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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Lisa Ray’s memoir Close to the Bone reads like a sumptuous literary work. It is an important story about isolation rooted in the lack of self worth, about the journey into the heart of darkness, death, bruising relationships and recovery. She is unfailingly kind to the people she writes about and brutally honest about her […]
I see you. I have been there. Me too. Is it fair to air stories about my battle when Gay’s memoir is utterly raw and intimate? I don’t know. But Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body has exhumed some painful memories and writing about those here will be a comforting exercise in catharsis. I was a few […]
A prospect with promise. A gleam of hope for a better future. And then the shattering reality. This is not the story of just one man, but many like him who left their homelands to find hidden treasures in golden desert fill of mirages. Nikhil Ramteke’s debut novel ‘The 365 Days’ recounts a year of […]
Certain books outlive their prime years not only due to their authors’ brilliance (which in this case was never in doubt), but also due to the core issues they analyze and address. The Shock Doctrine, currently in its 10th year of publication since its release in September 2007, falls in that category. Although yet to […]
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 […]
Over the last few months, I have travelled far more frequently than usual and reconnected with reading in a consuming, famished way that had gone missing from my life since I started writing 21 years ago. I can either write or read because both are all or nothing experiences for me. But when you are […]
On July 27, 2015, the entire nation was shocked by the sudden demise of the revered Dr. Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam. ‘Dear Kalam Sir’ is a tribute to him, based on a concept that LetterFarms, a Kochi-based NGO hit upon. They ideated an art project, inviting people to write postcards expressing their sentiments about the […]
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 […]
Second Lives is written by Anish Sarkar who debuted with Benaami, a historical thriller in the year 2010. The title aptly echoes the importance of life that most of us take for granted until it slips out of our hands in a moment. What comes to me after reading the book is a quote […]