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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Trust Punjabi theatre legend, Sangeet Natak Akademi Award winner and Padma Shri awardee Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry to treat the world as her stage. And to make personal connections with literary texts from diverse sources. In 2007, she had brought to the Theatre Festival, a searing Punjabi adaptation of South African writer Can Themba’s The Suit, a three […]
There is a scene in Farah Khan’s Happy New Year where Boman Irani takes out a fully iced cake from a bag and says to himself, “I am going to have my cake and eat it too.” Two seconds later his face is buried in the gooey stuff and when he faces the camera, a […]
There was a girl looking straight at me, slightly confused, mildly annoyed, her kohl smeared face, her frizzy and unkempt hair reminded of the person I was scared of becoming. She didn’t look familiar. She looked distraught and unhappy but as I continued to look at the reflection in the mirror, my mind went into the […]
I pride myself in being an extrovert. But the last two years in Kuwait, have made me recoil a little bit. I keep to myself, I have really started enjoying hanging out by myself. I accord myself the joy of becoming a more independent, self-sufficiently happy person. But then somewhere in the corner of my […]
What we learn from Naseeruddin Shah’s autobiography And Then One Day..A Memoir (Penguin Books India/Hamish Hamilton), is what we need to learn. No more, no less. Nothing extravagant about milestones reached, rewards gathered, boxes ticked. Like tempered chocolate or like a quintessential Naseer performance, the writing is perfectly poised between a melting point and gradual, cool normalcy. This celebrity […]
I am guilty of living in the past. I can’t really explain why. It’s like an aching. A longing. A strong conviction that the past held magic amidst the mundane. The glittering golden glory days of yore – far superior than the modern day drudgery. Something about those bygone days captivates me. Something about […]
In parts, Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider replays keynotes from a classic Shakespearean dirge with a sly wink. So we are offered the jovial grave diggers. The skull gnashing in glee. The sinner in a moment of redeeming prayer. The ghost who is not a ghost afterall but is Roohdar..the keeper of another man’s soul and all its agony. […]
You can touch the surface of life or live it inside out. You can just see what is visible or sometimes close your eyes and open your mind. And perceive the intangible as well. Few films manage to make you realise the difference between connecting with life and just skimming through it but Sai Paranjpye’s Sparsh did […]
It is hard for directors to treat Hrithik Roshan as ‘normal.’ He is either Jalluddin Mohammed Akbar or Krish or a vaguely challenged Rohit or an ace thief who can be a dwarf, a queen in drag, a superman vrooming to the beat of ‘Dhoom..dhoom‘ or a self-made chawl don spouting Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s Agnipath […]
I had the good fortune of knowing three very generous ladies. Two of them were my grandmothers and one was my ‘adopted’ grandmother. My Dadima (dad’s mom) was a businesswoman and she did really well selling cooking gas to households and hotels. Ganga (my adopted grandmother) lived with her and took care of the home, […]
Be afraid. Be very afraid. Especially, if you are a woman. A cleavage pointer is headed your way like a missile to show the world what it would have missed if it only looked at your eyes instead of your breasts. If someone looked in your eyes, really really long….they would not have seen what […]
Dr Mili Chakraborty likes to pose for selfies… perhaps that is why every frame she is in seems to be carefully composed for a snapshot. Her smile is always selfie ready and even though she says, “jo dil mein hai..wohi zabaan par,” nothing she says really come across as spontaneous. Not even her Skype conversations […]