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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“So, you’re imagining things again.” “You’re stupid. You always get it all wrong.” “I never said that, it never happened.” Rings a bell? It’s true that there are times when we can misunderstand, misinterpret or overreact to a situation. However, ask yourself, if it’s always true by putting your thoughts on trial under the light […]
So there’s a term for an unnamed ache. Ambiguous loss. Such a loss leaves behind sharp objects, doesn’t it? Memories. The ones that made us feel something for the first time like in forever. There’s something compelling about this grandiosity that makes us see ourselves with new eyes as we say; “I was a bright […]
Don’t begin to meditate with an objective in mind because this is against the very spirit of meditation. Meditation is non-doing. Most actions are goal directed and a goal implies a desire. A desire to achieve something through meditation works as an obstacle in attaining the state of meditation. In fact, liberation which is the […]
A minute before I was about to write this blog, I wrestled with an array of thoughts. Should I write about this? Should the world know? Is it necessary? Then I gave room to this thought: It might help somebody. And, that’s enough! I just finished Jerry Pinto’s Em and The Big Hoom. As always, […]
I walked into my first yoga class with no background in movement training or sports of any kind. It was no surprise that I couldn’t get a thing right and frankly, I was a bit disappointed! Earlier, my level of physical activity was rather limited to walking when necessary and nothing more. I have always had a petite […]
“I was never a dancer, never a gymnast, never naturally peaceful, patient or confident. I generally felt socially awkward, private, introverted, comfortable reading and studying but not talking, sharing. I never ever felt beautiful or elegant, always felt like the small girl in the corner. Then one day after many years of Yoga practice, I […]
The Maggi controversy has tainted the glow of memories that were formed as an entire nation gathered to watch Hum Log in the early eighties and to salivate over a new wonder snack that was, ‘‘fast to cook and good to eat.” Hum Log was Manohar Shyam Joshi’s seminal story about a lower-middle-class Indian […]
Vasuda Giri does not think of the future as a magical place where all her dreams will one day come true. She doesn’t have to because, every morning she takes a few deep breaths and begins the life of her dreams. In her twenties, she is no different from many of her friends who want […]
This International Women’s Day, as we celebrated sheroes who have shown us how to own their power and impact lives positively, I was reminded of an article adapted from Debora L. Spar’s new book Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection. She is the president of Barnard College and says something really pertinent […]
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 […]
It took decades for the ill effects of tobacco on health to be made public and many nations took some more years to ban smoking in public places and spend on anti-smoking campaigns.. Between the two world wars, cigarettes were part of a soldiers rations. There was not a single film where somebody didn’t smoke. […]
2014 is slowly fading into the past as a collage of memories and we eagerly await a new beginning, a new journey through 2015. The twilight between the years is a good time to reflect upon the past experiences that have shaped us into what we are at this moment, and to weave dreams of […]