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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Note: I have had the privilege to interview theatre personality and actor Arundhati Nag many times over a decade or more and this piece recalls many conversations about her life and work. You saw her award winning turn in Pa recently and even if she comes for a few seconds in an advertisement, you know, […]
Note: I met Shernaz Patel in 2007 and it was a moment of personal significance considering, I grew up watching her on TV in the best years of Doordarshan and had read about her, without ever imagining that I would be interviewing her, one day. It was hard to look at Shernaz Patel and not […]
Some films have a gender. Some don’t. For me, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather has none. It is just what it is. A movie that you discover at some point in your life and then keep rediscovering. It never ages though you do. I was roughly about three when it was made and discovered Mario […]
Memories are like films. Some fade away and some are revisited again and again. Like my interview with Shama Zaidi. Years later, I can still remember her voice pulsing across a long-distance telephone line. As full of character as her writing. Zaidi’s body of work speaks for itself and she is one of the few authentic […]
On Aamir Khan’s birthday today..we look back at one of his milestone productions..Dhobi Ghat… There is a moment in Basu Bhattacharya’s Anubhav when from a penthouse where the film is set (owned by Tanuja in real life), you see Mumbai or Bombay as it was in 1970s, waking up to a lazy dawn. There is […]
Journalist and writer Narayani Ganesh has written candidly about her iconic father in her heart-warming book, Eternal Romantic- My Father, Gemini Ganesan (Roli Books) and talks to Humra Quraishi about it. I’m no film buff, yet I enjoyed reading Narayani Ganesh’s book on her father, the legendary Tamil actor Gemini Ganesan…so much so, I flowed with the words and was rivetted by those rare pictures of the man. […]
This is what Vidya Balan has done. She has distilled the Indian film heroine beyond her size, skin colour, weight, objectification in item songs and orchestrated stardom created around the din of endorsements and tiny roles in big budget films to performance. And presence. The kind that makes you look at a woman beyond her […]
Just an observation. No one filled a T-shirt quite like Joy Mukherjee. Remember him pulling a rickshaw (in a striped T-shirt) with the fragile Sadhna in his debut film Love in Simla? Or him serenading Sharmila Tagore with Dil Ki Awaz Bhi Sun in Humsaya (yes, again in a t-shirt, red this time) and he and Saira […]
I met music director Ravi Sharma a few years ago as a WorldSpace RJ. He was a guest at a concert and was put up in a hotel where I went to interview him at the end of what had been a long day for him. He was a little watchful in the beginning and […]
If Kaagaz Ke Phool had not been Guru Dutt’s self-fulfilling prophecy but just a film about a fading star (a director) and his bond with a protege, it may have ended on a happy note with two lost souls hitching themselves to a rollicking wagon called the Future or Forever. Both Guru Dutt and Michel Hazanavicius’ […]
This Saturday morning, I walked into a multiplex to watch Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Paan Singh Tomar to find exactly 10 people in the hall. It did not matter. The emptiness around me filled up the moment Brijendra Kalay’s brilliantly shifty, stuttering scribe came face to face with the erstwhile national steeple chase champion, army Subedar and current baaghi, or […]
Ray devised an innovative way to work around Apu’s stiffness and awkward gait. Like much of his journey into making the film, this also is a lesson for wannabe filmmakers: “I had learnt a lesson. All my preparations over the years… had finally produced this one shot and it was difficult to imagine anything more […]