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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Last night in Bangalore, the cast of the play Nirbhaya got a standing ovation, each one of us standing for our own private reason. I for one stood because I thought it was admirable, how the cast made public perhaps the most painful truths of their lives. The tears were real, this was no acting. […]
I read somewhere, “Nothing should live that isn’t a labour of great, great love.” But seriously, if nothing should live that isn’t a labour of great love, how come the people and things that are, sometimes vanish into the mist of time? It’s nothing you haven’t contemplated before. There ought to be some place beyond, a […]
Most people need a movie review like they need a nail trim at a salon. It’s an option and sure we love one but we can live without it. Ofcourse, you’d like an indication of some sort on what to expect of a movie. That’s fair. But don’t we have that well before it’s time for a review […]
Music is a popular topic of debate in drawing room conversations, considering how conspicuously present it is at most get-togethers where music trivia begins to come out of your ears, after a while. Often, my heart goes out to the unsuspecting souls who have somehow managed to hold on to their romanticism about their kind of “good music,” only to innocently offer it to pontificating snobs for demolition on evenings like […]
Once upon a time, there lived a man who could sew to perfection. These were times when bales of fabric stared down at you from shop shelves, transforming themselves in your mind’s eye into lovely frocks, smart shirts and swirling skirts, till you saw them in just the form you coveted and called for the […]
Dawn knocked on the door, bedecked in nine yards, vermillion and carrying an aluminium milk can. Kanku was her name. No morning was complete without the swirling of her rotund hips and middle, as she set her can on the ground and herself on her haunches. “A litre?” she would ask with a smile […]
On a sultry Gujarat afternoon, the lazy summer heat would waft in, bringing in its warm folds the salted sweetness of his voice. “Paaaaaavvvvbiskeeeeeeeeeeeet!” Always starting low at ‘paa’ and reaching a nice final peak at ‘keet.’ Paav and biscuit is how his vendor call could be broken up as, but for a child those […]
The world would be a calmer place, we would be calmer people if we just realised that the only things that there are limited reserves of, in this world, are our natural resources. The rest of it all is in abundance because the manufacturers of these “other things” are us. Humans. While we have […]
Yes Mubarak Begum is around. And no, she isn’t doing well. I know no one asked but it’s one of those moments in life when a question need not precede the answer. A few years ago, a dusty drive to Behram Baug in Jogeshwari took a colleague and me to the one room tenement […]