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 master story-teller is back, weaving the usual magic with his words, writing a familiar yet brand-new tale of love in the times of bigotry and xenophobia.“ I wake up every day approaching life’s problems through fiction,“ says Nadeem Aslam. Which explains the prose that soars even as it touches upon, examines, parses all the conflict life […]
It is neither compulsory nor mandatory but I feel the need to make this admission: I am not an outsider. Though not of Kannada origin, I have been a resident of Bangalore/Bengaluru since the start of the 80s. That’s been over three decades, during which I have lived, worked, married, learned the language, savoured the […]
Lakshmi Kannan’s debut novel in English charts the life of two remarkable women, Kalyani, a child bride, and Vishalakshi, a young widow in pre-Independence Madras. Both the women display admirable grace under pressure and at some point, the story becomes a celebration of woman power. Kannan deftly highlights the various issues women had to face […]
First a sort of disclaimer: I grew up on a steady diet of Corbett’s tales of the man-eaters he had encountered and bested; and later on, I grew to really like Stephen Alter’s accounts of life of men and mountains. So this was a double delight for me: Stephen Alter in the voice […]
As the breathless blurbs go: he’s back! After 19 years! And so are Ron and Hermione! And Hagrid, Snape, Cedric Diggory and Dumbledore, (don’t ask), Moaning Myrtle and oh, quite a few of the Hogwarts lot we have come to know and like. It’s a new adventure, it contains all the requisite dangers, and never mind that […]
Eligible is American author Curtis Sittenfeld’s re-telling of that much loved classic Pride and Prejudice. To take on a work, any work of Jane Austen (even when commissioned to do so, as part of the Austen Project) is one brave thing to do, and inevitably, for every two people who liked Eligible, four others howled “Sacrilege!” Sittenfeld has said, “ I […]
Chillies and Porridge (Edited by Mita Kapur) has an interesting if rather crowded jacket picture. A line-up of accomplished writers. A winner of a topic for an anthology: food. Chillies and Porridge should have made for truly delicious reading. And some of it does, but only some. Janice Pariat`s reflective eulogy to a breakfast staple of her […]
Once in a while, along comes a book written at the cusp of imagination and craft. This slim volume that released a few months ago, tells a compellingly ordinary story and tells it in style. The protagonist is a middle-aged housewife running to a little fat, going about her everyday life: tending to her truant son, verily […]
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (Vintage Books) is an award-winning (the Samuel Johnson prize for nonfiction, the Costa Book of the Year prize) story of healing with a hawk. It is not a new release but it has long transcended the time barrier. It is the kind of book that you buy and keep […]
Let me begin the review of Friends in Wild Places by Ruskin Bond (Speaking Tiger Books) by quoting a passage near the end. Below my cottage was a forest of oak and maple and Himalayan rhododendron. A narrow path twisted its way down through the trees, over an open ridge where red sorrel grew wild, […]
So I naturally gravitated towards Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-eight Nights by Salman Rushdie. (Hamish Hamilton), the latest book by the Master, as befits a diehard fan and one who has avidly read all the pre-release breathless prose about how Rushdie had tweaked the ancient and eternally fascinating tale of One Thousand and One Nights […]
You know, when after prolonged gorging on balushahi, khubani ka meetha, kalakand, gulab jamun, malapua, you turn to a plain Cornetto ice cream? You bite into it and it turns out to be anything but plain: the buttery-smooth ice cream blends with the crunchy waffle it is wrapped in and the nuts sprinkled on top are a feast. […]