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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The girl mocked into silence by a devastating shaming campaign is speaking again.To claim the right to tell her story. She, who became fodder for 49 rap songs, recalled in a recent TED talk, with poise collected over the span of a decade or more, the names she was called by the media, by online […]
Overly critical of ourselves, we are often busy either keeping up with the latest fads or working hard at refuting them. Every woman I know is fighting her own battle to break some kind of societal convention. I usually find myself at war with the concept of “what is good and right?” versus “what society […]
Like all good actors, Aamina Sheikh is a chameleon. Her strong, striking face exudes both resilience and quiet simplicity in Pakistani soaps like Maat and Shikkan (now playing on Zee Zindagi) and yet when she wants to play a global citizen, she transforms herself in a second into a woman who drips effortless pizzazz. Born […]
It was the beginning of a new academic year. The entire school was back after a break. It was my first year at work after marriage. Many of them at school knew about this as I had invited them for the function before we broke for the holidays. As I entered the school office I […]
“This incident was a storm which came and went. And what was there before it, and what is left behind after it, this is what we need to see.” (Nirbhaya’s father) This is the parting message that Leslee Udwin’s film ‘India’s Daughter’ closes with. And this is what the film proposes to do. To see whether […]
Only last night, I finished reading Lights Out, a brutally honest book by my former journalist colleague L Subramani who has written about gradually going blind at 18 from a degenerative retinal disease called Retinitis Pigmentosa; and this morning I have this sudden desperate desire to speak to him. I manage to get his number from a common […]
Even in his seventies, Pyarelal Ramprasad Sharma of the legendary musical team of Laxmikant Pyarelal has the cherubic innocence of a child and the effusive humility of a waterfall. He was in the city to helm a musical night organised by the Rotary Club, and when he masterfully conducted a 30-piece orchestra, memories of […]
A ripple of nostalgia courses through you at the sight of stacks of cassettes in a recording shop. The kind of a shop in the bazaars of your hometown, where an obliging attendant took a playlist scribbled on a piece of paper and gave you back a cassette brimming with sweetness. And you tried to […]
I have had many teachers in life who taught me valuable lessons. However I have a special teacher named solitude that helps me keep my balance in many tight rope acts. In today’s life that moves at an unprecedented maddening pace, there are times when we need to just sit back, be on our own […]
Subamma was old, helpless and on the streets. Being paralysed from waist down she lived on just one spot on the earth – in the corner of a busy street in a small town in South India. She seemed to have appeared from nowhere. One morning, office goers found her lying there, wearing a torn saree caked with […]
One thing a Sriram Raghavan film does not ever lack is atmosphere. Remember the menacing rats in 2004’s Ek Hasina Thi or the crazily inventive heist in Johnny Gaddaar (2007) or the shootout that starts from a baby’s pram in Agent Vinod (2012)? In Badlapur too, the home of a young couple is inhabited by […]
I loved DDLJ when I first saw it. I saw it twice in a single screen hall and once with my niece dancing in the aisles. People in the hall were laughing, cheering. The way they would have when Raj Kapoor’s Bobby first hit the screens in the 70s and as Shahrukh Khan once famously […]