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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Dear Mr Godman ji First things first. You are neither a God. Nor a man. And if you are..the latter..I mean then do you have a daughter, a sister, a woman in your life who you care for, worry for? Do you remember your mother’s face from the time when you were a young boy? […]
Only Bihari migrants rape. Women would not get raped if they wore overcoats, stayed in Bharat instead of aspiring to India, did not wear skirts to school, did not err like Seeta to cross the Lakshmanrekha , if they focussed only on housework, if they did not mix freely with boys, if they were not […]
** If you are a writer, you will always find a story or a story will find you almost as if someone had set up a moment for you to look at and pointed, “Take note..remember this..write this down.” On an unplugged holiday after almost a decade when I refused to carry even a laptop […]
Hits, misses, deaths, brave, independent films and formulaic successes..the usual ingredients of an year at the movies. And some memories linger like Jab Tak Hai Jaan (http://unboxedwriters.com/2012/11/jab-tak-hai-jaan-fearless-sentimentality/), a bravely naive last offering by Yash Chopra in an unsentimental time. Yash Chopra believed in love. In humanism. Yes, he was a dream merchant, but at the core of his being was […]
How can words sum up who you were? What you stood up for? What you fought for? What you died for? You fought. Till the end. for that breath, that cannot be wounded, because it comes from an inviolable I AM. And even though you are gone. You are here. In all of […]
Just this morning, while getting ready for work, I overheard on 93.5 Red FM via the RJ (a woman) that the victim of the Delhi outrage was now in Singapore and responding well to treatment and since this was such a good news, she was going to play us an upbeat song and then the […]
I have never lived in Delhi but every time I pass it on the way to my mother’s town, my skin crawls and not just because of the rape lore that thickens its air. After having lived in the South for the last 18 years, I cannot handle the brazen disrespect in Delhi’s gaze […]
In a world where a random shooting spree can take away 20 young lives in a school, what do we need from not just our law makers, law enforcers, politicians but our musicians, artists, writers, film makers? Through the ages, the arts have been the humans spirit’s escape from intolerance and violence. For cinema, music, […]
Pandit Ravi Shankar passed away today. Rajinikanth turned 62. Dilip Kumar turned 90 yesterday. Smita Patil passed away almost 26 years ago on December 13. Births, deaths. Years counted, measured, emptied out. filled up. This whole idea of time and that somehow it should be accounted for in terms of achievements, milestones, awards, body of […]
This journey past old habits of entrenched inertia took me beyond mountains, lakes, fields and farms where green, pink, purple, yellow, orange homes stood in wilderness like unopened gifts. Past bridges land fills villages, towns and nothingness towards the unknown with strangers to teach that.. no place is unknown and no one a […]
Bangalore-based architect Chitra Vishwanath and husband Vishwanath Srikantaiah live in a home that is a rain bowl, a sun catcher and most importantly a living lesson in how to give back to the earth. To say that Chitra and Vishwanath have spearheaded the water-harvesting movement in the South would be an understatement and it […]
Ang Lee is a quiet and baffling auteur. Someone without a whole lot to say about his craft but like an operatic conductor, he orchestrates visual symphonies that no genre can contain. He can touch any genre and make it his own and always with a quiet felicity that juggles the magnificent, clutter breaking […]