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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Shahrukh Khan. The young, gawky, painfully intense boy with big brown, melting eyes who came from nowhere and became an empire. Didn’t we love this story almost as much as we loved him? He was Raju who came to Mumbai to become a gentleman and became instead a superman. We did not love him because […]
Shyam Benegal’s cinema never loses the plot in trying to project itself as a breakaway, alternate idea. His films never preen and say, “Let me show you something you have never seen before,” even though his cinema in the 70s was quietly, unobtrusively radical both in content and in form. He has always had a social […]
As he, almost silently, glided into the living room, it was as if the curtains had lifted and the show had begun. Cinemar manush (the man from the films) was how I would refer to him whenever I saw a picture of his anywhere, as a five-year-old. The man I had loved and loathed in […]
I enjoyed imagining that director Raaghav Dar, maybe unconsciously, maybe while casting or perhaps even while writing, had seen Prateik as I do, and then put him in My Friend Pinto and asked me, “Is this how you see him?” Like the painting the don has made for Reshma, the film is not great art, […]
“Mere uncle ki life pe bhi ek picture bana tha..Albert Pinto..unko gussa bahut aata tha,” says Prateik Babbar’s Pinto and this is one of the few genuinely funny lines in My Friend Pinto. Director Raaghav Dar is obviously inspired by the bumbling, golden-hearted Chaplin who runs into vases, people and disasters and somehow emerges unscathed, […]
I discovered Guru Dutt rather late in life. As a teenager, I always found him too intense. Someone who reminded me of dark, forbidden corners within. Of spiralling gloom you could lose yourself in, just the way he had. Even though he had made sunlit films like Baazi, Jaal, Aar Paar, Mr and Mrs 55; […]
I am a procrastinator by nature and at all given times I live with the stress of having to do too many things which I have pushed aside with the gentle stroke of one excuse or another. While I do take credit for all the good things that happen to me, I also blame my own self […]
In the small hill town of Kotdwar in Pauri Garhwal, this is the fortnight of the cross-dressers. This is the only season in these lazy hills, known for their laid-back men and hard-working women with alabaster complexions and frown-lined foreheads (you can well understand why), that the bhullus and the bhaijis (younger and elder brothers) […]
In Zoya Akhtar’s Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, we first see Kalki Koechlin melting away in milky sweetness, pouty and wide-eyed, smiling and dewy with joy next to the man she is going to marry. As jokes are cracked, a toast given and a cloyingly sweet song sung, she looks blissfully happy. Just moments later, she […]
One of my favourite moments in Love BreakUps Zindagi is when a twice divorced Govind (Cyrus Sahukar) sits in his Delhi barsaati with the woman he thinks is the answer to his search for love. There is a pile of home delivery menus between them and he puns on misspelt chicken dishes till she decides […]
A golden haze surrounds Dia Mirza these days. Its the visible, palpable joy of being part of a film she has long waited for. A film she knew she wanted to be a part of even before it was dreamt. Love BreakUps Zindagi is special for her not just because it is her first […]
India, for the first time after many decades is looking inwards. And as it does that as a nation, it has started to stare at the truth right in the eye and express itself with an honesty which had become as alien to us as the cinema we had started to make in the eighties […]