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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Iti Mrinalini (The Unfinished Letter) is a movie that takes you on a turbulent journey and lets you distinguish the myriad colors of relationships through the lens of an actress, a lover, a friend and a longing mother. What I loved about Iti Mrinalini besides the remarkable performances of the legendary Aparna Sen and the […]
Am looking forward to the new film written by Anjum Rajabali. All for selfish reasons of course. First, the personal reason-The joy of peeping into the minds of the characters. Finding layers. Ah! A complex here, a fear there. Delightful when the screenplay writer is a qualified psychologist, isn’t it? Then, because I teach and […]
At some point in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, between tears and smiles, I wanted to punch the air with my fist and say, “You go Caesar!” Caesar. We will come to him later but on a day when I heard a supposedly well meaning teacher say, “Only if you take away something that […]
On August 4, 1929, a voice was born. A voice of abandon, mischief, romance, barely contained madness, of rich, malted cadences. The voice that went by the name of Kishore Kumar. But then Abhas Kumar Ganguly or Kishore Kumar was more than just a gifted voice. He was an actor who could let himself loose […]
I remember the morning after Mohammed Rafi’s death in 1980. It was my turn to read the news in the school assembly and I remember preparing instead a small tribute to the singer and ending with the lines, “Jab Kabhi Bhi Sunoge Geet Mere, Sang Sang Tum Bhi Gungunaoge.” I realised the meaning of these words sometime in […]
Ofcourse, you remember The Wonder Years, the television series (1988-1993) that gently nudged us back into the 60s, to the years of the first moon landing, the Kennedy saga, the Vietnam war filtered through the adolescence of Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage). You remember because the series captured not just for America but for all of us the days of our innocence. This longing for the […]
Acclaimed cinematographer and film maker Thomas Michael Cowan is a man of truth. Of that moment when stiff pretences and masks are peeled off and the real person emerges. So he pays a sudden compliment. Caught off-guard, I react and he amusedly observes, “See? I get a smile!” It is a game he plays often with the film narratives he directs. […]
When a play has been declared ‘Housefull’ two weeks before it is being staged, you know its fame has preceded it. I would not have got to watch Atul Kumar’s The Blue Mug either (The last ticketed show is today at Delhi’s Kamani Auditorium), if it had not been for the intervention of a common friend […]
Just today while channel surfing, I refused to watch The Dark Knight beyond a few scenes even though it is marvellous cinematically, because as I tried to explain to my son..the idea of evil in the film is so dark and so overwhelming that it drains us of any belief in life as a meaningful experience. It makes us believe that no matter what […]
“The film is strictly for adults,” said Aamir Khan in what looked like a mix between a Tata Sky ad and an anti-smoking campaign as the three actors of Delhi Belly teased him about ruining his own reputation. While MBA students are running after him to learn marketing tips, filmwallahs are scratching their heads, trying to figure […]
You could hear the clenched fists though you could not see them. There was the face. Battle weary and lined. And the voice. Laboured. Faltering but trying to pull a frayed temper together. Yes, it is tough being Rupert Murdoch in these times. To be in the public eye in any case is a bit like enjoying a warm bath […]
In Barsaat, yes, all the way back in 1949, when Raj Kapoor and Prem Nath went to the hills in a car, braving the wind and perhaps egged by boredom, they ran into love, tragedy, heartbreak and a life lesson or two. There have been many memories on wheels, intrinsic to narratives like Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi but why are we digressing? In 2001, […]