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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“Kaanch ki haandi ko kitni baar chadhaenge ?” How many times will you put a glass bowl on flames and pretend to cook something in it? Last night, this question was asked by Kanhaiya Kumar as he addressed a charged gathering of hundreds of young JNU scholars who with joyful irreverence laughed at […]
I did not know Valsa Mathew but sometimes, you do not need to know a person too well to imbibe instantly and with absolute certainty that there is something very special about her. I first saw Valsa nearly a decade or so ago when accompanied by my mother, I went to her son Vivek Mathew’s […]
Hello again! The ad I am taking up for the “Conditioning is for Hair, Not Minds’ series in collaboration with The Spoilt Modern Indian Woman is by TVS tyres- watch it here and cringe once again at Indian TVs favourite misogynist, Kapil Sharma. The commercial starts with Sharma offering a lift to a young man holding […]
Here’s the next edition of ‘Conditioning is for Hair, not Minds’ in collaboration with The Spoilt Modern Indian Woman. The ad I am taking up is Amazon’s new groundbreaking (not) social experiment, titled “When a Woman Shops”. Check it out here. The ad begins with a group of men, in a generic, posh, urban living room, talking […]
“Men who want to be feminists need not be given a space in feminism. They need to take the space they have in society and make it feminist”. -Kelley Temple For some reason, this year began with a number of my male friends accusing my writing of being “alienating” and “scary”. I was told (by […]
I have been weathering a storm since last year. So, I have been blogging about how unfair, ruthless, and hard life is. Although the storm hasn’t abated yet, I am seeing a bright, bright ray of sunshine now. I am insanely happy today. A few months ago, when it dawned on me that my relationship had really gone down the drain, I had […]
I had been waiting for a long time to arrive at that special moment. It usually happens to people when they turn 18, for me I had to wait 27 years for the moment to finally arrive. I can’t deny I was a bit frustrated that it had taken so long, but sometimes you just have […]
There is a scene in the 2005 film Capote where the attention-seeking Truman Capote is working a room full of adoring listeners and Harper Lee passes him by. There is a brief conversation that tells us everything about both writers. Capote and Lee were childhood friends and Lee supposedly helped him in the research of […]
A tired squeaky toy on the divan. One of its eyes is missing. A well-used enormous ball near the shoe rack. I step on it inadvertently, and it goes, “squeeeaaak.” I jump, and land on a brown, wet, stuffed toy. Its head is empty. Little cloud-like pieces of cotton lie around it, a graphic […]
For a few years after we were married, we exchanged presents on Valentine’s Day. Then we reached this cynical phase, when we didn’t believe in celebrating or observing a day, so we conveniently ignored it. I still wrote a couple of blogs about him, about us, with a dash of mushiness every year on February […]
Recently, I sat down with a cup of lemon tea and watched The Lunchbox and Piku in one long stretch. To reassure myself that the world was still made up of serendipitous conversations tucked in fleeting moments when strangers connect and make soul contact. Sometimes via little notes that talk of the smell of spent […]
I was eight, when I participated in my first painting competition. It was conducted in a park on a sultry, summer evening. I wore one of my favourite cotton dresses, carried my water-colours, fancy brushes in a rucksack, and held my sister’s hands, as she walked me to the park. It was filled with hundreds of […]