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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When every work requires you to stop for at least a few minutes to absorb the intricacy in the carefully assembled objects, you know that this is no ordinary show. New York based artist Samanta Batra Mehta brings together a potpourri of antique and vintage objects for her debut solo show in India, at […]
Dawn knocked on the door, bedecked in nine yards, vermillion and carrying an aluminium milk can. Kanku was her name. No morning was complete without the swirling of her rotund hips and middle, as she set her can on the ground and herself on her haunches. “A litre?” she would ask with a smile […]
We all love to read stories or hear stories or sometimes weave stories. Neil Gaiman once said, “Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you, it […]
The thing about the past is that it never comes back and yet never really leaves. Shamshad Begum for instance is not just a Wikipedia note with a birthday and a death day. She is a memory for those of us who grew up with her songs. Though for all purposes, the woman who sang […]
“The Indian Railway’s Second AC has lost its elitist air,” Harshal told himself irritably. Elbowing his way into his assigned seat, he glared at the passengers already settled in. They wore that shifty eyed look of proprietary, typical of wait-listed Indians. He rolled his eyes at the pedestrian domesticity surrounding him, cursing the college alumni association for advancing […]
What the remakes of old classic films like Chashme Baddoor miss out on is an ingredient called innocence because you can’t ever recapture what is lost. Or fake the sense of wonder conveyed by Farooque Sheikh and Dipti Naval on their first date as they ordered a Tutti Fruity ice cream in a leafy […]
I woke up yet again and looked at the alarm clock. I had set the alarm for six o’clock in the morning like I always did and there was still half an hour before the alarm would start ringing; but for some reason I couldn’t lie in the bed anymore. It was the start of […]
On the day of her Shradh, everything is normal. The maids come and go, people go to work, children go to school, the trains and the buses struggle to run on time; the sun rises, it will rise to its highest position at noon, and then disappear, letting the moon take over. It is just […]
When I picked up Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk about When I Talk about Running, I was excited about reading it. And the book didn’t disappoint me. Well, not entirely. What I Talk about When I Talk about Running is a very personal and detailed account of Murakami’s running and writing life, about how the […]
I do not know if this matters. If anything matters. Especially when close to 4000 lives did not matter. When the survivors who were left behind to mourn them and battle an implacable system, did not matter. Have not mattered for over 29 years. Today the news that Congress leader Jagdish Tytler “may be in […]
The world has become unbearable to me. The more I try to center myself and tap into inner peace, the more junk it throws at me. I love the trash-to-treasure idea but what do you do with random acts of violence with absolutely no motive or reasoning? It’s hard to erase those images from […]
Truth, Goodness, Beauty are the highest virtues, the lofty peaks that we aspire to reach while we climb the slippery slope. Yes, indeed the way to virtue is slippery. Virtues are ideals but in practice we may need to dilute them. But the trap is that we may tend to dilute them to the extent […]