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…
Read More
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…
Read More
“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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
You are browsing archives for
Margarita, With a Straw continues its triumphant journey across the world, taking director Shonali Bose to assorted festival podiums and vindicating her belief in her brave, little film, again and again. In an interview, Bose recounts the loss, the pain and the cathartic emotions that led to the making of the film. The tragedy […]
The closest we came to hearing jazz in a Hindi film in the ‘70s, was when Amitabh Bachchan’s dock-worker turned underworld apprentice Vijay, smoked away his foreboding in a bar; and Parveen Babi in a red gown slithered close to him with ‘I am falling in love with stranger’ playing in the background. The film […]
In 1982, my mother was hit by a truck on her way to the school where she taught. The driver fled and a man who was driving a jeep, thankfully stopped, picked her up and brought her to the hospital and then somehow found a way to get in touch with us. I remember being […]
While Indian television continues to swim in recycled cliches, Pakistan since the seventies, has been enriched by its emotive and powerful women story tellers. Most notably Haseena Moin who wrote great dramas and scripts for the stage, radio and television and is till date considered a pathbreaker. Some of her popular dramas include Ankahi, […]
Musicians Roopkumar Rathod and Sunali Rathod celebrated 25 years of togetherness last December and his voice softens as he says, “It is music that brought us together…the music that we eat and breathe. And the music that we live for and will die for together. But a relationship needs nurturing, compromises, space and unconditional support. […]
In August 2012, actor and travel photographer Kunal Karan Kapoor travelled to Nepal with the team of his daily soap Na Bole Tum Na Maine Kuch Kaha. The crew spent over 10 days in and around the buzzing colours and heritage sites of Kathmandu and Kunal captured the rolling clouds, the valleys, the majestic structures […]
Satyajit Ray would have approved (if you disregard the product placements). Shoojit Sarkar goes back to his roots literally and cinematically with Piku, a film about nothing in particular when it trundles, carrying a baggage of eccentricity and family history from Delhi to Kolkata in a taxi. But in retrospect, it is about the little […]
When South-African sporting legend Oscar Pistorius’ trial post the tragic and gruesome murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp turned into a television soap opera, I remember thinking just how ironic is it that the word, ‘icon’ has also the word ‘con’ in it. How truth about guilt does not matter as long as the perception […]
The tyranny of perception management. Only a few hours after she gave birth, Kate Middleton posed with a big smile for the cameras with her baby daughter in her arms. Her flawless, yellow dress hugged her perfect, postpartum body and as she cooed over the baby and waved at the invisible crowds, you forgot […]
This year, Vijay Anand’s Guide turned 50. And when the seasons unfurl in Yahan Kaun Hai Tera even today, you watch without blinking. Dev Anand’s Raju sheds his past visibly and morphs from an ex-convict to a wanderer to a yogi by default when a monk covers his curled up body with a saffron shawl. […]
There is a scene in Shonali Bose’s incredibly direct and brave film Margarita With A Straw where Laila (Kalki Koechlin), the protagonist is passing by a library in her wheelchair and looking through a glass wall at ‘normal’ people on the other side. This glass wall, as the film teaches us is not just something […]
Director and writer Shonali Bose after the painfully direct Amu (2005), a film that revisited the 1984 Sikh riots, is back with another story that is close to her heart. Margarita With A Straw draws from a personal tragedy and also the life of a close relative who suffers from Cerebral Palsy ( A […]