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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It is official. The award for the most unlikable male character of 2016 will be shared by Ranbir Kapoor’s Ayan in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil and Ranveer Singh’s Dharam in Befikre. These are clueless boys with the emotional and intellectual depth of a nine-year-old with the tumultuous hormones of a teenager and are paired with […]
The patchwork of unfinished relationships, replaceable snapshots, the short-lived high of opening a new package, restless online scrolling, things that we don’t need but must buy, a flurry of vodka shots, a life lived from one plane hop to another, one missed connection to another. It is easy to dismiss Gauri Shinde’s Dear Zindagi as a […]
When a television serial right in the middle of an innocuous narrative about a controlling mother and an independent daughter-in-law weaves in a little banter about demonitisation with one of the characters hailing it, when a plug inserted between ads on FM radio says, “Desh ko line pe laana hai toh line mein lagiye” and […]
The important thing to learn from this time in human history is that appealing to people’s better judgement, their higher selves, their intelligence and sense of decency and right and wrong no longer works. If you appeal to their baser selves, their misogyny and irrationality, their hatred for the loathed ‘others’ (be they women, the […]
How easy it is to judge folks whose shoes we have not walked in. The largely lonely battle Karan Johar fought to save his film from hyper nationalist bullies and his desperate video which I could not bring myself to watch, the patriotism tax of Rs five crore and the backlash that followed did not […]
American satirist Sarah Silverman recently sat down with New Yorker’s editor Andy Borowitz and said that Trump was infact a mirror of a section of the American society that believes in the xenophobic, narrow version of American nationalism. A nationalism that hates, excludes and wants to always be ‘Number One.” In what she asked, […]
In a world where hate is normalised through conversations, social media exchanges, images, sound bytes, war is a constant news ticker and pain has lost its pungency because it is so pervasive, how do we stay hopeful? By not just noticing beauty, but creating it. By focusing on light. And colour. For Japanese American artist […]
In 1987, Roopkuvarba Kanwar, a Rajput woman was celebrated by a huge number of people in her community for committing Sati at Deorala village of Sikar district in Rajasthan. She was just 18 and had been married for just eight months to one Maal Singh Shekhawat. Thousands of people watched her immolation into a heap of […]
I cannot recall the exact number of times I have interviewed or spoken to Yusuf Arakkal in the past 21 years. Possibly one of my first stories with him was when I interviewed him and his son Shibu Arakkal (a celebrated photographer) for a Sunday edition of a national daily. I remember meeting his […]
Don’t be surprised by Prem Chopra ji gaslighting Tannishtha Chatterjee and telling her that her rage doesn’t count just because he did not get offended when he was called bald on Comedy Nights Bachao. Yes, she and her dark skin need the publicity, Mr Chopra doesn’t. Also please do not be surprised by the Pink […]
One newspaper memory lingers from the terrifying months of the Kargil war. There were two photos side by side on the front page of a national daily. One celebrating India’s win over Pakistan in a World Cup match and another one referring to the Army recapturing a key sector, if I remember correctly. In their […]
Poet Majaz Lakhnawi wrote once, “Yeh tera zard rukh yeh khushk lab yeh waham, yeh wahshat.. Tu apne sar se yeh baadal hata leti to accha tha.. Tere maathe pe yeh aanchal bahot hi khoob hai lekin.. Tu is aanchal se ek parcham bana leti to accha tha..” (Your pale face, your parched lips..these doubts..this […]