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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Do not judge me for my repetitive rhymes; For I have suffered enough judgements in recent times. When the result of expectations is a marred reality; Even the best of bards lose their clarity. Growing out of love is a phrase overrated; For the action is glorified and the emotion understated. The emotion you […]
And so we decided to spend the weekend trekking. “You guys are so planned and organized. It is so boring! Why can’t you be spontaneous?” my daughter had cribbed. So, one fine Saturday, I got up and planned to be spontaneous and decreed that the family will engage in a trek over the weekend. We picked the […]
Editor’s note: Proceed with caution..spoilers ahead! I had the good fortune of investing three hours of my hitherto worthless life in edifying myself when friends propelled me to a show of Gunday. I learnt that the Indian Police is so diabolically clever that they can lay an intricately plotted conspiracy to rival the best of Ludlums and John […]
I was watching Rajdeep Sardesai getting into a blather on the VIP culture on CNN-IBN the other day. It appears that a Member of Parliament missed his connecting flight from Mumbai to Indore as his flight from Goa had been delayed. The Honourable MP had to spend the night in Mumbai. The DGCA has now asked the private […]
The other day I was watching the rerun of a popular comedy show on TV with my wife. I found that out of the six main characters in the show- a man and his wife, a grandmother and an aunt with two women from the neighbourhood- as many as three female characters were being played by men. In […]
On a scenic hill top in Munnar, we noticed a small coffee stall and decided to stop for a break. The stall was run by a young, chatty guy who showed us his village located at the foot of the hill… not very far. We could see a church and a few quaint houses down […]
The other day my wife, newspaper in hand, interrupted my happy commune with my cup of tea and asked, “what is this ‘recuse’ business? Why is this chap recusing himself from editorial duties?” Glad to get in a word sideways in the house first thing in the morning, I pontificated as to how judges who perceived a […]
The Indian Railways have introduced a mandatory training program for their staff. It is imperative that every single official in the Indian Railways, right from the signalman to the station masters to the Mechanical Engineers not just undergo this training, it is absolutely vital that they pass this program with flying colours. Their jobs are […]
The Company Theatre was formed by Sheeba Chadha, Atul Kumar, Manish Chawdhary and Sanjeev Sharma in 1993 in New Delhi. This year it celebrates two decades of creativity, laughter, tears, toil, struggle and triumph. In a country addicted to cinema and cricket, for a theatre group to have come so far and created a new mindscape […]
Tulfes is the most beautiful village I have ever seen. There are flowers everywhere, fat cats clean their whiskers on wood benches; apricot trees (yes trees) clamber up house walls; goats graze in fenced enclosures, horses neigh under trees, a beautiful church with paintings on stone walls stands sleepily at the corner and there is […]
We hire a nine seater from Hertz at the airport the next day for the staggering figure of Rs 90,000 a week. It was much cheaper when we had checked from India but we didn’t book then and now it’s too late for regrets. The guys flash their newly acquired International driving licenses (Rs 500 […]
Jet lagged and tired after 11 hours of flight, we land in Vienna. It is raining. We press our noses against the window of the taxi that is taking us to our hotel, zipping across the wet roads with some classical music playing softly in the background. It has cost us 70 Euros (nearly Rs […]