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 was just another day at work..and as usual I was multitasking – switching my view from the software that I work on to the many pages on chrome ranging from Gmail to Facebook – whilst keeping my mind off a chatathon which had commenced in the neighbouring cubicle. ** That’s when I saw your […]
In the years I lived in India in my parents’ home overlooking the slums, we would see drunken husbands beating up their wives. Girls pulled out of school and sent off to do housework. Polygamous husbands and their impoverished families. I always thought it had something to do with being poor and uneducated. I was […]
Tucked away in a remote part of Uttar Pradesh, India, is a firebrand of a woman. Her name is Sampat Pal, leader of the Pink Gang (Gulabi Gang). The word gang conjures up images of mobs of unruly thugs out to create chaos. But believe me this gang is a far cry from that. Clad […]
An article on Frank Lloyd Wright on smithsonian.com summed up his work in one perfect sentence, “He was there first.” Wright explored the word ‘organic’ as early as 1908 and unlocked architecture and set it free from conventional notions of what a building was supposed to be. He made us see what a building could […]
Love is a need like no other.Love is matter.The terrible, unstable kind, yes?The wild, sweeping kind that rips every notion apart until only nothing remains. And you weep, your tears are diamonds. Or perhaps the luminescent, sublime kind. The soothing, balmy kind, that caresses every scar, contains tides until only stillness remains and your […]
Around 12 years ago, I travelled for hours to a lesser known neighbourhood in Bangalore to find and interview Manna Dey. He lived on the first floor of an independent home and it was probably a rented space.and there were really no flourishes of fame and legendary success anywhere. ** This was a middle-class home […]
In the 1998 Hollywood romantic film, You’ve Got Mail, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, a classic face-off between the neighbourhood ‘mom-and-pop’ book- store versus a national chain is the back-drop to the story. The struggle of the little shop to stay afloat in trying times and its subsequent failure is probably played out in […]
A dear friend recently went to Switzerland and took a chiffon saree with her just in case a Yash Chopra moment struck her. And she is not even a Hindi film aficionado like me. Just goes to show, doesn’t it? How in a moment when memory meets reality, a snatch from a loved film comes […]
In March this year, I visited Istanbul. In addition to visiting the various tourist attractions like the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia etc, here are six things that I recommend and you CANNOT, should not miss doing in Istanbul. 1. Take two Bosphorus cruise rides – One in the daytime and one in the night. The day ride will give […]
No matter how self-obsessed you are, you would have heard of Doctors Without Borders. Officially known as Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF, they are, like Marvel’s Avengers, superheroes who tread where devils have no fear of going either. They might even make you think of the Steinbeck story immortalised by Henry Fonda in Grapes of […]
Rekha will soon be seen playing Super Nani but the icon turns into an age-defying model in the film to teach her errant family a lesson. No, dowdy weepies for the lady.There are many faces of Bhanurekha Ganesan. The little girl who danced on a table in a white frilly frock to the tune […]
As I write, drums are being beaten, conch shells are being blown. They are celebrating the season of the Goddess. It is now that she is at her most powerful, her biggest, her most terrifying and beatific. Hoards of men and women in a frenzied procession, demonstrating their faith in time to the incessant beat of […]