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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Long before the Rachel Cut was made famous by Jennifer Aniston in F.R.I.E.N.D.S, there was the Sadhana Cut. In 1960, a frothy Love In Simla gave us an unforgettable romance with a little pixie in the lead. She was Sadhana and in a key scene, turns from a Cinderella to a princess when her grandmother […]
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 […]
A pea-shaped face peeked from behind a set of rusted iron doors at the Taj Mahal palace as I firmly rapped the heavy door-knocker against its metal backrest. “I wish to look around”, I said determinedly in response to the quizzical expression that stared back at me. The possessor of the tiny, question-marked face – Abhinav, a […]
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 […]
My memories of celebrating Lohri in Patiala are a bit hazy. But yes, winter was the season when beeji, my grandmother would painstakingly chop sarson ka saag and then cook it in a haandi on a mud angeethi. The prepared saag always topped with a dollop of homemade butter never ever saw the inside of […]
What is memory? A place you no longer live in? What is history? A street that has been renamed? Are boundaries only geographical? Can they be erased and redrawn? And when memory, geography and history can all be given a political context, what do you remember? The human experience or its politicised version. Questions like […]
No, this is not about cricket, although cricket is a constant presence. Some days I could be watching it, some days not. But it is there. Like music, like the smell of jasmine or ‘agarbathi’ in the bylanes of Bangalore. Or even the loud ‘soppu’ cry of the vegetable vendor pushing his cart in my […]
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. […]
In a recent interview, a best-selling author had commented that his books are competing against apps like Candy Crush and Flappy Birds. I do admit being hooked to these games for hours and feeling frustrated about an unproductive day in the end. It’s a travesty that books (even humorous fiction), does not sell well these […]
Whatever they told you about love and romance is getting a complete make-over in today’s age of plug-ins and widgets. Love in the air has been replaced by love in the digital maze of dating apps that claim to help you find your ideal soul mate! Forget the fabled heart-in-the-mouth or butterflies-in-the-belly moments; it is […]