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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‘How do you cope with being housebound?’ he asks. ‘The world is suddenly very small. There are many things that don’t exist in my world: other people’s brightly lit living rooms, tourists asking the way, clothes wet from rain, stolen bikes, dropped ice-cream cones melting on hot asphalt, maypoles. Disputes over parking spaces, meadows of […]
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 […]
For the uninitiated, Sanil Sachar is a 23- year- old author from Delhi, whose first book Summer Promises and Other Poems was published in 2013. He started writing during his time in England, where he completed his high school and graduation. He is an avid footballer apart from being a writer who aspires to inspire and lives […]
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 […]
William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault set the tone from the very beginning; I knew that nothing would go right for Lucy. Her story was melancholic, but it didn’t make me sob. I felt a distant pain, and it lingered for a while, as though my mind played a sad song over and over again […]
I read Paul Kalanithi’s essay in The New Yorker in January, and pre-ordered When Breath Becomes Air. The book arrived last month, but I couldn’t muster the courage to read it. Although I was reading a lot of books that affected me deeply, I still shuddered at the mere thought of reading Kalanithi’s memoir, only because […]
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 […]
I finished reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love last night, and I wrestled with my thoughts to decide if I should really blog about the book. I did not want to write about it because, when so many people have already read the book, how is my little opinion going to change the course of the world? But […]
I have been reading voraciously these days. My love for reading has begun irking the folks around me. They often remark, “Why do you want to read so much? Do something else. Reading is not everything.” But, I do not tell them that I think reading is the warmest, healthiest way to fill the abyss […]
2015 was the year of letting go; it was the year of saying no. What I reckoned as my dream job began crushing my soul. I said no to it, and went back to my desk job. When I was stuck in a crevice created by a moral dilemma — should I let my furry-friend go on […]
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, […]