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 have not written a movie review in a long time. I watch movies selectively. I do my research on the story, on the conclusion and then decide to expose my senses to this massively powerful medium of absorption. There is enough conditioning in the human mind without me deliberately exposing it to the unnecessary, […]
Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala is an explosion of colours and cathartic vindication. Everytime I watch it, I remember something I had written a long time back about movies, “Living is not complete without imagining what we can be or should have been. The best kind of movies are the truths we wish we were living. They remind us […]
Some time back, the brief marriage of socialite and reality TV star Kim Kardashian broke up amid speculations that it was all a publicity stunt. Publicity is big business today and those who are famous at times do not even need to do anything worthwhile to earn their fame. They are famous and just by […]
There is nothing easier to kill in the world than a dream if it is too big to fit in your life. Maybe except for a stray dog on a street, a tiger in a jungle, a dolphin in the ocean, a river choking on effluents, a valley denuded by mining because in a habitat being usurped […]
Should a film, even one that blurs the line between live action and animation engage your emotions or is the flash of a soul too much to ask for in a multi-million dollar franchise, that painstakingly brings to life, every ripple in a sunlit, heaving ocean, every wave of a caramel sandscape? The Adventures of […]
Hiring Mickey Rourke is always a problem. No, not because of the substance abuse or that, like a child, he will speak with no filter whatsoever between his brain and his mouth, but because if you put him in a movie, all the viewer will recall is Him. And if Tarsem The Cell Singh is […]
An aside. There is a moment in Imtiaz Ali’s Love Aaj Kal, when after being mugged by two hoodlums in a strange country, Saif Ali Khan sits beaten and broken by more than just the blows he has just received. And suddenly, the face of Meera, a woman he thought he had forgotten flashes before […]
Kanchan Chander is known for her versatility. She has consistently, and indeed successfully, shown an impressive diversity in her art practice that ranges from large-scale paintings replete with sensuous and spiritual feminine forms to intricate miniature style mixed media works on both canvas and paper. In her latest solo show at Gallery Art Positive, titled […]
I woke up some time back to the disturbing picture in the papers, of a 14-year-old housemaid who was battered by a TV starlet for having eaten some shrikhand from her refrigerator without taking her permission. I have been watching some discussions on television on the subject but there are no solutions. Should children be […]
Never before has Assam witnessed such a mass hysteria as people pour in from different places to bid goodbye to the ‘jajabar’ (a wanderer) for one last time as he lies in a glass-covered coffin, silenced by death. Lovingly addressed as ‘Bhupen da’ by the young and the old, Dr. Bhupen Hazarika was a cultural […]
The other day while watching Kalpana Lajmi’s unsung, little cinematic ballad Ek Pal, I was amazed at how seamlessly Bhupen Hazarika’s voice wrapped itself around sprawling tea estates, gracious bungalows and the heart of its protagonist Priyam (Shabana Azmi) as she falls into a self-destructive passion for the frivolous Jeet Barua (Farooque Sheikh). Hazarika’s voice […]
Movies are about magical moments that linger on for years afterwards either bringing a smile on an otherwise humdrum day or suffusing you with sorrow when you are taking a walk by a seaside. Here are my 10 favourite moments from 10 favourite films. 1. Hey Jude moment from Coming Home– This is an anti […]