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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Housing is one of the key issues facing our overstretched planet today. According to UN reports, over 30 per cent of the planet’s urban population lives in slums, in great deprivation without fundamental amenities like water, sanitation, adequate space. 35 per cent of the rural population does even worse and more than 2 billion people all over the world […]
A TV channel has recently been scaling high TRPs with the story of Jodha Akbar. It has a cost-effective set design that uses a few stock locations for every scene and uses wind-blown curtains, outdoor shots, ambient lighting and expensive furnishings to convey opulence. A few years ago, Ashutosh Gowarikar’s film of the same name […]
Very few modern landmarks have the kind of instant recall as The Louvre Pyramid, designed by Leoh Ming Pei. It even featured in the Dan Brown bestseller The Da Vinci Code and the cinematic version celebrated the angular mystery of the structure. ** It is a radical departure from its historic context and had attracted a lot […]
Politics and wars decimate history, memory, geography, architecture, human life and art. No city knows this better than Baghdad. Baghdad has been battered by decades of war and has lost among other things a sense of normalcy that human existence thrives on. In the worst of times, art comes to the rescue of the human spirit and reminds it […]
Can architecture have a gender? A feminine perspective maybe? Especially if it is a Zaha Hadid building? Frozen like a giant wave between the earth and the sky? Immovable but fluid? Like time made visible with its many flowing curves and pauses? The geometry in Hadid’s work demonstrates that the source of creation has no gender. A creative impulse […]
Structure is at times over-emphasised in architecture. It is not just what is seen and what can be touched that is important in a building but what flows inside it..what can be felt. Frank Gehry, arguably the most famous architect in the world today is a master orchestrator of subliminal experience. Of creating buildings that come across as […]
There is a moment in the 2003 Julia Roberts starrer Mona Lisa Smile where Katherine Ann Watson, an art lecturer introduces her students to Jackson Pollock’s art and there is a hush in the room as a larger-than-life canvas fills up the silence with a wordless roar. There is nothing to say really because Pollock’s art […]
I visited Sri Lanka last year and that is the first time I came across a sandakada pahana or a moonstone. This is a semi-circular stone that is seen at the entrance of the temples at Anuradhapuram and Polonnaruwa. Buddhism flourished here and the moonstone became more and more pronounced with intricate carvings and came a […]
Linear perfection. Monastic lines. Reductionist volumes. Unadorned surfaces. Geometric harmony. That in a nutshell was the work of Louis Isadore Kahn (born Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky), widely known as one of the most influential architects in the world. There was something starkly original and intellectually stimulating about his work. His buildings were like mathematical theorems, well-realised to the last brick but with […]
A few weeks back, I discovered the joy of using a tool I did not even know the name of. I spent an engrossing afternoon, etching a wooden tile with a Buddha head, burnishing it and feeling rewarded. Being an artist sometimes limits you to one way of looking at the world and interpreting it. […]
There may come a time when there won’t be enough land for vegetation to grow upon. When we will have more buildings than trees and open tracts of green will be a fading memory. Look around you. It is already happening. The land feuds. The scramble to build more and more concrete jungles where an overture to a […]
Taj Mahal. A beautiful mausoleum that in popular culture, in poetry and in cinema, has come to embody deathless romance. Princess Diana on her much celebrated visit to India posed alone on a bench with the Taj as a backdrop just to rub her loneliness in and to make the absence of her spouse obvious . […]