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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Boxes strike terror in my heart, the ones crammed with books and papers in particular. I will procrastinate sorting them until pushed to the wall. It is not that I am lazy or disorganized; I am just scared of hurting. And so the black containers sit scratchy and sore like corns on the toes, darkly […]
“There is a sacred space between mindless surrender and cold logic.. I will meet you there. But wait, first I will meet myself. Because without me, there cannot be… you. “ ** My take on Rumi and on his absolutely intoxicating philosophy of love that dissolves the walls of the self in the other and […]
Are women more sensitive, more prone to need extraneous approval for self esteem because there certainly seem to be some types of work that make women prone to being depressed and suicidal. There are endless biological reasons related to hormones that make us more vulnerable at different periods of time. Men use other resorts […]
Ordinary life is hard enough to manage. How much harder would fame be? Too much of it? Too little of it? What must it be like to be watched constantly, measured, estimated, valued for what is visible in you? To smile at hundreds of cameras and then come home to maybe an imperfect life that […]
Freedom. That ‘apparently’ ever elusive feeling that many of us are after. All our lives we think, feel or believe that someone or something is constantly taking it away or keeping it away from us. That it is controlled externally, and we have to fight for it. Usually, it is our parents who we blame […]
#1 – A sink full of vessels will not wash itself… even if u wait for two days! And even if you pray for it to grow a pair of hands! * #2 – Making chapatis is a lesson in Acceptance (of whatever shape emerges)… Letting go (of over-emphasis on perfection).. and Gratitude (for what […]
“When an architect builds a glass tower in the middle of the Arabian desert, he justifies his design with a 100 different reasons-except possibly the real one, viz., that he is trying to (unconsciously) recreate for his clients, the mythic imagery of what to them is the quintessential city of the 20th century: Houston, Texas,” […]
Society in India is coming of age. It has begun to openly acknowledge the word ‘gay,’ before kids and in movies etc. Unfortunately our minds are not open enough to accommodate and treat the gay community with the same respect that we accord to heterosexuals. There is a subtle stigma attached to this word which […]
(Author’s note: This is not a work of fiction. But then, who can define reality anyway?)I was eating a cheesecake and a banoffee pie with my husband when one of the most important people in my life was on the verge of suffering a massive stroke. I was making one of my favourite sambars when […]
The green light of a distant dock twinkling tantalisingly. Whispering of irretrievable gifts, of hope. Of innocence..that time chipped away at soundlessly. A man, alone on the other side of the bay, reaching out, trying to grasp it. ** Diaphanous curtains filling up a room with wind, and luxurious lassitude. Beautiful shirts. Spun out of […]
‘Continue 88 miles on I10 N to Houston’ – instructs a female voice emanating from the tiny black GPS on the dashboard. As if on cue, I recline my backrest, stretch my legs and relax. The view from my window is a fine treat for my ever hungry imagination and soon enough on a puffy […]
Long minutes, maybe a few hours were spent this week in the heart of a police station where I for the first time witnessed the daily workings of a place we usually associate with dark images of intimidation, apathy and incompetence, especially if you are a woman with a complaint. This one was surprisingly..for want […]