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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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 […]
“He was chewing on his paan, slowly and thinking. Thick jets of sticky, tobacco-mixed gob was swishing in his mouth. He felt as if his teeth were grinding his thoughts and blending them with his saliva.Maybe that was why he didn’t wish to spit out the gob of chewed-up paan.’’ Muhammad Umar Memon’s translation of […]
When I took leave of Patiala and my first job as an LKG teacher, I was given two Tarla Dalal books by my colleagues to accompany me to my new life in Bengaluru. This was in 1994 and Ms Dalal was possibly the only known name in the Indian publishing industry. The recipe booklet that […]
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. […]
When Ophelia scatters bits of her sanity with a bunch of flowers in a final heartbreaking farewell to the world where her father has been killed by the man she loves; when Devdas breathes his last, his gaze transfixed upon a gate that will never afford him a glimpse of the woman he has destroyed […]
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, […]
Yasser Usman’s biography, Rajesh Khanna, The Untold Story Of India’s First Superstar (Penguin) reminds me of the Motown gala in 1983, when Michael Jackson at the peak of his powers debuted the moonwalk. Throughout the performance, he was in a zone, not really aware of how many people were dancing in the aisles, […]
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 […]
“The last breath/Exhaled/Is the last poem/Released. Then/The curtain falls…” But before the curtain fell, Kamala Das or Kamala Surayya or Madhavikutty exhausted many lives, lived free and in confinement..by choice and wrote compulsively and passionately till the desire to live and write both burnt itself out. And the clamorous din following her last breath that sifted her life and poetry? It […]
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 […]
A picture of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, taken possibly in the 1960s, is on the cover of his latest anthology. His curly, unruly hair tumbles down his combat jacket. His jeans are frayed and with his boots making a statement all on their own, he looks like a cross between Che and George Harrison. This image, […]
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 […]