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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The kitchen. Pretty much where she spent a greater part of her time. Randomly throwing spices, cleaning up and spraying repellent on little red ants that crawled their way up to some new tidbit they had stumbled upon. The bedroom. Clothes being folded, shelves being arranged, curtains being dusted, windows wiped clean. The ceremony of […]
When they fought, he would make up. And eventually, in a few minutes, she would relent, and the world would be perfect again. So when he left home to buy a strip of medicines that she needed, locking her inside the house like he did when she was cooking and not free to come close […]
It is very easy to get swept up in a current. It’s wild, it’s random and you exert hardly any effort at all, getting tossed in the waters. Feeling absolutely free. Really? Or is every limb constricted, balled up, drawn in, in fear of being smashed against rocks and getting thrown into whirlpools or rapids? I […]
I normally experiment on days when I have time to experiment. That way, in the remote chance of a failure (ahem, ahem), I have time to whip up something familiar and comforting and hearty. I have also felt that wanting to experiment ONLY when I have time is not always a smart thing. It […]
I am itching to declare this as my invention but I am sure somebody has already made it, if not spoken about it. It’s like chancing upon Palak Paneer and feeling that you came up with it. Ridiculous. But this khichdi makes me very happy. It is a ‘vegetabled’ version of what I used […]
As a child, I often wondered which tree bears the sabudana fruit. Maybe it’s a crop. But we never studied it, although we ate it so voraciously. I learnt where sabudana comes from only a few years back. Sabudana is made from Tapioca. Or sago. In India, its commercially produced as pearls of different sizes. […]
I always thought I was a visual person. That sights would remind me of places, of people. Turns out, I was wrong. That day, when I caught a whiff of a certain face wash, I felt like I was back in my hostel in Bangalore. Because I used it then. So I closed my eyes […]
There is nothing overtly special about this day. It is just another Saturday, the day of the week that goes fastest, and she is back to her domain, the kitchen, aromas sashaying their way out of the open windows, mustard and asafetida, curry leaves and green chillies chopped fine, like little green nose rings. […]
You walk ahead of me. And I keep pace with you when I can. Often, I lose sight of you. Suddenly…when I look down at a pebble I trip on, if I look at one of the sights that lie around me, if I stop for a moment to catch my breath. And you […]
Have you pondered a sudden unexpected end? Nothing is unchanged. The clothes lie in the same wardrobe, those socks are in the dryer, the book they were reading is still lying with the bookmark on page 259. That shirt on the door smells of their perfume. But no person to turn the page, wear […]
The thing about death is, you cannot call. You cannot call them again. Ever. I think that is what tears you apart, what tears you up.
Many of us hate supermarkets. Yes, you will see us thronging them and standing in endless queues and looking glad to finally have access to things that were once limited to TV screens a few years ago. But some of us hate them. We hate that the vegetables are sodden and oh-so-huge, which means that they are […]