies to the beat of RD Burman’s Spanish guitar and Amitabh Bachchan’s angst, in retrospect, it was the end of the happy endings in Hindi cinema. 20 years into independence, the political reality of India had become far more complex, dark and divisive to allow films to be set on house boats, shikaras, […]
Ordinary life is hard enough to manage. How much harder would fame be? Too much of it? Too little of it? What must it be like to be watched constantly, measured, estimated, valued for what is visible in you? To smile at hundreds of cameras and then come home to maybe an imperfect life that […]
It is hard for me to write legibly about the quiet legend of Gokuldas Sadanand Shenoy. I did not know him personally and yet I feel I know him in a way that is instinctive, beyond the realms of academics and art history. While soaking and absorbing the book,Shenoy-Footprints (put together with painstaking passion and insightful […]
“When an architect builds a glass tower in the middle of the Arabian desert, he justifies his design with a 100 different reasons-except possibly the real one, viz., that he is trying to (unconsciously) recreate for his clients, the mythic imagery of what to them is the quintessential city of the 20th century: Houston, Texas,” […]
Say it. when the shining silence smiles when all fits all is at peace all swims flows sings dances is one with everything ** Give that joy back to the world to all of life just say simply clearly I love. I love. I. Love.