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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Jaspal Bhatti was more of a crusader than a comedian, who through his simple, clean, genial and understated humour won millions of hearts through decades. With much ease, freshness and simplicity, Bhatti’s realistic characters, caught in everyday situations, were identifiable and made instant connect. Utilizing comedy as a tool of satire had been his […]
Jab Tak Hai Jaan..a prophetic title in retrospect. Perfect for a man who worked till the last year of his life with the medium that he loved, and had shaped and redefined. Call it a coincidence but for some reason, I started watching my favourite Yash Chopra films in the past one week and marvelled […]
I remember Sridevi only for a few signature moments. Her swirl in a shower of flower petals in Chandni. Her single-minded adoration for an older man in Lamhe. That face that could mirror any emotion, any thought in a trice. Those limbs that made music whenever they moved to music. There is an ironical moment […]
Undo each moment till the closure. The memory of his hand in yours. Undo every memory you shaped. Every dream in your mind that you taped. Undo the ‘I will be here forever’ Because there is no everafter. Undo the want to be his. The need to make him yours. Togetherness. And its cause. Undo […]
At a recent event, I was meant to give a talk on “Mumbai and the power of collective conscience”. I went prepared for the speech, but the unimaginable happened.Something that has never happened to me before. The moment my turn came, and I stepped on to the stage to speak, I blanked out and lost complete […]
The seeds of my love affair with San Francisco were sown the very day we were acquainted. What started out as a mere check mark on the to-do list of a travel aficionado, culminated into a full blown obsession which grew exponentially with each passing day. This is the story of my bitter sweet […]
Based on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Piya Behrupiya is a Hindi musical drama by The Company Theatre and directed by theatre doyen Atul Kumar. It played to a packed house at London’s Globe theatre and was recently staged at Pune’s Nehru Hall. The play unfurls with a huge portrait of Shakespeare to whom the arriving stage actors pay […]
Anurag Basu’s Barfi, India’s official entry to the Oscars has achieved nothing new, The controversy in the wake of its selection has been as old as the questions about just what guides our cinema juries to select films for a foreign forum. Was an epic mess called Jeans, a Vijay Amritraj’s production, chosen because of Amritraj’s […]
A young cousin of mine got engaged today. An army officer’s daughter, she is getting married to an army officer too. Needless to say (wonder why I am saying it then…..but there it is), the event had a definite fauji flavour. The party was spread over three sections of a venue. The festivities in […]
In the 70s and the 80s, cinema was an Eastman colour, 70 mm or cinema-scope as the case may be, ‘cannot bear to miss a scene’ event. And if you have not watched Trishul and Deewar or Kala Patthar or Sholay in a cinema hall, you will never know what it was like to be in the heart of […]
Tragedy does not respect fame or talent or abundance. It strikes with cold precision and takes away what it must. And also destroys the notion that the rich and the successful are impervious to loss. The suicide of writer Varsha Bhosle, is a blow not just because it is such a shocking tragedy but also because […]
Piya Behrupiya, the Hindi musical version of Twelfth Night brought by The Company Theatre will open in Pune on the 13th of October, this year. This play was staged recently at the World Shakespeare Festival in London-UK and was applauded by a full house. In the words of its director, Atul Kumar, the audiences in […]