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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I haven’t watched Homi Adajania’s Cocktail but from what I hear, it achieves something no different from the message sent by goons of the so called Hindu Janajagrana Vedike on Saturday who raided a resort in Padil, and thrashed and slapped girls for partying in “indecent clothes” and consuming, alcohol. Deepika Padukone’s Veronica was not thrashed […]
Just before The Dark Knight Rises began, my mind wandered off to evil. And its randomness. And its twisted sense of purpose. The Colorado shooting during the screening of the film that took 12 lives. The depraved pawing and mauling of a young girl in Guwahati. The molestation of another girl in front of a train […]
Slowly from behind the camera, the giant of a man and his tall, slim frame emerges. A cigarette dangling close to his lips. You recognise him instantly.. the enigmatic versatile genius, Satyajit Ray. Magical images of Pather Panchali and Apu trilogy shapes up in that cloud of smoke. Or take a new Feluda movie with […]
We celebrate Rajesh Khanna with 20 of his most memorable songs that sum up his charisma, his magic, his unsung range and his indelible impact on the vocabulary of cinematic romance. This is by no means a definitive list (and is in no particular order) or the most comprehensive but tries to capture some moments […]
Love. Who believes in it? Show of hands please? I believe it when I see it for real. In lives like Imroz and Amrita. Nargis and Sunil Dutt. Patrick Swayze and Lisa Niemi. Agassi and Graf. At a certain age, love was cinema, literature, music and what they tapped into. The raw material of hope, […]
My first memory of Dara Singh is in the 70’s film Bhagat Dhanna Jatt, that I watched in Chandigarh’s Piccadily cinema hall with my parents on a night when we had nothing to do. My dad was not fastidious about films. If he wanted to see one, he found one playing near a theatre near him. […]
Recently I made a new penpal in America. Here’s a copy of the first letter I posted. Dear Holly Wood, I hope you are doing well. I know you have been awfully busy trying to come up with all sorts of movies, and I understood from your last letter that you are feeling extraordinarily stressed […]
From the first still I saw of this movie, where Tom Cruise is shirtless, wearing pants that are faintly Godless, head turned over his shoulder, leaning backwards with one hand straining towards something, like the Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I knew Mr Cruise had found his Moment. *** The […]
My first memory of Rajesh Khanna is the song, “Accha Toh Hum Chalte Hain (Aan Milo Sajna, 1970) and of me sighing exaggeratedly like he did in the song. And of listening to his songs from Mere Jeevan Sathi (1972) in an Assamese cantonment and trying to sing, “Mera Naam Hai Shabnam” (Kati Patang 1970) and then […]
In the film industry, the transition is not that clear. We have had good cinema, off and on, more dependent on the directors- so Satyajit Ray (who along with masters from Bengal and South India influenced world cinema and not just Indian cinema and was active in years 1955-1991), Guru Dutt (1950s), Raj Kapoor (1950s,60s,70s even […]
It is a bit surreal to hear Kunal Karan Kapoor telling you over the phone, “I have just come home. Let me order some food and I will call you back.” This is an interview that has been in the works for some time and today somehow, after a delay for which he has not stopped apologising profusely, things […]
I recently remembered the shows on TV as I was growing up. When TV meant one and then just two channels of Doordarshan. There was even a time when all programming stopped after 10:pm and I used to think that the late night shows on New Year’s eve were the greatest treat ever! Who knew […]