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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A couple of years ago, film maker Tom Shadyac, known for blockbuster comedies like Liar Liar, Bruce Almighty, Patch Adams and The Nutty Professor walked into his luxurious new 17000 sq ft Beverly Hills home which had more bedrooms, bathrooms and uninhabited spaces than he would ever enjoy and he had an epiphany. That this success was just an idea […]
If you go to the website of one of Pakistan’s best known contemporary art magazines Nukta Art (http://www.nuktaartmag.com/Nukta/), you will run into stimulating discourses about post modernist dilemmas, narratives woven around personal and collective histories and the artistic urge to blur orders, dissolve the idea of separation between countries, religions and go beyond “identity […]
Writer’s note: I have been writing on the negative mind-set against Aishwarya Rai for years. Years ago, when she was targetted for choosing a man younger than her, a story I wrote for a newspaper invited negative backlash. Some of my pieces on her have appeared on this website where I have tried to […]
In the eighties, it was enough for a hero to have intense eyes. If the wiry Jackie Shroff (who once admitted to have mixed Sunil Dutt’s jaunty walk with Dev Anand’s tenderness to become a hero) squinted at the camera like someone was stripping band-aid off a wound, we all winced in pain too. […]
Amole Gupte, the chairperson of the Children’s Film Society of India, the villain of the forthcoming Singham 2, the sensitive maker of two clutter breaking films (Stanley Ka Dabba and Hawa Hawai) and the heart and soul of Taare Zameen Par is a self-confessed fakir, a muflis, someone without the baggage of manufactured fame. Who […]
Very rarely does a film become a visual sock in the gut like Pather Panchali or irrevocably changes the way we think of cinema. The images linger. An unloved old woman trapped in her impoverished life, singing a wedding song, longing for human contact, and then one day deciding that she has had enough. She […]
The joke is always on her. The middle-aged bua who cannot get married because she is not eligible any more for love and so must be laughed at. The spirited young woman played by a man in drag who must be insulted because ‘she’ is fat and must be compared to a bull-dozer and assorted […]
The writing in Revolver Rani winks at the seventies and the jargon of hero-centric block-busters so “Police ne tumhe chaaron taraf se gher liya hai ” becomes, “Police ko hamne chaaron taraf se gher liya hai.” The menace of a hero or a villain once conveyed through lines like, “Teja..Tejja..Teja..kaun hai yeh Teja,” turns into, “Alka..Alka..Alka..kaun hai […]
It is not enough to be Shahrukh Khan. He has to be Fair and Handsome and atleast in an ad attribute his success to a tube of fairness cream. Fairness is the door to great jobs, marriage proposals for women in our ads and beauty many have many shades, but in India, for a majority of […]
Intense emotion for someone/thing. I guess. I’m not sure how to exactly describe love – I guess you know love when you see starry skies or monsoon nights. As you sink your teeth into that oh-so-perfect blueberry muffin. or your toes into oh-so-squishy sand. ** Love is owl-spotting and tree climbing. Tribal beats beneath […]
Dear God, how time flies. Kumar Gaurav, of melting , caramel eyes and bee-stung lips and the signature blue jeans and red jacket that he wore along with the coolest vibe we had seen a young hero sport in the 80s, for a while atleast, is in his mid 50s! I watch him sometimes in […]
A TV channel has recently been scaling high TRPs with the story of Jodha Akbar. It has a cost-effective set design that uses a few stock locations for every scene and uses wind-blown curtains, outdoor shots, ambient lighting and expensive furnishings to convey opulence. A few years ago, Ashutosh Gowarikar’s film of the same name […]