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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When the sixties swung into the seventies to the beat of RD Burman’s Spanish guitar and Amitabh Bachchan’s angst, in retrospect, it was the end of the happy endings in Hindi cinema. 20 years into independence, the political reality of India had become far more complex, dark and divisive to allow films to be set on house boats, shikaras, […]
Are women more sensitive, more prone to need extraneous approval for self esteem because there certainly seem to be some types of work that make women prone to being depressed and suicidal. There are endless biological reasons related to hormones that make us more vulnerable at different periods of time. Men use other resorts […]
Ordinary life is hard enough to manage. How much harder would fame be? Too much of it? Too little of it? What must it be like to be watched constantly, measured, estimated, valued for what is visible in you? To smile at hundreds of cameras and then come home to maybe an imperfect life that […]
Society in India is coming of age. It has begun to openly acknowledge the word ‘gay,’ before kids and in movies etc. Unfortunately our minds are not open enough to accommodate and treat the gay community with the same respect that we accord to heterosexuals. There is a subtle stigma attached to this word which […]
The green light of a distant dock twinkling tantalisingly. Whispering of irretrievable gifts, of hope. Of innocence..that time chipped away at soundlessly. A man, alone on the other side of the bay, reaching out, trying to grasp it. ** Diaphanous curtains filling up a room with wind, and luxurious lassitude. Beautiful shirts. Spun out of […]
The manic energy of trance has weaned a lot of young Hindi film music fans off familiar loops and the old robes of comforting grooves. It is not surprising then that Hindi film music as we knew it, has left the building and gone for a walk along unusual paths. ** Amartya Rahut’s addictive, mind […]
Yes, Saqib Saleem is what all new actors could be and one can only hope they will be one day. Well at least we have him and he is someone I wouldn’t mind being in ‘any room with’. Like his character (Avinash) in Bombay Talkies says about Randeep Hooda’s character ( who also I wouldn’t mind […]
The thing about the past is that it never comes back and yet never really leaves. Shamshad Begum for instance is not just a Wikipedia note with a birthday and a death day. She is a memory for those of us who grew up with her songs. Though for all purposes, the woman who sang […]
What the remakes of old classic films like Chashme Baddoor miss out on is an ingredient called innocence because you can’t ever recapture what is lost. Or fake the sense of wonder conveyed by Farooque Sheikh and Dipti Naval on their first date as they ordered a Tutti Fruity ice cream in a leafy […]
A sharply sculpted face with cheekbones bouncing off light. Hair, rippling like silk across the screen. Sensuality that was wide-eyed innocence in one instant and overwhelmingly dark and compelling in another. Crystal clear diction. It is hard to describe Parveen Babi in conventional terms. She was pure sunshine in Amar Akbar Anthony. A chatty, infinitely entertaining journalist in Kala Patthar. A poised lady in red in Deewar, […]
Isn’t there something utterly beautiful about Vikram Gokhale? That glow about him that hasn’t faded with time? And how little we know about him. Not much has been written about Gokhale in the national press and it is not surprising considering how cinema coverage in our national newspapers is synonymous with Hindi films and their […]
The word icon is used so cheaply today. The fact that it has the word, con in it may have something to do with it. Perception is more important than substance. Image more important than truth. Marketing more important than creating. Fame and shame sometimes are not indistinguishable. And somehow it doesn’t matter. So strong […]