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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Yesterday, for some reason, I hunted for a DVD I had bought many years ago but never watched. And then as Aruna-Vikas’ little known 1978 murder mystery Shaque unspooled, I realised, the film in a way exemplified Vinod Khanna’s approach towards fame. He did not give a damn about it. He did love the […]
In a world where reductionist phrases simplify trends in unintelligent words, it is the season of supposedly “woke” men turning out to be predators. Case in point being Vikas Bahl, the man who directed Queen and also a few other successful men who were supposed to behave better than louts hanging around dark street corners, […]
There is a telling anecdote about Kishori Amonkar’s early years as a classical sensation when she was rattling off the number of shows she had been booked for and her mother and guru Mogubai Kurdikar, herself a legendary disciple of Ustad Alladiya Khan’s Jaipur Atrauli gharana, heard her out and asked her if her calendar had […]
There is a big noise in the media about just who Vishal Bhardwaj’s Rangoon belongs to. Well, it does not belong to either Kangana Ranaut or Shahid Kapoor. Or Saif Ali Khan for that matter. It belongs to no one and well, nowhere because Vishal Bhardwaj, whose Maqbool and Omkara cohesively wove Indian narratives into Shakespearean […]
Those who filmed themselves proudly as they broke cameras, vandalised property and beat up Sanjay Leela Bhansali on the sets of Padmavati know nothing about the culture they claim to be protecting. So let us begin with a slice of history. With the story of a man who was a devout Muslim and a bhakt […]
Ordinary people do not interest Hindi cinema anymore and that is why even if Mani Ratnam’s artifice free protagonists from OK Kanmani (who did not think it was necessary to interrupt their love story to endorse Vero Moda, Coca Cola and Anita Dongre’s wedding wear) are channelled in Ok Jaanu (a Karan Johar production), they […]
There is a scene in Rahul Dholakia’s Raees where Vijay, the symbol of conscientious idealism in Salim Javed’s cinematic universe of the 70s, appears for a few seconds on a screen in an open air theatre to take a greedy capitalist to task for a coal mine that has caused poverty, death and persecution of […]
Symbols matter. Symbols sum up ideals that are bigger than phraseology and represent the best of humanity. And no one knows how an intangible idea brimming with something vast and indefinable, gets distilled into a symbol and comes to belong to all of us. When artist Shepard Fairey created the iconic Barack Obama poster emblazoned with the word “Hope” in 2008-2009, […]
While performing a street play in Sahibabad township, on 1 January 1989, Safdar Hashmi, a member of the Communist Party of India , a playwright and activist, was attacked and murdered by the followers of an election candidate. What followed was unexpected. During the staid Doordarshan coverage of the National Film Festival Awards, Shabana Azmi […]
A few days before Om Puri passed away, I shuddered past a YouTube video (obviously fake) that speculated if he had converted to Islam. No prizes at all for guessing why the video had been created. To fan the hate that his support for Pakistani artists had kindled amid patriots whose claim to nationalism is trashing […]
Sometime last year I went for a late night show with my 18-year-old and forgot one cardinal rule I have always followed while going out after dusk though it is a rare occurrence. Dress down. Wear a big shawl that hides the fact that though 47, I am a woman still. No flashy neck or […]
The opening scene of Nitesh Tiwari’s Dangal has a young Mahavir Singh Phogat priming himself up for an office brawl. He has left wrestling but we are told, wrestling has not left him. And so like a fighter in an akhada, he crouches, his eyes focused and unblinking and makes a little gesture to pull […]