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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It all started with the outlet tube of the washing machine snapping open at the joint, a couple of weeks back. The existing tape had to be removed, the outlet pipes fitted together again properly and taped up securely with insulation tape. Once I was done repairing the pipe, casual conversation led to me […]
In the midst of ramshackle buildings in Detroit, a vibrant marketplace mushrooms every Saturday like a bold stroke of happiness and hope against the dreary canvas of poverty and neglect. Here, under a spotlessly blue sky, with the sun shining merrily upon the city, a large warehouse stretches across six blocks. Within its premises, hundreds of local […]
Actor and former VJ Purab Kohli is enraged by the recent rape of a child in Bangalore and the crimes against women in the rest of the country. “I thought, after the December 12 case in New Delhi, these incidents would stop but they seem to be spreading like an epidemic. I just sat […]
Former VJ, actor and Internet entrepreneur Cyrus Sahukar is an entertainer even on the phone. He recreates a rainy evening and a traffic jam in Mumbai with little inflections and you can sense his life is a blur. A happy one, we suppose though he says, even his mother doesn’t get the hectic thrum of […]
Richa Chaddha has the kind of face that the camera conspires with and talks to. It is not a one note face preoccupied with bland prettiness. It has character, strength and in her silence, you can hear the deep roar of an ocean. Watch her in her debut cameo in Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! […]
She is hard to classify or sum up in stock phrases that are usually used for a mainstream female actor. She strains against the tyranny of preconceptions about women and their bodies in cinema and in life. She speaks passionately against misogyny at every level. In language that does not sound like sloganeering but […]
“Gehrai mein kuch nahin hota..sirf khauf aur beyakini hoti hai,” says the female hero of Pakistani serial Zindagi Gulzar Hai, currently playing on Zee Zindagi. The point being, the deeper you go in a problem, the more complex it gets and the simpler life is, the better it is. The phrase reminded me of beautiful episodes of Dhoop Kinare […]
In his world, trees are ancestors, rivers are mumbling old men, pines are charcoal sketches, mountains are Christmas cards painted in water-colours. Children running down hill slopes are fruits spilling out of baskets, rain is a rude intruder pounding on doors with wet knuckles , snow in Manali is a stealthy interloper that takes […]
Some of the best scenes in Bobby Jasoos unfold between Vidya Balan and Rajendra Gupta. Gupta is the taciturn abba who rules his household with forbidding silence and occasional bitterness because his eldest daughter is a joyous, guilt-free, 30-year-old with no intentions to interrupt her ‘career’ as a jasoos for marriage. She tries often to […]
Before we get into whether Mohit Suri’s Ek Villain has snatches of the Korean thriller I Saw a Devil, or shades of Jack Reacher, let us first deal with Remo Fernandes. Yes, Remo of O Meri Munni and Humma and countless memories of Goan susegad. So here he is, trying to fill the shoes of […]
Nestled in a cane casket, hung a foot or two above the ground, and wrapped in embroidered cotton cloth, the baby slept peacefully. This is a rare sight to see and that’s why it caught my attention amongst the many other photographs displayed in an art and culture magazine. Times have changed. ** Recently, I […]
On June 27, India will commemorate trend-setting music composer R D Burman’s 75th birth anniversary. Something unprecedented will also happen. For the first time ever, a mainstream television channel will showcase a documentary on prime-time. Pancham Unmixed: Mujhe Chalte Jaana Hai (an unending journey), a national award-winning feature-length documentary on R D Burman will be […]