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…
Read More
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…
Read More
“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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
You are browsing archives for
Has it ever happened to you that you are having a conversation with someone and even though both of you were speaking the same language you couldn’t really understand a word of what they were saying? Walls of cultural references, upbringing, experiences and age separate you. You could tell them what it was like to […]
Often when my auto whizzes past a school campus on Bangalore’s Hosur Road, I can smell the breezy trees and instantly feel the pine and fir fragrance of Palampur flooding my senses. Palampur was my happy place as a teenager because a favourite aunt lived here, in a house by a pine hill overlooking the craggy Dhauladhar range. […]
The immediacy of pain and loss . the kind that One Hundred Years of Solitude narrates is not so much as fiction, as it is life. The life we invest hope and love in when we wake up every morning, watch a day go by, sometimes lose a part of us and occasionally find a missing piece. And so […]
It is only a make-believe that we are born free. We are not. Have you wondered why authorities register your birth? To keep track of you. It is like tying a collar radar on the neck of a beast so one could trace it as and when required and curb its movements. The word ‘official’ is quite […]
We are fragmented beings at many levels, living in a fragmented world, trying so hard to patch together our fragmented lives. The chinks, the cracks, the scars and the wounds leave us feeling incomplete. This hole we try to fill with things we seek on the outside, failing to realize that they can never make […]
I write this today with a deep sense of sadness, anger and helplessness. Animals in India have lost a warrior. In 2011. I was living in Delhi, training to be fund raiser for an animal shelter. Part of my job entailed having a good idea of existing infrastructure, so I requested that I be allowed […]
I’ve always been interested in stories. I guess it began with the bedtime stories crafted by Papa when we were kids. Carefully personalized for children. So there was He-Man, running alongside the warrior goddess, Teela Radhika . Stories of Himalayan heroics by grandfathers. Growing up in Bengal meant the inevitable fascination for the Durga Ma, the Mother Goddess, […]
Some cities are motels. Others are luxury suites in a fancy five star hotel. Then there are those that are just waiting rooms, a place where you can sit down for a while but you know inside that you are going to leave any minute. ** But every once in a while, you arrive in […]
Saying Goodbye is a daunting task. I remember the day my grandmother was buried, me and my grandfather stood by the door and wept in each other’s arms. We cried till we couldn’t cry anymore, because this Goodbye was our final goodbye, there were no see-you again later’s, or call me when you reach. This […]
The winds of change blow hard Rattling my windows Shaking every tree in my yard I flinch under the covers Frightened and sick. ** I try to shut out the howling storm But it will not be ignored One by one the windows shatter And my blanket of safety gets whipped up in the […]
*** I don’t want the fleeting happiness that comes from acquiring beautiful things. Nor the shallow mirth that comes from people who please you, praise you and bring you gifts. But I crave the satisfaction of one who need not try so hard to prove one self in a cruel world. One who without seeking […]
I wish the world would understand what we look like when the stars see us. A blimp in the blackness of the universe. A sole blazing sun supporting this delicately balanced eco-system. Perhaps we would then stop rampaging through this world and her resources without a care. We as a race completely fail to see […]