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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Well, comparisons are odious but 30 pages or so into this book, words float into your mind. Words like Svengali. Like Last Tango in Paris. Like Lolita. Like Caro Lamb and Lord Byron. Like 9½ Weeks. You get the drift. Deepti Kapoor`s heroine Idha, motherless, abandoned by her father, is a bit of a wraith: good-looking, intense, […]
Aatish Taseer is at it again. Rooting in the past, referencing our shared history, seeking answers to painful questions of love, loss, alienation. In The Way Things Were, we meet Skanda, Sanskrit student, son of a Sanskrit scholar, collector of cognates, conveyor of his father`s dead body to its final resting place by the river Tamasa […]
In his first book, The Collaborator, Mirza Waheed spun a stunning story, thinly veiled as fiction, of the hapless Valley and its hapless residents. Here, he tells us a tender love story. The serious young man with fine features and a talent for papier mache art, naqashi, is Faiz, a Sunni. The girl is the […]
Atul Gawande`s Being Mortal (Penguin Books) cuts rather too close to the family bone, so an impersonal review is difficult. To rage or not to rage against the dying light? That is what the author asks in this book. Dr Gawande, author of a set of very thought-provoking books like Complications, Better and The Checklist Manifesto, tackles […]
The Indian reader should be forgiven for rolling her eyes soon after she starts to read The Sleepwalker`s Guide to Dancing by Mira Jacob (Bloomsbury India). Because the story seems to faithfully check all the little boxes that serve as bullet points for the Diaspora novel. Immigrants transitioning awkwardly, check. Father, white collar professional (a doctor in this case) […]
Quantum of Solace, The complete James Bond short stories by Ian Fleming As a precocious pre-teen, I used to devour each and every James Bond book I came across in my grandmother’s large library. To my delight, most of the fourteen in the series were there, in fairly good condition for well-thumbed paperbacks! ** Then I started […]
The Man Booker hype surrounding this book almost overwhelms it. Almost but not quite. Because in The Lives of Others (Vintage/Random House India, distributed by Rupa Publications), Neel Mukherjee has taken an old canvas and painted atop it; the story is by no means new, the telling is not really unique, yet it grips the […]
Ever since the Famous Author promoted the half- idea, I have been wondering who originally developed this earth-shattering concept. Was it Aryabhata, who after inventing the zero decided he might as well throw in another idea, two for the price of one? Was it Kalidasa who, watching an unsatisfactory monsoon do (half) its thing, decided […]