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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I am fishing for the right quote by Manto to begin this write-up. As I unearth some old books from my college days, I realise that Manto is not someone, who can be put away between the pages of history forever. It was hard to ignore the man when he lived and it is hard […]
You can’t unmake or remake .. or break her.. because she picked her scattered bones from the womb of the earth, from thirsty sands and ocean pits and glued them to her soul with warm blood, hot tears, sweat and sticky hope.. and built herself limb by limb from a faint heart beat, a fading pulse. You can’t because she […]
Difficult to say sperm (or sparm – as the good Doctor Chadda (Annu Kapoor in an err.. seminal performance) pronounces it), without the mind travelling to where it comes from. All right, I picked up that line somewhere. Yet, here is an entire movie from Bollywood that revolves around the word without making you go queasy […]
Two people met, became friends (not sure when love happened) and decided to get hitched for the better. Like any other inter-caste marriage, this Assamese-Bengali alliance also went through a lot of high drama before it could culminate into a marriage ceremony that seemed interminable as rituals followed rituals to appease Assamese and Bengali sentiments. […]
He raises his eyebrow. Flicks a tear off his sculpted, strikingly beautiful face. Leans forward. Cups his chin. He is not Oprah but we could be wrong. Satyamev Jayate is a well-intentioned show. It has got one thing right. The fact that in a country where we are oblivious to the obvious, a show about […]
A few days back I found a petition forwarded by Richard Loitam’s parents in my inbox. The same Richard who was brutally beaten to death a few nights ago in a reputed Bangalore college. A few months in a college in the capacity of an occasional teacher made me react to this news with far more […]
Three years ago, you did not know you would be here reading these words. Three years ago, you did not know the name that would make things go round in your life. Three years ago, all the wrong things mattered. Not the life-sustaining, soul-stirring truth of today. Today’s smells of cinnamon and spice, today’s sunsets […]
He rode quietly, feeling the wind on his face, feeling her snuggling up to him, his pillion rider wife. The song he had caught off the radio at a snacks store still auto-played in his head. 11 children, all in their khaki shorts, scratches healing on their rugged knees, scuttling between lanes with bats on […]
A new country. New faces. New culture. And endless stretch of empty time that was a wishful thought until a few months back is now a reality. Often I tried to find a sense of belonging in all these. Compared to my quest for a more purposeful life and years of running around like […]
Emotions sometimes seem so unnecessary. The thoughts, the fears, the assumptions, the pre-suppositions, the questions which play with our thought processes and create an unnecessary noise, distract silence and keep our minds constantly busy. Not to forget the need for ‘dramatisation’ that a normal person is taught from his childhood. When a person is hurt, his first reaction should be a […]
It was a rainy day. I was waiting for my first lecture to begin in the classes I had joined for my entrance exam. In the nervousness of the first day, I realized I had reached too early and was the first one to arrive. The second person to arrive changed my life forever. He […]
The two convicts in the Pune BPO employee rape-cum-murder case, Purshottam Borate and Pradip Komokate, were sentenced to death, sometime back. News of sexual violence against women sends me into an overdrive.I am approaching 50 but am as angry, as touchy about this business of the second sex as I was, 30 years ago. The reason […]