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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“James Dean was an acting sonnet. Marlon was a planet unto himself. But he needed to explore his gift and fail with it. I always felt success had an adverse effect on him.” So said Al Pacino. The man who grew up watching Dean’s vehement talent. As a young boy who enjoyed acting, he was […]
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 […]
What we learn from Naseeruddin Shah’s autobiography And Then One Day..A Memoir (Penguin Books India/Hamish Hamilton), is what we need to learn. No more, no less. Nothing extravagant about milestones reached, rewards gathered, boxes ticked. Like tempered chocolate or like a quintessential Naseer performance, the writing is perfectly poised between a melting point and gradual, cool normalcy. This celebrity […]
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 […]
Editorial note: Rachna Bisht Rawat is out with her first book The Brave. Read 21 riveting stories about how India’s highest military honour, Paramveer Chakra was won. Rachna takes us to the heart of war, chronicling the tales of India’s bravest soldiers. Talking to parents, siblings, children and comrades-in-arms to paint the most vivid character-portraits of these […]
There was a time when young children in small Northern towns, regardless of their religious denominations, learnt Urdu. And when they grew up, many young men like my father could recite the Gita and write and read Urdu as if it was the most natural thing to do. ** The generation after his, caught up […]
1980 was the year when Khorshed and Rumi Bhavnagri, a Parsi couple living in Mumbai lost their two young sons Vispi and Ratoo in a freak, automobile accident. In the absolute heart of darkness, they stumbled upon, what to them became a new lease of life. They were facilitated by a strange turn of circumstances […]
Was it Shakeel Badayuni who wrote, “Sukoon-e-dil ke liye kuch to ehtemaam karoon.. zara nazar jo miley phir unhein salaam karoon, mujhe to hosh nahin aap mashwara dijiye, kahan se chedoon fasana kahan tamaam karoon?” But these words about the urgency to gaze at a beloved face and to greet it, the need to start […]
The immediacy of pain and loss . the kind that One Hundred Years of Solitude narrates is not so much as fiction, as it is life. The life we invest hope and love in when we wake up every morning, watch a day go by, sometimes lose a part of us and occasionally find a missing piece. And so […]
I’ve known Rumjhum Biswas (or RK Biswas) for some years now. I have read her poetry and her short stories, so am happy her first novel is just out. It’s set in a very intriguing time, as she explains it. So if you’ve seen and read about Calcutta of the 1960s and 1970s from, and this is by way […]
When I was 11-years-old, I was whining to my mummy about how bored I was and then whining some more at her dozen suggestions to solve the problem. At the same age, Tarun George Thomas decided to write a book – which he finished when he was 12. (He’s now all of 14.) Now that’s […]