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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I read Fifty Shades of Grey yesterday. According to wiki (and because I cannot be bothered to think of new ways to say the same things): Fifty Shades of Grey is a 2011 erotic novel by British author E. L. James. Set largely in Seattle, it is the first instalment in a trilogy that traces […]
It is perhaps the first novel about the intriguing world of art by an insider, one who knows the artists and the art market. Published by Hachette India, Artist, Undone is the debut novel by V. Sanjay Kumar – a Chennai based art collector and one of the directors of Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai – who […]
A sword lodged in stone. That is how Francisco Goldman describes a daughter’s love for her missing father in his visceral tribute to his late wife Aura Estrada in his book Say Her Name which is partly a grief diary of a devastated husband and partly a fictionalised account of life after the death of a […]
Barbara Epstein calls reviewing a special skill. In India unfortunately, no skill seems to be necessary. Anyone, just about anyone, it seems, can do a review of any book, any author, any genre. To quote Doris Lessing: ` … a young man or woman, reviewer or critic, who has not read more of a writer’s work […]
There are many things that could draw you to a book, but fewer things that keeps you hooked on to it. I’ve jotted down a few reasons why I believe books are great. If you have more to add, leave a comment. One moment you’re in an open jeep slowly following a tiger, and the […]
A good book should leave you… slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. ~William Styron With a deep love for travel, and an equally matched passion for writing, it is only natural that I take to travelogues like a moth takes to a flame. A friend recommended Rishad Saam Mehta’s Hot Tea […]
Journalist and writer Narayani Ganesh has written candidly about her iconic father in her heart-warming book, Eternal Romantic- My Father, Gemini Ganesan (Roli Books) and talks to Humra Quraishi about it. I’m no film buff, yet I enjoyed reading Narayani Ganesh’s book on her father, the legendary Tamil actor Gemini Ganesan…so much so, I flowed with the words and was rivetted by those rare pictures of the man. […]
Ambition has no gender. Fulfilment in life and work is not a gender specific pursuit and yet somehow, marriage, family and professional success often become chemically disparate when it comes to women in India. Are Indian women really free to be ambitious? Can they truly be unbound as they break open boxes, knock at glass […]
Is there a book in you, waiting to get out? Now is the time to start writing it because as a bit of online research will show you, India is the sixth-largest publishing industry in the world and the numbers are ticking everyday with new publishers joining the rush. A report published sometime back put the annual output of […]
Monideepa Sahu is as softspoken as sunshine on a winter day. Mellow and sedate. But in her imagination, there crouches a child that dreams, weaves stories laughingly and creates pretend friends like Rishabh the rat and Shashee the spider who prance around in Venkat Thatha’s “wonderful, musty, dusty, rare herbs shop. Until, that is, they […]
Victor Rangel-Ribeiro’s Loving Ayesha and Other Stories (Harper Collins India) is a collection that first appeared in 2003, but apart from a couple of stories, that have appeared in magazines, I read this entire collection only just now and this late discovery is a matter of regret as also thrill. It was the title story, Loving Ayesha I read first. I did […]
I begin with a shamefaced confession. I discovered Meira Chand only a few months before I moved to Singapore, and thats when I made up my mind to read A Different Sky. One thing about reading a novel you soon find yourself engrossed in, is that you want to read more about the author. And […]