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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Love. Is it about looking for something or someone ‘whole’ and perfect out there? Or welcoming imperfection in people, situations because they mirror our lacks and maybe it is only the broken pieces of one soul that can fit into the gaps of another? Jane Fonda once wrote, “Life is not about perfection but completion.” […]
Sometime in 2006, United 93, a taut, almost unemotional account of the fourth hijacked plane that did not reach its destination on the morning of September 11 , 2001 hit the theatres. What moved me about the film was its intention to not manipulate the emotions of viewers who had on one terrible morning learnt […]
Imagine being 16 and heedlessly in love with a man almost 16 years older than you. Imagine eloping with him and then walking out of a broken marriage with two children and a third on the way. Imagine being in the shadow of a far more successful sister and initially having to sing her […]
The rush of blood to the head. The tingle in the spine as Rocky Balboa locks his eyes squarely with James ‘Clubber’ Lang in Sylvester after fighting his demons and running through walls of fear to the tune of Gonna Fly Now and Survivor’s smash hit Eye of The Tiger. And the lines. Apollo Creed […]
After years of search on YouTube, I finally stumbled upon Farmaan, a Doordarshan serial directed by Lekh Tandon. Based on the Urdu book Alampanah by Rafia Amin, the serial starring Kanwaljit Singh and Deepika Deshpande was a restless memory that even two decades could not erase. And for good reason. The story telling was honest to […]
One of my favourite AK Hangal performances is that of a smiling, chess obsessed patriarch in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Guddi. He has a little room to himself at the entrance of the home that he shares with his son, his daughter-in-law and a teenaged daughter played by Jaya Bhaduri. All the old man lives for is a […]
This post is dedicated to my mother; who like any other teenager was smitten by Rajesh Khanna in the 70s so much so that she wore sarees especially like one of his heroines; Sharmila Tagore (though she totally denies it!). Since his demise, she has been watching news and programs only about him; infact she […]
What does a cinematographer or a photographer do that we can’t? Well, he reinterprets the world through his gaze, recreates it, focusses on moments that say, “Watch this. This is important. Beautiful. Relevant,” bleaches a frame of colour or suffuses it with rainbows. Catches butterflies. Dewdrops. Rain streaks across a window pane. Faces with all […]
Fame can be a compelling thing. To Die For, a 1995 Gus Van Sant film, inspired by one Pamela Smart (accused of instigating her husband’s murder), was really a comment on America’s bottomless appetite for televised fame or notoriety. To be remembered for something, anything is one of the prime human impulses today. Ever wondered […]
She comes to us on a first-name basis. She has to because we are as intimate as lovers. We’ve never met, we’ve not even spoken over the phone. But every shadow that crossed her face was something we recognised and made our own. Her beauty? Unsurpassed. Her vulnerability? Depthless. Her first name? Marilyn. Except, of […]
Like Jism, Jism 2 is unapologetic and deals with a subject that all of India is shy to discuss but that which all of Indian media devours and exploits to gain the TRPs, the readership and the viewership at every opportunity it gets, be it the molestation of a young girl outside a nightclub in […]
In the first ever Osian’s Cinefan Film Festival auction of Indian cinema memorabilia, held at Imperial Hotel in Delhi last evening, Aamir Khan won the bid of as many as six rare cinematic items, as he set another precedent and became the first collector from the film industry. Over a telecom bid, in tandem […]