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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It is fitting that an overview of this year’s most memorable films should begin with a conversation about The Dirty Picture. This film is a triumph because of three people. Director Milan Luthria. Dialogue writer Rajat Arora and Vidya Balan. Earlier this year, a strident PR campaign pegged Rani Mukherjee’s foul mouthed scribe in No One […]
“Iss daur se sabhi ko guzarna padta hai..himmat mat haar bete..shunya nahin zindagi saamne hai tumhare.. insani rakt ek hamesha behne wali Ganga hai..pusht dar pusht woh behti hai..tum jiyoge tabhi hamari jade jiyengi.. marusthal mein apni ma ke cactus ban jao..yaadon se apne ko seecho, maut ka dar kise nahin lagta par iss dar […]
“Heere jo lagte hain woh mumkin hai angaare ho. Chingari lagte hai jo ho sakta hai taare ho,” husks Usha Uthup in Don 2 and the gold dusted line reminds you why Javed Akhtar was the other half of a legendary dialogue writing team that had understood to perfection, when to pull punches, when to […]
In an age when film makers masquarade as reformers, it is only apt that one remember the flag bearers of the REAL New Wave in Indian Cinema that had its inception in the early 50’s through the mid 70’s. A beacon of this New Wave was Ritwik Ghatak. The Anarchist. The Rebel. The quintessential Bengali […]
In the Golden Age of Hollywood, India represented little more than a mystical land of Rajahs, snake charmers, nubile princesses and elephants. Cannot really blame them – our own cinema of the time was filled with Rajahs and princesses of our own! In Hollywood, this image held sway till as late as the 60s, with […]
All new baddies In the first two decades post Independence, our screen baddies were largely understated in their amorous overtures to the fairer sex. However, as the 70’s with the hippies and counterculture burst into the scene, there came ‘liberation’ from the shackles of tradition, and holding back, in every sense of the term, was […]
As I sat watching Golmaal 3 with a roomful of guffawing and rollicking humans, trying my best to roar with laughter, and hating my inability to do so, the scene that really had me in splits was Mithunda (wearing a delightful toupee) facing off with his girlfriend’s ameer baap, ‘Prem Chopra’ (played by who else: […]
I remember coming across a billboard during one of my road trips which had “Sex,” in big bold letters, written all over it. However, the sentence that followed read, “Now, that we have your attention, let us remind you about the polio drive!” Clearly, the advertiser knew that the S word would guarantee a lot […]
Dharam Dev Pishorimal Ānand is no more but it is hard to come to terms with his absence. He was someone that Jigar would describe as the zindagi in zindagi..the life in life. More than his film career, it was his passion for life that defined him. His life was an endorsement of hope, of optimism, of the belief that life is […]
“Zindagi mayoos hoti hai tabhi mehsoos hoti hai,” is the final footnote of The Dirty Picture where a spent force of nature after having lived crazy dreams and nightmares, dizzying flights and spiralling lows, finds peace. Not the kind we would have wished for her but the kind that comes after life has been lived […]
I learnt at five just what Hindi cinema means to middle class India when I heard my father talk about Dilip Kumar’s death scene in Ganga Jamuna.“Tabahi macha di,” (he was devastating) he said. Films were a part of everything we lived through in Patiala. Terrorism, joy and grief. Happiness meant a scooter […]
All hail Emperor Clooney! The Ides of March is such a smart movie. It explains politics the way Stephen Hawking explains the cosmos – with flair. It distills pure entertainment from a subject most of us find either aggravating or plain dull. And then to make it Shakespearean where you delve into what drives character […]