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…
Read More
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…
Read More
“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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
You are browsing archives for
The rush of blood to the head. The tingle in the spine as Rocky Balboa locks his eyes squarely with James ‘Clubber’ Lang in Sylvester after fighting his demons and running through walls of fear to the tune of Gonna Fly Now and Survivor’s smash hit Eye of The Tiger. And the lines. Apollo Creed […]
After years of search on YouTube, I finally stumbled upon Farmaan, a Doordarshan serial directed by Lekh Tandon. Based on the Urdu book Alampanah by Rafia Amin, the serial starring Kanwaljit Singh and Deepika Deshpande was a restless memory that even two decades could not erase. And for good reason. The story telling was honest to […]
One of my favourite AK Hangal performances is that of a smiling, chess obsessed patriarch in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Guddi. He has a little room to himself at the entrance of the home that he shares with his son, his daughter-in-law and a teenaged daughter played by Jaya Bhaduri. All the old man lives for is a […]
(Pic courtesy sify.com) A few months ago, on a Facebook thread, I read a few comments against North-Eastern women, about North-Eastern people and their irrelevance to India, to a city like Bangalore. I was teaching at that time in a college and many of my students were North-Eastern, some of whom had already shared […]
What does a cinematographer or a photographer do that we can’t? Well, he reinterprets the world through his gaze, recreates it, focusses on moments that say, “Watch this. This is important. Beautiful. Relevant,” bleaches a frame of colour or suffuses it with rainbows. Catches butterflies. Dewdrops. Rain streaks across a window pane. Faces with all […]
Fame can be a compelling thing. To Die For, a 1995 Gus Van Sant film, inspired by one Pamela Smart (accused of instigating her husband’s murder), was really a comment on America’s bottomless appetite for televised fame or notoriety. To be remembered for something, anything is one of the prime human impulses today. Ever wondered […]
From a helpless young girl being pawed by a pack of hounds in Guwahati, the media focus has shifted now to a sinewy Manipuri woman punching her way to international attention. Some shift. I wonder how the powerful women competing in the Olympics come across to the moral sainiks. Women swimmers, gymnasts, weight lifters, […]
I haven’t watched Homi Adajania’s Cocktail but from what I hear, it achieves something no different from the message sent by goons of the so called Hindu Janajagrana Vedike on Saturday who raided a resort in Padil, and thrashed and slapped girls for partying in “indecent clothes” and consuming, alcohol. Deepika Padukone’s Veronica was not thrashed […]
Just before The Dark Knight Rises began, my mind wandered off to evil. And its randomness. And its twisted sense of purpose. The Colorado shooting during the screening of the film that took 12 lives. The depraved pawing and mauling of a young girl in Guwahati. The molestation of another girl in front of a train […]
We celebrate Rajesh Khanna with 20 of his most memorable songs that sum up his charisma, his magic, his unsung range and his indelible impact on the vocabulary of cinematic romance. This is by no means a definitive list (and is in no particular order) or the most comprehensive but tries to capture some moments […]
Love. Who believes in it? Show of hands please? I believe it when I see it for real. In lives like Imroz and Amrita. Nargis and Sunil Dutt. Patrick Swayze and Lisa Niemi. Agassi and Graf. At a certain age, love was cinema, literature, music and what they tapped into. The raw material of hope, […]
My first memory of Dara Singh is in the 70’s film Bhagat Dhanna Jatt, that I watched in Chandigarh’s Piccadily cinema hall with my parents on a night when we had nothing to do. My dad was not fastidious about films. If he wanted to see one, he found one playing near a theatre near him. […]