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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Captive Prince: Volume Two S.U. Pacat ** I would like to believe that the life-changing books I discover are God’s way of leading me onto the path of forgiveness. Mine towards Him. For screwing me over. But alas, there is, of course, no God. And I have to sublimate my pain over this non-life […]
One chapter from a book sometimes tells you everything you need to know; hell, the first page can usually do that. Into my hot little hands have come three books by Indian writers, and I gave them all the same treatment, opening chapters only, just to get a feel of where they might go. Isn’t […]
“When an architect builds a glass tower in the middle of the Arabian desert, he justifies his design with a 100 different reasons-except possibly the real one, viz., that he is trying to (unconsciously) recreate for his clients, the mythic imagery of what to them is the quintessential city of the 20th century: Houston, Texas,” […]
When I picked up Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk about When I Talk about Running, I was excited about reading it. And the book didn’t disappoint me. Well, not entirely. What I Talk about When I Talk about Running is a very personal and detailed account of Murakami’s running and writing life, about how the […]
Rajat Chaudhuri’s Hotel Calcutta has just been published (Niyogi Books, 2013). He lives in Kolkata, and besides his novels, he has also written short stories, essays and book reviews. The few questions I asked Rajat below are really not enough to convey the richness and variety of his writing work but his answers I […]
I loved The Casual Vacancy. What a decimation of British smalltown culture, with their petty concerns, their sad sex lives and their young and aimless. Rowling says it all ‘authentically’, never mind whose point of view she is working from. I don’t know many writers who can delve into the workings of an obese old […]
The first time I read Rebecca I fell in love with the book. The haunting, sometimes thrilling, often heart wrenching novel by Daphne Du Maurier made me an instant fan of the author and I have ever since recommended the book to many people. However the other day I saw a cinematic adaptation of the […]
The world is divided between them and us. Between the disempowered and the powerful. Between survivors. And oppressors. And what better way to tell a story about dispossession, migration, transition and struggle than to assume not just one voice but many? To narrate not just one but diverse histories embodied in Japanese mail order […]
There’s nothing new you might say about chefs writing a book. Of all writers who don’t actually have to perforce write for a living, chefs arguably are the most prolific. You might say they have a subject ready at hand – recipes, sundry food related matters, even advice on how to open a restaurant. This […]
In Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay, the protagonist Karan is an outsider who wants to make Bombay his home. How he sees Bombay through his camera lens is what forms the primary plot of the story. The narrative weaves together different characters and incidents which influence Karan’s life. As per the author’s note, the […]
Let me start off by stating that it is through JP Das’ writings and narrations I have known and grasped the different aspects of Orissa’s history, traditions and its people. His writings remain focussed on the ground realities .And he is one of those bureaucrats who have had the grit to take premature retirement from the […]
The three of them are the true loves of my life and they don’t figure in any order of preference. Each one of them has played an equally important part in my growth as a writer and a human being. In my own way I have paid a tribute to all three of them […]