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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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 basic is impulse control. At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal (Hotstar) is a […]
We can’t pretend to be shocked by the Instagram group chats of young, potential rapists. There is a consumer base for rape videos in India, remember? The NGO, India Child Protection Fund (ICPF) reported in April that consumption of child pornography content in India spiked by over 95 per cent amid lockdown. That there was […]
“You have to break up a nation first if you want to put its pieces together the way you want.” These words attributed to Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign manager Steve Bannon sent chills down my spine. The Great Hack, a Netflix documentary about the Cambridge Analytica scandal and how the company played a key role […]
I can’t get this image out of my head. A young survivor of the latest mass shooting in the US, clinging to a parent, with a Valentine’s Day balloon clutched in the hand. And yet another image. Of screaming children raising their hands in the air as a SWAT team breaks into an auditorium. And one […]
Sometime last year I went for a late night show with my 18-year-old and forgot one cardinal rule I have always followed while going out after dusk though it is a rare occurrence. Dress down. Wear a big shawl that hides the fact that though 47, I am a woman still. No flashy neck or […]
When the soul remains shrouded In the dead silence of a few past days, When the heart lies curled up Too heavy to move; When the sky remains overcast With smoking clouds of pain and agony When words lose their meanings And protests their fire; When things remain As they had been; I look vacantly […]
In 1987, Roopkuvarba Kanwar, a Rajput woman was celebrated by a huge number of people in her community for committing Sati at Deorala village of Sikar district in Rajasthan. She was just 18 and had been married for just eight months to one Maal Singh Shekhawat. Thousands of people watched her immolation into a heap of […]
For the longest time, cinema in the subcontinent referred to daughters as, “betiyan toh ghar ki izzat hoti hain.” The mindset being that women must always think first of the family honour because they always have to be accountable to the world and its honour keepers for what they say, think or do. A few […]
Being accustomed to receiving information about the outside world through the NDTV app on my phone and articles on Facebook, it’d been a while since I read an actual newspaper. However, paranoia emerging out of rumours about the city I live in being on “high alert” led me to pick up a copy of the Deccan […]
Orlando. I remember you. Sitting right in the heart of Florida, you are a place where dreams come true. Where magic unfolds. Where a confluence of people from around the world come to enjoy dream vacations. Sunshine, sweet oranges, laughter, fun and good times – that’s what you are all about. I remember spending some […]
Remember the Dalit girl being dragged through the streets of Muktsar? And Pushpa and Murti, the Dalit teenaged girls in Badaun in 2014 whose rape and hanging was referred to by the shocked Western media as India’s Mango tree case? A case that was dismissed by CBI director Ranjit Sinha with this statement, “Our probe […]
We have been here before but let us do a body count, once again.Safdar Hashmi is a distant memory, so he does not count. He was murdered In 1989, while performing a street play. Rationalist Dr. Narendra Dabholkar (65) was shot dead near Pune’s Shanivar Peth area in 2013. Not too long ago, anti-toll campaigner […]