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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There was a time when young children in small Northern towns, regardless of their religious denominations, learnt Urdu. And when they grew up, many young men like my father could recite the Gita and write and read Urdu as if it was the most natural thing to do. ** The generation after his, caught up […]
Recently a young colleague wrote a Facebook post about being stared at for the way she dresses or even otherwise. The point of the post was that a woman’s body is her business. It is not an offering or a piece of public property. The post went viral and was shared by various websites and […]
Actor and former VJ Purab Kohli is enraged by the recent rape of a child in Bangalore and the crimes against women in the rest of the country. “I thought, after the December 12 case in New Delhi, these incidents would stop but they seem to be spreading like an epidemic. I just sat […]
Former VJ, actor and Internet entrepreneur Cyrus Sahukar is an entertainer even on the phone. He recreates a rainy evening and a traffic jam in Mumbai with little inflections and you can sense his life is a blur. A happy one, we suppose though he says, even his mother doesn’t get the hectic thrum of […]
Richa Chaddha has the kind of face that the camera conspires with and talks to. It is not a one note face preoccupied with bland prettiness. It has character, strength and in her silence, you can hear the deep roar of an ocean. Watch her in her debut cameo in Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! […]
She is hard to classify or sum up in stock phrases that are usually used for a mainstream female actor. She strains against the tyranny of preconceptions about women and their bodies in cinema and in life. She speaks passionately against misogyny at every level. In language that does not sound like sloganeering but […]
“Gehrai mein kuch nahin hota..sirf khauf aur beyakini hoti hai,” says the female hero of Pakistani serial Zindagi Gulzar Hai, currently playing on Zee Zindagi. The point being, the deeper you go in a problem, the more complex it gets and the simpler life is, the better it is. The phrase reminded me of beautiful episodes of Dhoop Kinare […]
In his world, trees are ancestors, rivers are mumbling old men, pines are charcoal sketches, mountains are Christmas cards painted in water-colours. Children running down hill slopes are fruits spilling out of baskets, rain is a rude intruder pounding on doors with wet knuckles , snow in Manali is a stealthy interloper that takes […]
Priya Ganapathy, former RJ, also the unforgettable lilt of Lingo Leela and Sister Stella remembers a night in the studios when her playlist was so exciting that she decided to not pack up. She grins, “I loved the playlist so much that I broke the rules and did an eight-hour talk marathon chatting up insomniacs and […]
Some of the best scenes in Bobby Jasoos unfold between Vidya Balan and Rajendra Gupta. Gupta is the taciturn abba who rules his household with forbidding silence and occasional bitterness because his eldest daughter is a joyous, guilt-free, 30-year-old with no intentions to interrupt her ‘career’ as a jasoos for marriage. She tries often to […]
The world of music has always been divided between populists and spiritualists. So though there is a Yo Yo Honey Singh, thankfully, we also have a Mohammed Vakil. Vakil, who won reality show Sa Re Ga Ma (Mega Final) in 1998, is now an established ghazal and sufi singer, the scion of the Jaipur gharana […]
In 2003, Mike Tollin directed a film about a real life character called James Effinhimer Robert ‘Radio’ Kennedy — a nickname he acquired because he was fascinated with radios and would carry one everywhere. The film was called, yes, Radio. How powerful and dangerous radio can be as a medium was captured in Talk Radio, […]