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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Aatish Taseer straddles many worlds within one. The legacy of being an Indian, the son of a Sikh mother and a Pakistani father, and a writer who draws his material from pluralism and divides, from two nations that though hacked in two bleeding halves share a strangely collusive relationship with each other, from people who […]
What is the value of a person whose dawn breaks on streets or railway stations who sips tea at dingy canteens each day whose sells scrap to live who sleeps under an empty sky Who is he in the city of dreams? I don’t know. Perhaps he is a mascot of disparity, inequality of empty […]
To my dear henpecked husband, No I don’t intend to insult you, unlike our society ever ready with many tags that aim to degrade you, to question your testosterone levels and to reinforce its archaic, misogynistic beliefs on you so as to snuff out the slightest glimmer of hope for change. To me the word […]
What is memory? A place you no longer live in? What is history? A street that has been renamed? Are boundaries only geographical? Can they be erased and redrawn? And when memory, geography and history can all be given a political context, what do you remember? The human experience or its politicised version. Questions like […]
Last year, over 100 Broadway stars, directors, producers, musicians, choreographers, designers and technicians gathered in front of the police station in Times Square, New York, while a poem titled ‘I Can’t Breathe‘ was rendered by Daniel J Watts. This was done to register a protest and start a conversation about police violence, which had claimed […]
Every Bangalorean has a Church Street memory. From NASA, the grounded spaceship cum pub in the mid nineties to RR restaurant which was supposedly the favourite of Raj Kapoor for its Gongura chutney, avakai pickle, gunpowder and the secret recipes from Guntur and Nellore that sang to you from a plantain leaf. Dahlia, the little Japanese eatery […]
Someone suggested I watch The Fault In Our Stars for a change of perspective. Instead I watched the movie to be reminded of something I believed in but had forgotten about. Pain demands to be felt. It is easier to fall into someone else’s arms at the end of a relationship. It is easier to find […]
When we call young HR professional Theja Harjani, she is in the bylanes of Shivajinagar, distributing blankets to the homeless. “I do this around Christmas every year and this is the fifth year,” she says. She became sensitive to the plight of the homeless when, on her way back home after a night shift, she […]
In a city thrumming with festive cheer, the monastic stone structure on Hosur Road, synonymous with the Little Sisters of the Poor, reveals just a few overtures to Christmas. A crib, a tree, some modest festoons bring cheer to the elderly inmates being served a modest lunch, with the help of two young […]
Perspective. That sets what we see apart from what really exists. Like the blind-folded men who touched different parts of an elephant and proclaimed that a trunk was the whole elephant or perhaps the tail was, we see the world in our likeness. When in reality, as Rajkumar Hirani’s PK reminds a religious absolutist, “You […]
Actor and media personality Shenaz Treasury has had an eventful week. As a spontaneous reaction to the Uber rape case in Delhi, she posted an open letter on her Facebook page. The letter was addressed to influential thought leaders in India, all of them men incidentally. She shared personal episodes of violation and stated that […]
Just a few days before December 16, the second anniversary of the Nirbhaya tragedy, actor, producer and activist Dia Mirza was in town. The Uber rape case was on her mind, as were the sexual crimes against young girls in Bengaluru’s schools. She said, “What kind of man rapes a woman… a little girl? This […]