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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So there was a snore in the seat next to mine. The audience gave a derisive applause at the end of Vikramjit Singh’s debut film Roy, and laughed when a lovelorn heroine gasped with joy and fell into the arms of her lover and spoiler alert, merged into a painting that was at the heart […]
Yasser Usman’s biography, Rajesh Khanna, The Untold Story Of India’s First Superstar (Penguin) reminds me of the Motown gala in 1983, when Michael Jackson at the peak of his powers debuted the moonwalk. Throughout the performance, he was in a zone, not really aware of how many people were dancing in the aisles, […]
Every so often, a movie will come along that works like a magic sequence for its once-forgotten star, and for the unique message it carries. It happened last with Mickey Rourke in ‘The Wrestler’. The same Mickey who made films that went into the archives they were so damn good; ‘A Prayer for the Dying’, […]
I loved DDLJ when I first saw it. I saw it twice in a single screen hall and once with my niece dancing in the aisles. People in the hall were laughing, cheering. The way they would have when Raj Kapoor’s Bobby first hit the screens in the 70s and as Shahrukh Khan once famously […]
In the 80s, a book shop in an old, musty structure in Patiala’s Adalat Bazaar was where you went for magazines and English fiction. I remember being given Rs 20 by my grandmother on my birthday and buying The Fountainhead. I read it without being aware of the capitalist subtext or the glorification of materialism. I […]
It is the season of awards in the Hindi film industry and it isn’t often that small films get their own share of confetti and applause on podiums reserved for glistening blockbusters. But director and actor Rajat Kapoor and the Ankhon Dekhi team were taken by surprise when their little film with a big […]
Richard Linklater has a thing for time. He likes to watch it with the fascination of a microbiologist examining a petri dish. He notices worlds within an instant, the layers of the past, the present and the future, the collision of the ephemeral with the infinite. As the world recovers from Boyhood, a film he […]
Long before the Rachel Cut was made famous by Jennifer Aniston in F.R.I.E.N.D.S, there was the Sadhana Cut. In 1960, a frothy Love In Simla gave us an unforgettable romance with a little pixie in the lead. She was Sadhana and in a key scene, turns from a Cinderella to a princess when her grandmother […]
Ironical that for a film that tars Pakistan as the enemy behind every potential danger stalking India, Neeraj Pandey’s Baby has two popular Pakistani actors in key roles. Heartthrob Mikaal Zulfikaar as a young facilitator helping Indian agents and seasoned actor Rasheed Naz as Maulana Mohammed Rehman,the dreaded “mother lode’ of terrorism. While watching the film, one […]
Dilip Kumar was known as the Man in White, as he always wore perfectly crisp whites laundered by a trusted man who has been with his family for decades.Raj Kapoor’s passion for the colour white was legendary. The story goes that as an impressionable teenager, he saw the wife of Balraj Sahni dressed in a […]
Perspective. That sets what we see apart from what really exists. Like the blind-folded men who touched different parts of an elephant and proclaimed that a trunk was the whole elephant or perhaps the tail was, we see the world in our likeness. When in reality, as Rajkumar Hirani’s PK reminds a religious absolutist, “You […]
Actor and media personality Shenaz Treasury has had an eventful week. As a spontaneous reaction to the Uber rape case in Delhi, she posted an open letter on her Facebook page. The letter was addressed to influential thought leaders in India, all of them men incidentally. She shared personal episodes of violation and stated that […]