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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In 1996, one Father Verghese in charge of Bangalore Oniyavara Seva Coota (BOSCO), a non governmental organisation working with the young at risk in the city since 1980, had responded to a late evening call by this reporter and come to MG Road to counsel a destitute teenager addicted to white ink. BOSCO, in retrospect […]
There is a scene in Shonali Bose’s incredibly direct and brave film Margarita With A Straw where Laila (Kalki Koechlin), the protagonist is passing by a library in her wheelchair and looking through a glass wall at ‘normal’ people on the other side. This glass wall, as the film teaches us is not just something […]
A certain section of Internet users need scapegoats and heroes. They need constant debate. About whether the cat is coming down or going up the staircase. Whether a dress is blue or white and gold. Whether Prince Harry was right in refusing a selfie with a fan. Some of us want to see the last […]
Director and writer Shonali Bose after the painfully direct Amu (2005), a film that revisited the 1984 Sikh riots, is back with another story that is close to her heart. Margarita With A Straw draws from a personal tragedy and also the life of a close relative who suffers from Cerebral Palsy ( A […]
The girl mocked into silence by a devastating shaming campaign is speaking again.To claim the right to tell her story. She, who became fodder for 49 rap songs, recalled in a recent TED talk, with poise collected over the span of a decade or more, the names she was called by the media, by online […]
When you call activist Harish Iyer, you hear instead a hilarious warning by Quick Gun Murugan to not waste too much of the gentleman’s time. Compliment Harish on all the work he is doing for rape survivors and LGBT rights and he feigns sadness and says, “But all this is not enough to get me […]
Suzette Jordan was not a name. Or a face, Or a person. For most part of the last years of her life, she was just a news headline. A controversial rape story. A cautionary tale about what a single woman must never do on a night out with her girl friends. She should not go […]
It was the beginning of a new academic year. The entire school was back after a break. It was my first year at work after marriage. Many of them at school knew about this as I had invited them for the function before we broke for the holidays. As I entered the school office I […]
How do global business leaders manage their time? Very efficiently, if Vinita Bali’s example is anything to go by. She graciously takes calls from unfamiliar journalists but will not agree to a random interview. She wants you to do your homework and not ask scattered questions but once she begins to talk, there is no […]
Purple Skies, a documentary about lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders was recently screened at the Bangalore Queer Film Festival and the film’s director Sridhar Rangayan, also a profound thought leader of the LGBT movement and a conversation starter as far as gay rights go in India, was in town. When the award-winning filmmaker, editor of India’s […]
“This incident was a storm which came and went. And what was there before it, and what is left behind after it, this is what we need to see.” (Nirbhaya’s father) This is the parting message that Leslee Udwin’s film ‘India’s Daughter’ closes with. And this is what the film proposes to do. To see whether […]
Subamma was old, helpless and on the streets. Being paralysed from waist down she lived on just one spot on the earth – in the corner of a busy street in a small town in South India. She seemed to have appeared from nowhere. One morning, office goers found her lying there, wearing a torn saree caked with […]