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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“Groom her and she will go places. She has the potential to become a biographer someday,” said Dilip Kumar to SS Pillai, the editor of Screen many decades ago. He was of course referring to Udaytara Nayar, the woman to whom destiny would entrust the task of putting together his autobiography in 2004. Over the […]
Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan) is walking out of a police station with his black-listed benefactor who has just bailed him out of jail. Ashwini Kumar (Dilip Kumar), a revered police officer and his father warns, “If you go too far on this path..you may not be able to return.” Vijay turns to face him and […]
In Muzaffar Ali’s 1981 master-piece Umrao Jaan, one of the opening scenes featured Ustad Ghulam Mustafa Khan’s voice as it wove sublime magic with a raagmala, Pratham Dhar Dhyan. And there is a young Umrao in the frame, singing along, wrapped coyly in a white silk dupatta and the poetry, or nafasat (delicacy) of […]
Was it Shakeel Badayuni who wrote, “Sukoon-e-dil ke liye kuch to ehtemaam karoon.. zara nazar jo miley phir unhein salaam karoon, mujhe to hosh nahin aap mashwara dijiye, kahan se chedoon fasana kahan tamaam karoon?” But these words about the urgency to gaze at a beloved face and to greet it, the need to start […]
Years ago, in an interaction , Dia Mirza had spoken about how human potential was not always an explosion but a slow release of energy and intention. Even then it was obvious that being a model and the winner of Miss Asia Pacilfic International was incidental for her because she did not seem in any […]
A couple of years ago, film maker Tom Shadyac, known for blockbuster comedies like Liar Liar, Bruce Almighty, Patch Adams and The Nutty Professor walked into his luxurious new 17000 sq ft Beverly Hills home which had more bedrooms, bathrooms and uninhabited spaces than he would ever enjoy and he had an epiphany. That this success was just an idea […]
When we hear about women, who are ill-treated in Afghanistan, Pakistan and a few other countries, we often catch ourselves feeling happy about living in India, where we presume that many women are independent, safe and considered ‘equals’. While the recent crimes unleashed against women prove that this country is not really women-friendly, I […]
I’ve been contemplating meditation, to escape inconvenient realities. To distance myself from wickedness. Long swims in the sea, long conversations in the moonlight, nothing seems to change the harsh reality that there is nothing you can do to change people willing to be led by the nose to believe in whatever the world is stuffing […]
So, I was out in Mylapore this evening. And there was a mela all around. The pavement shops were selling everything from terracotta pots and pans to herbal oils for mosquito bites to cheap plastic toys and knick-knacks. Fortune tellers sat on the roadside with their parrots picking out fortune cards for hopeful clients. […]
I have imagined, often, what it must feel like, to die. Do I gradually lose awareness of my body, one part at a time and slip away? Do I become excruciatingly aware of it as the mind recedes and the life force that I am makes its presence known? Is it painful? Is it relieving? […]
In the eighties, it was enough for a hero to have intense eyes. If the wiry Jackie Shroff (who once admitted to have mixed Sunil Dutt’s jaunty walk with Dev Anand’s tenderness to become a hero) squinted at the camera like someone was stripping band-aid off a wound, we all winced in pain too. […]
Amole Gupte, the chairperson of the Children’s Film Society of India, the villain of the forthcoming Singham 2, the sensitive maker of two clutter breaking films (Stanley Ka Dabba and Hawa Hawai) and the heart and soul of Taare Zameen Par is a self-confessed fakir, a muflis, someone without the baggage of manufactured fame. Who […]