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
I often check my desires. They are often indicative of things I do not want. This desire to leave everything behind stems more from my need to run away from things, people, than from a need to actually be in a new place. That can’t be right, can it? It’s like wanting to marry so […]
When I watched Tom Hanks’s The Terminal, I was left confused and am quite undecided even today on whether it’s a tale of resilience or a story about the helpless acceptance by a man of his circumstances. The way Hanks watches people come and go, all the while making himself comfortable in an airport terminal, hoping […]
The powder puff has more dust sticking to it than the familiar smelling particles of Ponds talcum powder. The fragrance is as familiar to me as the hemmed borders of the electric blue printed frock that I used to wear almost every alternate day. The scorching summers would not allow room for sartorial experiments. Back […]
Many a time we find ourselves in uncomfortable situations over and over again. Try as we might to deal with the past and bury it, some patterns keep repeating. At some point I came across an explanation for this phenomenon. Until you make peace with something or deal with it appropriately it refuses to go […]
An old woman bashes a bunch of puppies to death because she cannot stand the noise they and their mother are making in the neighbourhood. Visuals of a man killing stray dogs in Delhi go viral. A mother elephant and her babies are stoned randomly on the Wayanad-Mysore NH. A man is beaten and tied […]
It is spring and nature’s beauty is in full bloom. Glorious flowers are being wooed by buzzing bees, lady birds, grasshoppers and ants. During the day, pigeons, crows, mynas, woodpeckers, parakeets and cuckoos can be seen going about their business. Some are collecting twigs as the nesting period has begun. Others are impatiently […]
Many years ago when Javed Akhtar along with Shabana Azmi was touring the country to present the stage adaptation of Shaukat Azmi’s book Kaifi Aur Main, I had asked him at a press meet if the Ganga Jamni tehzeeb he represented so beautifully would fade away after him along with a few remaining voices […]
I finished reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love last night, and I wrestled with my thoughts to decide if I should really blog about the book. I did not want to write about it because, when so many people have already read the book, how is my little opinion going to change the course of the world? But […]
The conference room was cold. Maybe, it seemed colder because I was waiting to be interviewed by two editors. I had applied for the role of a reporter/sub-editor at a popular newspaper. My brain was almost ready to shut down, for I had already written a long test that checked my understanding of ‘affect’, and […]
It’s funny how the city grows on you and makes you a part of her, no matter how hard you resist. The chaos swirling in the air grabs you in a vice-like grip and slowly but surely saps everything within until you join the hollow-faced endless crowd of humanity. Their listless eyes looking to the horizon, dragging […]
“Agar Firdaus bar rōy-e zamin ast, hamin ast-o hamin ast-o hamin ast.” If there is paradise on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here.That’s what Persian poet Amir Khusrau, said of Kashmir in 13th Century.Fast-forward to now and this is what I heard from friends and acquaintances: “There’s a constant sense of […]
I’m taking up another ad as part of ‘Conditioning is for Hair, Not Minds’ – a series in collaboration with The Spoilt Modern Indian Woman. This one is by Whisper Ultra. The ad review suggestion was made by award-winning bloggerSheena Dabholkar, who is also the co-author of this post. So let’s begin. I was sent a […]