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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To a question am asked often (Why do you write?), my answer is simple. I see people. Really see them. When I see a mind, a talent, an imagination at work, the world falls away. My own imperfections fall away. I connect with the energy at work and my own energy feeds on it and […]
Can architecture have a gender? A feminine perspective maybe? Especially if it is a Zaha Hadid building? Frozen like a giant wave between the earth and the sky? Immovable but fluid? Like time made visible with its many flowing curves and pauses? The geometry in Hadid’s work demonstrates that the source of creation has no gender. A creative impulse […]
When Philip Dodd, Chairman of the creative industries company Made in China, claimed that the future “belongs to a constellation of India and China”, he may not have been exaggerating. Dodd was one of the many luminaries visiting the ongoing India Art Fair in Delhi and is credited with bringing for the first time to the fair Chinese […]
Structure is at times over-emphasised in architecture. It is not just what is seen and what can be touched that is important in a building but what flows inside it..what can be felt. Frank Gehry, arguably the most famous architect in the world today is a master orchestrator of subliminal experience. Of creating buildings that come across as […]
There is a moment in the 2003 Julia Roberts starrer Mona Lisa Smile where Katherine Ann Watson, an art lecturer introduces her students to Jackson Pollock’s art and there is a hush in the room as a larger-than-life canvas fills up the silence with a wordless roar. There is nothing to say really because Pollock’s art […]
I visited Sri Lanka last year and that is the first time I came across a sandakada pahana or a moonstone. This is a semi-circular stone that is seen at the entrance of the temples at Anuradhapuram and Polonnaruwa. Buddhism flourished here and the moonstone became more and more pronounced with intricate carvings and came a […]
“I was really sad when I heard about the demise of Rajesh Khanna. And so I decided to pay a tribute to my favourite Bollywood hero,” with that Ranjit Dahiya went looking for the perfect canvas on the streets of Bombay. A resident of Bandra, he knew the landscape quite well and soon found the […]
Mirror shards, watches, mechanical junk, hardware parts, golden beads, glitter construct a woman’s bust on paper, while from her bosom emerge a series of ethereal red roses-their lightness well contrasted with the heaviness of the robotic women. The nose accessory, forehead bindi and the facial features bespeak a South Asian face. These women are often part goddess-part cyborg; deified […]
A few weeks back, I discovered the joy of using a tool I did not even know the name of. I spent an engrossing afternoon, etching a wooden tile with a Buddha head, burnishing it and feeling rewarded. Being an artist sometimes limits you to one way of looking at the world and interpreting it. […]
Taj Mahal. A beautiful mausoleum that in popular culture, in poetry and in cinema, has come to embody deathless romance. Princess Diana on her much celebrated visit to India posed alone on a bench with the Taj as a backdrop just to rub her loneliness in and to make the absence of her spouse obvious . […]
Stonehenge is a befuddling prehistoric monument in Wiltshire, England and is one of the most famous heritage sites in the world with its mysterious ring of standing stones. There is a similar quality to sculptor Henry Spencer Moore’s work. It has a dormant energy, a powerful sweep, an organic quality that is of this world and […]
That architecture is an art is understood by few but for a few creative geniuses architecture reflects who they are and their faith in divinity. It is colour, texture, flow, light, space, energy, emotion, prayer and surrender to a higher power. For Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí (25 June 1852 – 10 June 1926)), architecture was […]