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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At the 2004 Rock Hall of Fame induction ceremony, Prince played a guitar solo next to the likes of Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne and others. The song was While My Guitar Gently Weeps and as the song progressed, something magical began to happen. It was almost as if the guitar in Prince’s hands took […]
One of the reasons given to explain the bleeding cuts inflicted on Abhishek Chaubey’s Udta Punjab is that Shahid Kapoor’s Tommy ‘Gabru’ Singh swears when drugged and even when sober! The problem with the film however is not profanity or vulgarity. In any case, the current head of the Central Board of Film Certification of India, Pahlaj Nihalani’s […]
There is a scene in Dulal Guha’s 1976 film Do Anjaane where a nameless mohalla toughie makes an appearance for a few fleeting seconds. That was Mithun Chakraborty. The same Mithun Chakraborty who would go on to win a National Award the same year for his debut in Mrinal Sen’s Mrigayaa. The same who would […]
Teaching is just another form of learning. And most of the time, you meet teachers in the unlikeliest of places. Once while teaching a class of post graduate students of media studies, I was told by a young girl, “You know ma’am..if you have something to offer, you will never go hungry. There will always […]
One of the most memorable one liners delivered by Chef Marco Pierre White on MasterChef Australia is,”Generosity is the greatest garnish.” And it is possibly true that generosity of spirit separates a great cook from a good one. Meeting Calicut’s culinary doyenne Abida Rasheed reaffirms this fact. At the Moplah Food Fest at Novotel Bengaluru Techpark’s […]
There are many ways to think about writing. And only one way to unthink the jargon. By just writing. And then writing some more. If you were to ask writers who have been published a lot just what they have learnt about writing, they will possibly give you different answers or a response that is […]
Right at the onset, let me make it clear that I had a lot of issues with Kankar, the narrative about domestic violence that is about to conclude on Zee Zindagi. All the women in the serial with the exception of Kiran (Sanam Baloch), spend their lives sharpening invisible knives, wishing each other ill, pretending […]
It was a moment of vindication though she was not looking for one when Kalki Koechlin walked across the stage in Rashtrapati Bhavan to accept a well-earned honour for her role in Margarita with a Straw. This was a film that normalised and mainstreamed a cerebral palsy patient as a full-bodied, ferociously intelligent protagonist. The […]
Remember the Dalit girl being dragged through the streets of Muktsar? And Pushpa and Murti, the Dalit teenaged girls in Badaun in 2014 whose rape and hanging was referred to by the shocked Western media as India’s Mango tree case? A case that was dismissed by CBI director Ranjit Sinha with this statement, “Our probe […]
Well, Kapil Sharma is back and going by the roar of approval, laughter and cheers packed in a Delhi stadium, a large number of folks really did miss him. And if you thought, in this second coming, he would have evolved into a more..well..refined version of himself, don’t hold your breath. He is still referring […]
Prince frightened the hell out of me when I first discovered him as a teenager. His compelling androgyny baffled me. His charisma seemed almost reptilian. It drew you in its silky coils and never let go. It was dangerous. Erotic. His breathy voice leaving little shivers in its wake. And because this Prince inhabited a universe that […]
In the 1995 Ketan Mehta film Oh Darling! Yeh Hai India, a very young Shahrukh Khan played a character called Hero, a symbol of ambition that floats into Mumbai, on a straw of hope. The film was also about a foolhardy plan to replace the President of India with a clone. Most importantly, the […]