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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Women suffer. By habit, choice and circumstance. We feel inadequate most of the time. As home makers we wish we were out there, validating ourselves by earning money. When we have careers, we worry that the kids are growing up without good food on the table, without ironed clothes, without supervised homework. We don’t ever […]
Some films have a gender. Some don’t. For me, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather has none. It is just what it is. A movie that you discover at some point in your life and then keep rediscovering. It never ages though you do. I was roughly about three when it was made and discovered Mario […]
Note: This is a Press Release, not an authored article. Bangalore Theatre comes together to celebrate World Theatre Day with THE GREAT GALATA Date: 27th March 2012. ONE SHOW ONLY. The Great Galata is a curated theatre event to celebrate theatre, theatre people, theatre spaces and theatre performances. It has been envisioned as a start-to- […]
Memories are like films. Some fade away and some are revisited again and again. Like my interview with Shama Zaidi. Years later, I can still remember her voice pulsing across a long-distance telephone line. As full of character as her writing. Zaidi’s body of work speaks for itself and she is one of the few authentic […]
Many many decades ago as a young girl in a small town, I remember reading a cover story on film maker, artist and writer Imtiaz Dharker with growing admiration. She was someone who had battled great odds to acquire personal and creative freedom. I wanted to grow up to be like her. A few years later, […]
On Aamir Khan’s birthday today..we look back at one of his milestone productions..Dhobi Ghat… There is a moment in Basu Bhattacharya’s Anubhav when from a penthouse where the film is set (owned by Tanuja in real life), you see Mumbai or Bombay as it was in 1970s, waking up to a lazy dawn. There is […]
This is what Vidya Balan has done. She has distilled the Indian film heroine beyond her size, skin colour, weight, objectification in item songs and orchestrated stardom created around the din of endorsements and tiny roles in big budget films to performance. And presence. The kind that makes you look at a woman beyond her […]
Just an observation. No one filled a T-shirt quite like Joy Mukherjee. Remember him pulling a rickshaw (in a striped T-shirt) with the fragile Sadhna in his debut film Love in Simla? Or him serenading Sharmila Tagore with Dil Ki Awaz Bhi Sun in Humsaya (yes, again in a t-shirt, red this time) and he and Saira […]
I met music director Ravi Sharma a few years ago as a WorldSpace RJ. He was a guest at a concert and was put up in a hotel where I went to interview him at the end of what had been a long day for him. He was a little watchful in the beginning and […]
If Kaagaz Ke Phool had not been Guru Dutt’s self-fulfilling prophecy but just a film about a fading star (a director) and his bond with a protege, it may have ended on a happy note with two lost souls hitching themselves to a rollicking wagon called the Future or Forever. Both Guru Dutt and Michel Hazanavicius’ […]
This Saturday morning, I walked into a multiplex to watch Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Paan Singh Tomar to find exactly 10 people in the hall. It did not matter. The emptiness around me filled up the moment Brijendra Kalay’s brilliantly shifty, stuttering scribe came face to face with the erstwhile national steeple chase champion, army Subedar and current baaghi, or […]
I did not want to write about Whitney Houston’s death because like Amy Winehouse, she too has been turned into a cautionary tale about the failure to deal with success, wealth, adulation and fulfilled dreams. When a glistening firefly crashes and burns..it is the done thing to perform an autopsy upon a life story. Oh, […]