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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Many, many years ago, when there was no such thing as ready-made ginger-garlic paste, saas-bahu flicks on TV, when Mumbai had one standard climate for all seasons (hot, sucky, humid), when I could not tell Malayalam from Tamil from Kannada from Telugu…my mom got a recipe from her office colleague, Rose Aunty. Rose Aunty, like […]
Three years ago, you did not know you would be here reading these words. Three years ago, you did not know the name that would make things go round in your life. Three years ago, all the wrong things mattered. Not the life-sustaining, soul-stirring truth of today. Today’s smells of cinnamon and spice, today’s sunsets […]
I was packing a lunch box. A day back. And the vegetable that I had cooked and was stuffing into the air-tight tiffin box was spinach. Now we all know how volatile the nutrients in a leafy vegetable are. So I felt a bit off about cooking it and then packing it. It would travel […]
He rode quietly, feeling the wind on his face, feeling her snuggling up to him, his pillion rider wife. The song he had caught off the radio at a snacks store still auto-played in his head. 11 children, all in their khaki shorts, scratches healing on their rugged knees, scuttling between lanes with bats on […]
For a very long time, I did not know that paneer is cottage cheese. Until of course, in fifth standard, I saw a recipe by Tarla Dalal on TV and she clarified that cottage cheese is paneer. Tarla Dalal followed by Sanjeev Kapoor are the people I resort to when I want a super yum […]
She always wondered how she would find him in the next lifetime. Because, obviously, she would not want to be with anybody else. He wondered why she was always in a hurry. He would set out to meet her and always find her halfway through, complaining that he never came first. She wondered why he never […]
Images fly by. Trees and dogs, cows in alleyways, people. We catch familiar expressions…disgust at highly priced onions , the sly smile of a pickpocket, the anger in a girl’s eyes at the man who just leered at her, anxiety in the man’s as he waits for the daughter to cross the road and reach […]
The winds carry you. To places far and not known yet. Where you will breathe the air I have not yet touched. Or have I? Where you will see sights I have not yet seen. Sounds I have not heard yet, and smells I have not breathed in. You will be away and you will […]
It is frail. It falters and stumbles and we still spend our lives chasing it and feeling the compulsive need to acquire it. To have it in our lives. To want it, to live it. Many crimes are committed in its name, many lives lost, many sacrifices made, many sorrows lived. And yet, when we […]
You have a fancy job. You have cool friends. You have a family that visits occasionally and you therefore feel you are in touch with them. You also have a vehicle to get around the city, you have a pay cheque that pays for unnecessary expenses like ready-made ginger-garlic paste, an extra skillet, more than two […]
Your voice is clear, You wish I would change. You wish I would hear, And not find it strange. I hear my voice, Climbing in defence, I wish I wouldn’t lie And drop my pretense. I wish you would say What you felt underneath, While I wish I could hear What you hide beneath. Tell […]
She peers hard into the massive wall of water that is 20 feet away from her. The wall that has drenched her entirely from so far away, she is too scared to go anywhere close to it. She is no longer sure if the water is tumbling down in giant gushes to the ground at […]