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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He is Farhad, cutting through a taciturn mountain with clenched tenacity. And Forrest Gump fuelled by an impossible to bear grief, traversing long distances like a messiah and being followed by agenda seekers. Or Gandhi who will be the change he wants to see in the world. And Aron Ralston, trapped between a rock and […]
George Calombaris is a diminutive man but you would never know it. He is someone who could always see the big picture and the story goes that when he was an apprentice, he used to work with a really tall chef. But George would be too busy running the ship to notice that. He […]
During one of the many special screenings of Masaan in Mumbai, Shabana Azmi came up to Vicky Kaushal and said incredulously, “Tum kaun ho? Kya kaam kiya hai tumne! (Who are you? What an amazing job!) Come, you must meet Javed saab!’’ Javed Akhtar who was coming out of the theatre just at that […]
Jon Stewart was television gold. His beautiful, sardonic face dominated America’s political opinion-scape with a raised eyebrow and a barely perceptible twitch for 16 years on The Daily Show. The show was ironically aired on Comedy Central, a channel one would not expect searing political satire from but Stewart was nothing if not an astute […]
The imperishable memories Shweta Tripathi gathered while playing a small-town girl in Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan include the night when she sobbed over the end of a beautiful story. She recalls, “I cried not for what was happening to my character but for what was happening to her story with Deepak. I just lay, looking up […]
For some reason Drishyam reminded me of RGV’s Bhoot where Ajay Devgn spent a good amount of screen time going up and down elevators. And looking scared, thoughtful or protective when he was in his house. He does a lot of bike riding in this film, and jeep driving and bus commuting and frowning […]
Debutant director Neeraj Ghaywan grasped that both life and death can co-exist in the same river when during a recce around the Ganges, he saw loss interwoven with the infinitude of existence and hope. A man sitting still in a boat holding a shrouded baby, looking at a distance.. unable to let go. And a corpse […]
A katori of kheer as an ice-breaker between a sulking father and a daughter. The birthday gift of a recorder that plays back the voice of a beloved interspersed with romantic songs. A furtive phone chat on a terrace amid clothes drying under the sun. The banter with a roadside chaat vendor. Strings of […]
Tu kisi rail si guzarti hai..main kisi pul sa.. thartharata hoon (You pass by like a train…I shudder, pulse like a bridge). These lines from a Dushyant Kumar poem in Neeraj Ghaywan’s debut film Masaan, take you back to the terrace of a small town home where in the middle of the night, you heard […]
Over a decade ago, at Alliance Francaise de Bangalore, I spoke with a youthful conviction on why Hindi cinema must never be dismissed as just another drug to keep the masses oblivious to the real issues of governance, poverty, disenfranchisement, corruption and more. When gently asked by the moderator, why Hindi cinema could not be […]
Jab kabhi tera naam lete hain… dil se hum intaqam lete hain meri barbadiyon ke afsane… mere yaron ka naam lete hain bas yahi ek jurm hai apna… hum muhabbat se kaam lete hain har qadam par gire par seekha… kaise girton ko tham lete hain (Whenever I take your name, I put my heart through agony.. […]
In the 1940s, a Tamil studio attempted a pan-Indian epic that cost over Rs 3 million and told the story of two royal siblings warring over the kingdom and a woman. The film was Chandralekha and it had a scale that till then had been seen only in Hollywood films. The famous drum scene […]