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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Onir’s anthology I Am (2010) remains one of the most deeply felt and insightful cinematic statements on Kashmir where Juhi Chawla’s Megha (a Kashmiri Pandit) and Manisha Koirala’s Rubina (a Kashmiri Muslim) connect after twenty years of estrangement amid barbed wires, abandoned, crumbling homes with bullet riddled walls and layers upon layers of anger and […]
Vidya Sinha passed away on 15 August 2019. A look back at possibly the most memorable film of her career. *In Sujoy Ghosh’s 2016 film Kahaani 2, Vidya Balan’s Durga Rani Singh shares a fleeting romantic interlude in what is primarily a dark and tumultuous life. Her suitor plays for her the title song from […]
Right at the end of the messy Season 3 of 13 Reasons Why (Streaming on Netflix), a character quotes Tolstoy’s War and Peace to say (without attribution of course), “Let the dead bury the dead.” And even though we are supposed to make do with that statement, this season like the other two before […]
The rehabilitation of those tainted by the #MeToo movement has begun in the Hindi film industry. On June 1, just before the release of Super 30’s first trailer, director Vikas Bahl, accused of sexual harassment by a former employee of the now defunct Phantom Films, was given a clean chit by an “internal committee.” The said committee […]
Says a woman cop in Unbelievable, a wrenching new Netflix original, “Rape has three crime scenes. The body of the victim. The body of the rapist. And the place where the crime actually happens.” The series also adds another crime scene to the list without naming it. The mind of the victim. Against which, a […]
Aarey Milk Colony was envisioned in 1949 by Dara Nusserwanji Khurody (winner of 1963 Ramon Magsaysay Award with Dr Verghese Kurien) and inaugurated with the planting of a sapling by the then PM Jawaharlal Nehru in 1951. Over the decades, it has grown to be one of Mumbai’s most cherished lung spaces. Weeks before the […]
The Joker of 1993 was Michael Douglas’ William Foster in the film Falling Down. The protagonist Foster did not wear a mask though. He in fact, took off the masks of civility, politeness, political correctness, self-control and compassion to fall into a vortex of a toxic sense of personal persecution. His litany of woes? […]
The hate around us is like the Amazon on fire. Instigated to scorch everything tender and infinitesimal. Random cruelties are as commonplace as laughter emojis and when genocides (silent as well as triumphantly boisterous), are taking place under our watch, it is hard to take the troubles of Modern Love seriously. The anthology web series, […]
Shah Rukh Khan does not make political statements.He does not say much about the state of the country he has seen become a bit snappy and rude and yes, intolerant over the decades. Aamir Khan tried to opine but learnt to then know better. These two are in a unique position unlike Salman Khan from […]
That viral video of Kangana Ranaut on a dummy horse without legs , issuing a blood curdling cry is emblematic of the kind of fake nationalism we are being asked to adhere to these days. It allows the lady in question to diss anyone she dislikes from Alia Bhatt to Shabana Azmi without watching her […]
At a time when everything is politicised, be it birth, death, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, the notion of the home land and the reality of displacement, let us pause for moment to acknowledge the fact that Rami Malek, a child raised in America by Egyptian immigrant parents, and with one-eighth Greek heritage ended up playing […]
The urge to learn a new language breathes down my back the most when I realise how a treasure trove of heart-rending music remains beyond my reach. The Malayalam movie Mayaanadhi’s (2017) rendition of Bawra Mann (cue: Swanand Kirkire, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi) took me to Sachin Siby’s rendition of Kanmani Anbodhu, of which I understood […]