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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Dear Reader, I have always loved letters but in my 22 years and 11 months of existence, I have only received two letters and written one. When I was younger, I’d write long letters on the back of my notebooks namely to anybody I knew back home, then I’d carefully re-write them, tuck them into […]
Aatish Taseer straddles many worlds within one. The legacy of being an Indian, the son of a Sikh mother and a Pakistani father, and a writer who draws his material from pluralism and divides, from two nations that though hacked in two bleeding halves share a strangely collusive relationship with each other, from people who […]
Richard Linklater has a thing for time. He likes to watch it with the fascination of a microbiologist examining a petri dish. He notices worlds within an instant, the layers of the past, the present and the future, the collision of the ephemeral with the infinite. As the world recovers from Boyhood, a film he […]
What is the value of a person whose dawn breaks on streets or railway stations who sips tea at dingy canteens each day whose sells scrap to live who sleeps under an empty sky Who is he in the city of dreams? I don’t know. Perhaps he is a mascot of disparity, inequality of empty […]
I am 26 years old. In the conservative Muslim community that is so close knit that you can smell what’s cooking in your neighbors house,whispers of, “What is wrong with her, how come she isn’t married yet?” are hard to miss. In the words of an overly concerned aunty whose face I haven’t seen in […]
If your temple or your mosque or your church was attacked by terrorists, your family was hurt by an act of hate, would you pick up a gun to avenge yourself? Or atleast carry a burden of hate against THEM forever? What if we killed a perceived enemy and realised, a gun shot or a […]
The only part that can be appropriately labelled as ‘excruciating’ in a 3.5 week vacation home (India), is perhaps the 20+ hours spent cooped up in an air-plane or counting crows during layovers. An 8 hour flight from Detroit to Amsterdam, wandering aimlessly through the occluded corridors of Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport before boarding the next […]
“The last breath/Exhaled/Is the last poem/Released. Then/The curtain falls…” But before the curtain fell, Kamala Das or Kamala Surayya or Madhavikutty exhausted many lives, lived free and in confinement..by choice and wrote compulsively and passionately till the desire to live and write both burnt itself out. And the clamorous din following her last breath that sifted her life and poetry? It […]
To my dear henpecked husband, No I don’t intend to insult you, unlike our society ever ready with many tags that aim to degrade you, to question your testosterone levels and to reinforce its archaic, misogynistic beliefs on you so as to snuff out the slightest glimmer of hope for change. To me the word […]
Last year, over 100 Broadway stars, directors, producers, musicians, choreographers, designers and technicians gathered in front of the police station in Times Square, New York, while a poem titled ‘I Can’t Breathe‘ was rendered by Daniel J Watts. This was done to register a protest and start a conversation about police violence, which had claimed […]
I remember a time when I hated sitting around doing nothing. My days had to be packed with things to do, places to go, people to meet or I felt like I would go crazy. And somewhere along the way I had to make peace with having too much time and too little to do. […]
2014 is slowly fading into the past as a collage of memories and we eagerly await a new beginning, a new journey through 2015. The twilight between the years is a good time to reflect upon the past experiences that have shaped us into what we are at this moment, and to weave dreams of […]