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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While performing a street play in Sahibabad township, on 1 January 1989, Safdar Hashmi, a member of the Communist Party of India , a playwright and activist, was attacked and murdered by the followers of an election candidate. What followed was unexpected. During the staid Doordarshan coverage of the National Film Festival Awards, Shabana Azmi […]
A few days before Om Puri passed away, I shuddered past a YouTube video (obviously fake) that speculated if he had converted to Islam. No prizes at all for guessing why the video had been created. To fan the hate that his support for Pakistani artists had kindled amid patriots whose claim to nationalism is trashing […]
The opening scene of Nitesh Tiwari’s Dangal has a young Mahavir Singh Phogat priming himself up for an office brawl. He has left wrestling but we are told, wrestling has not left him. And so like a fighter in an akhada, he crouches, his eyes focused and unblinking and makes a little gesture to pull […]
It is official. The award for the most unlikable male character of 2016 will be shared by Ranbir Kapoor’s Ayan in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil and Ranveer Singh’s Dharam in Befikre. These are clueless boys with the emotional and intellectual depth of a nine-year-old with the tumultuous hormones of a teenager and are paired with […]
The patchwork of unfinished relationships, replaceable snapshots, the short-lived high of opening a new package, restless online scrolling, things that we don’t need but must buy, a flurry of vodka shots, a life lived from one plane hop to another, one missed connection to another. It is easy to dismiss Gauri Shinde’s Dear Zindagi as a […]
How easy it is to judge folks whose shoes we have not walked in. The largely lonely battle Karan Johar fought to save his film from hyper nationalist bullies and his desperate video which I could not bring myself to watch, the patriotism tax of Rs five crore and the backlash that followed did not […]
American satirist Sarah Silverman recently sat down with New Yorker’s editor Andy Borowitz and said that Trump was infact a mirror of a section of the American society that believes in the xenophobic, narrow version of American nationalism. A nationalism that hates, excludes and wants to always be ‘Number One.” In what she asked, […]
Don’t be surprised by Prem Chopra ji gaslighting Tannishtha Chatterjee and telling her that her rage doesn’t count just because he did not get offended when he was called bald on Comedy Nights Bachao. Yes, she and her dark skin need the publicity, Mr Chopra doesn’t. Also please do not be surprised by the Pink […]
A Paradise for travel and film buffs, DIFF 2016 which will be held from 3-6 November in McLeod Ganj, Dharamshala also gets a new look and venue. Among other highlights, docu features-A Syrian Love Story by British director Sean McAllister, the Iranian director Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami’s much-lauded Sonita, and fiction features -Thailand’s first female […]
Poet Majaz Lakhnawi wrote once, “Yeh tera zard rukh yeh khushk lab yeh waham, yeh wahshat.. Tu apne sar se yeh baadal hata leti to accha tha.. Tere maathe pe yeh aanchal bahot hi khoob hai lekin.. Tu is aanchal se ek parcham bana leti to accha tha..” (Your pale face, your parched lips..these doubts..this […]
No, there is no real evidence that Mr Bachchan’s daughter-in-law had to marry a tree before she could marry his son but a gentlemanly, deep-seated patriarchy has long been a part of who he is. Many years ago, on Karan Johar’s talk show, he expressed his sincere admiration and absolute respect for Kajol because she […]
Internet sensation Ssumier S Pasricha’s recent video about Pammi aunty mocking a dark, overweight woman at a Teej function evoked mixed reactions. Was he mocking, dark and overweight women? Or was he mocking the women who mock them? If you watch his videos closely, every little narrative is about a woman deriding another woman, establishing the […]