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…
Read More
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…
Read More
“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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
You are browsing archives for
This Goan or a Kerala backwaters’ setting was the least I expected from this frenzied, hustling city. The sun had softened in the sky. I walked under its gaze, and sat on a bench in a small, partly open church. An old man was seated at the end of the row of benches. I didn’t notice […]
A sword lodged in stone. That is how Francisco Goldman describes a daughter’s love for her missing father in his visceral tribute to his late wife Aura Estrada in his book Say Her Name which is partly a grief diary of a devastated husband and partly a fictionalised account of life after the death of a […]
Sometimes I feel that this madness just keeps on increasing. Like the background music of my life is building up to this great crescendo except that you cant tell if it’s gonna change back to a major scale after that, and if it does, maybe it will lapse back to the relative minor. Sometimes I want to run […]
From the first still I saw of this movie, where Tom Cruise is shirtless, wearing pants that are faintly Godless, head turned over his shoulder, leaning backwards with one hand straining towards something, like the Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I knew Mr Cruise had found his Moment. *** The […]
My first memory of Rajesh Khanna is the song, “Accha Toh Hum Chalte Hain (Aan Milo Sajna, 1970) and of me sighing exaggeratedly like he did in the song. And of listening to his songs from Mere Jeevan Sathi (1972) in an Assamese cantonment and trying to sing, “Mera Naam Hai Shabnam” (Kati Patang 1970) and then […]
I remember I wrote my first poem at the age of seven. It was ‘ Ek je chilo bador, Se kheto sudhu gajor (Once there was a monkey, who ate only carrots)’. My parents had a hearty laugh about it. My father, then told me that Gurudev’s first poem was ‘Jol Pore, Pata Nore’ (It […]
They clucked around him in eager anticipation as he chopped a special treat for them… last evening, he chopped one of them as a special treat for himself on the same wooden block. Those hens, reminded me of someone. oh yes, human beings. we get bruised, beaten and betrayed but we still clamour for carrots. No […]
And yet again in a case of sexual child abuse, a three-year-old girl is raped, by her FATHER. Not once, not twice but several times. And as if it was not enough that the child was violated by someone who created her, the police had to further add insult to the injury by conducting not […]
“I don’t care how big and fast computers are, they’re not as big and fast as the world.” ~ Herbert Simon When was it that the travel bug bit me? Was it when I started to read travel books? Or was it during my trip to the Valley of Flowers? Or perhaps my annual trips back […]
At first glance the Scorpio that Delhi-based artist-brothers Manil and Rohit Gupta have driven down in looks like a blown up toy straight out of a comic book. Look closer and the spontaneously drawn organic forms, graffiti, speech bubbles, street art, language from everyday life, all come together like a thoughtfully executed painting that has […]
It is a bit surreal to hear Kunal Karan Kapoor telling you over the phone, “I have just come home. Let me order some food and I will call you back.” This is an interview that has been in the works for some time and today somehow, after a delay for which he has not stopped apologising profusely, things […]
I recently remembered the shows on TV as I was growing up. When TV meant one and then just two channels of Doordarshan. There was even a time when all programming stopped after 10:pm and I used to think that the late night shows on New Year’s eve were the greatest treat ever! Who knew […]