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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Can’t keep my mind from the circling skies Tongue-tied and twisted just an earth-bound misfit, I… The Pink Floyd song played in my head all through the weekend. It was about half past six on a cool Saturday morning and we were standing in an open field, next to Shinde Hill. The January sun wasn’t completely […]
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 […]
The Oscars this year was unexpected. There was real emotion in the air, not the fake chatter that often mimics the profession the show celebrates. There was Patricia Arquette asking for equal pay, and Meryl Streep shouting Yes! from the front row. There was Inarritu pleading for decent behavior towards immigrants from a country OF […]
‘2639’ that was my library number at the local library I visited while I was growing up. I regularly went there during my early teenage years. Located between my high school and church, it also had a video library and provided services like photocopying. It was run by a father-son duo and was called Kings Library. I stopped […]
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 […]
Any social gathering, be it a wedding, a party or even a small family get together has a dangerous tendency to turn into a buzzing hive of gossip as long as there are enough people and delicious food to fuel stray sparks caused by snide remarks and incessantly wagging tongues that seem to have snapped […]
Warm waves wash upon the sandy shore and tickle my toes, A cool breeze mingles with the salty air, Caresses my cheek and blows through my hair, Gulls fly lazily above me, And pelicans glide effortlessly. The sun hovers in and out of the puffy white clouds, Moving slowly across the azure sky. Kids run back […]
Maybe it’s the hormones or the overcast skies that are a regular feature of this part of the world. Maybe it’s my inability to get a decent job. Dang it! I blame all of the above for pushing me into this limbo. Winter blues hit me bad when I was in Boston and now […]
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 […]
In the 80s, a book shop in an old, musty structure in Patiala’s Adalat Bazaar was where you went for magazines and English fiction. I remember being given Rs 20 by my grandmother on my birthday and buying The Fountainhead. I read it without being aware of the capitalist subtext or the glorification of materialism. I […]
I am aware that no two paths are alike and everyone is unique but human beings have this kind of herd mentality that they find hard to resist. And time and again we struggle with the same ideas and situations. This is especially true when one has graduated from high school and stepped out into […]
I have spent a few years using the Law of Attraction and know for sure that it works. But I have not been able to break it down to a science because it works in mysterious ways that defy definition. The first step in manifesting anything is to ask. Get really clear about what you […]