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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After spending my formative years in a terrorism scarred state, I feel almost invulnerable on the streets of Bangalore. This is a fundamentally gentle city, usually too diffident and polite to give offence. This is the city where I fell asleep during a bus commute in the early nineties and woke up in the middle […]
No, there is no real evidence that Mr Bachchan’s daughter-in-law had to marry a tree before she could marry his son but a gentlemanly, deep-seated patriarchy has long been a part of who he is. Many years ago, on Karan Johar’s talk show, he expressed his sincere admiration and absolute respect for Kajol because she […]
Over the last few months, I have travelled far more frequently than usual and reconnected with reading in a consuming, famished way that had gone missing from my life since I started writing 21 years ago. I can either write or read because both are all or nothing experiences for me. But when you are […]
Yes, it is just so hard. To not appropriate her success. So recently there was a Facebook post by Loyola students about how PV Sindhu’s father’s education at Loyola had something to do with her recent triumph. Another FB page dug out a picture of Sindhu in traditional regalia to show the ”feminists” that she could […]
Internet sensation Ssumier S Pasricha’s recent video about Pammi aunty mocking a dark, overweight woman at a Teej function evoked mixed reactions. Was he mocking, dark and overweight women? Or was he mocking the women who mock them? If you watch his videos closely, every little narrative is about a woman deriding another woman, establishing the […]
While channel surfing a few days back, I saw Mika Singh punning upon Diana Penty’s surname and adding to good effect, “And Mika Kaccha!” I guarantee that you will not hear anyone in the film fraternity rising up in instinctive disgust over this comment just as most of them kept quiet when Salman Khan rose […]
‘How do you cope with being housebound?’ he asks. ‘The world is suddenly very small. There are many things that don’t exist in my world: other people’s brightly lit living rooms, tourists asking the way, clothes wet from rain, stolen bikes, dropped ice-cream cones melting on hot asphalt, maypoles. Disputes over parking spaces, meadows of […]
Naseeruddin Shah is a national treasure but he never set out to be one. His ambitions differ from most actors who come into the industry fuelled by nepotism on steroids. When we talk about outsiders making it big on their own terms in Hindi cinema, let us please start the conversation with the likes of […]
For the longest time, cinema in the subcontinent referred to daughters as, “betiyan toh ghar ki izzat hoti hain.” The mindset being that women must always think first of the family honour because they always have to be accountable to the world and its honour keepers for what they say, think or do. A few […]
In a country where a mother of three babies is a five-time World Amateur Boxing champion, has represented India at the Olympics and won a medal, we recently had the director of Sultan defending his decision to show a pregnant wrestler meekly giving up her Olympic dreams while her husband hops from one international success to another. Because, […]
I did not know Ishrat Akhond, one of the 28 diners killed in the Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka. But a link took me to her Facebook page and something reached out to me like the warmth of a little persuasive flame. The words she had used to describe an Iftar meal. The words,”stubborn gladness” […]
Garv: Pride and Honour was a movie Salman Khan starred in 2004. The film was about how the righteous brother and upright cop played by Salman avenges the rape of his sister. We will get to the irony of that theme later but this film directed by Puneet Issar was insufferable, tacky and turned rape into, like […]