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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The second half of Prem Rog is marked by the brilliant verbosity of dialogue writer Jainendra Jain but there are a few scenes that belong to Nanda. She plays the quietly suffering wife of a Zamindar who routinely beds an outspoken, ‘lower caste’ woman but won’t let his own widowed daughter find love with a […]
Have they come for you yet? They could be anyone. A new oraganisation committed to keeping women out of pubs, jeans, self-hoods and a sense of freedom. Khap elders calculating whether you can fall in love with a boy in the same village and if you do, whether you should be hung in public or […]
While watching the opening shots of Queen, I remembered a machine knitted, beige pull-over I have not worn in years. The heroine’s grandmother brought back memories of a grand-aunt in Delhi who plucked her eye brows even in her 80s, had a smart bob and would pull up a high stool in her kitchen to […]
So Gulaab Gang is not really about Gulabi Gang or Sampat Pal. They just decided the colour pink was fetching, the lathis provocative and the idea of a gang of self-willed, rustic women commercially viable and they went for it. The intention was never to give credit where it is due. I also find it […]
It was with a sense of dread that I watched the Geetika Tyagi ..Subhash Kapoor video. In a tastefully decorated room where friends possibly gather to discuss films and life..a conversation unfolded that could not have been easy for any of the people present. A young woman with naked pain and revulsion in her voice. A friend trying […]
Editor’s note: Proceed with caution..spoilers ahead! I had the good fortune of investing three hours of my hitherto worthless life in edifying myself when friends propelled me to a show of Gunday. I learnt that the Indian Police is so diabolically clever that they can lay an intricately plotted conspiracy to rival the best of Ludlums and John […]
In the last scene of Highway, Alia Bhatt’s Veera stands cradling Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her arms watching over two undamaged children playing in the valley stretched before her. She has run with the wolves and come home. It has been a long journey with a lot of motifs that we recognise by now from […]
Last weekend, I had the time and opportunity to watch two films in two days. Both are based on true life stories, and also based in large part on the personal accounts of the protagonists. Both have been hailed as wonderful films with performances which are Oscar worthy. On the face of it, they did not have […]
I have been thinking of pain lately. The pointlessness of it. The inevitability of it. Why some people court it and others shun it. Some hide it and others hide from it. Some people gather painful moments like they were spring flowers. Their life is defined by pain, what it did to them, will do […]
The other day I was watching the rerun of a popular comedy show on TV with my wife. I found that out of the six main characters in the show- a man and his wife, a grandmother and an aunt with two women from the neighbourhood- as many as three female characters were being played by men. In […]
“I was really sad when I heard about the demise of Rajesh Khanna. And so I decided to pay a tribute to my favourite Bollywood hero,” with that Ranjit Dahiya went looking for the perfect canvas on the streets of Bombay. A resident of Bandra, he knew the landscape quite well and soon found the […]
There is something sickening and violating about the way Sunanda Pushkar’s life and death are being played out round the clock on our TV screens. Her voice, images, letters, life and death make for compulsively watchable television. One channel even played an “exclusive” mobile camera footage of the suite where […]