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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We are told how to be happy in a million different ways by a million people and the options are boggling. There are many different ways to be happy but just a few simple ones to be unhappy. Here are a few simple tricks to be unhappy and achieve a gloomy, sloppy, sagging soul. Beat yourself […]
Yesterday, on a friend’s suggestion, I read a poem called ‘On the Art of Kintsugi‘ by Ruth Padel. And then to understand it better, researched the pottery craft the poem was inspired by. Kintsugi, I learnt is a Japanese art/craft of fixing pottery and ceramic vessels. But it is no ordinary technique. It uses a gold based […]
The bunk bed went yesterday. In the living room the 40-inch TV lies on the floor, devoid of its stand. The coffee tables and end tables gone – even their impressions on the carpet – gone. Very soon this house will be empty. Emptied of occupants and emptied of possessions. It will no long smell […]
Here are a few pages from the diary of an anxious soul. Though she prefers anonymity, the thoughts she pens down resonates with many of us. Over to her: As I sit on my desk without any work at the moment, I fear that is it because they don’t want to keep me here. I […]
Cinema in the hands of Sohrab Modi, K Asif, Mehboob Khan, Kamal Amrohi and Salim Javed was pure verbosity and dialogue driven bravado. Gulzar, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Rahi Masoom Reza, Sai Paranjpay, Manu Bhandhari and Basu Chatterjee made cinema less confrontational and more conversational. Now cinema is driven by images and emotion that is […]
In the heart of Kinnaur in Himachal where tourists on their way to the desolate yet beautiful valley of Lahaul and Spiti, often stop by for a breather or some stretch-the-legs treks; there lives an old man. With a finely lined face, a green Kinnauri topi on his head and a Zen like peace surrounding his persona, 69year-old […]
‘Dil ki choton ne kabhi chain se rehne na diya jab chali sard hawa maine tujhe yaad kiya’ (The wounded heart restlessly aches… Whenever the wind ripples, for you…I crave) ‘Iss ka rona nahi kyun tumne kiya dil barbaad Iss ka gham hai ki bahut der se barbaad kiya’ (I don’t mourn the fact that […]
This International Women’s Day, as we celebrated sheroes who have shown us how to own their power and impact lives positively, I was reminded of an article adapted from Debora L. Spar’s new book Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection. She is the president of Barnard College and says something really pertinent […]
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 […]
“Almost all your blogs talk about work,” my daughter declared a few weeks ago. I mildly protested but then it struck me that she was right. The years since I started blogging have been devoted to finding work, finding my passion, quitting jobs, moving and trying to find work again. At times I was under […]
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 […]
I often come across people who seem to be eternally stuck to the assorted gadgets in their prized possession. It really amuses me, how they apportion their time between laptops, tablets, smart phones and so many other gizmos. I fear that a lame joke that someone cracked may actually be true- that we live in […]