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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Decades before Article 15, a certain film delivered a stunning cinematic punch line against oppression. A woman of privilege who lives in the “upper” regions of a fictional city, appears in front of men who have gathered to decide whether a nullah running through the “lower” parts of the city is dirty or not. The […]
“You have to break up a nation first if you want to put its pieces together the way you want.” These words attributed to Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign manager Steve Bannon sent chills down my spine. The Great Hack, a Netflix documentary about the Cambridge Analytica scandal and how the company played a key role […]
Onir’s anthology I Am (2010) remains one of the most deeply felt and insightful cinematic statements on Kashmir where Juhi Chawla’s Megha (a Kashmiri Pandit) and Manisha Koirala’s Rubina (a Kashmiri Muslim) connect after twenty years of estrangement amid barbed wires, abandoned, crumbling homes with bullet riddled walls and layers upon layers of anger and […]
The rehabilitation of those tainted by the #MeToo movement has begun in the Hindi film industry. On June 1, just before the release of Super 30’s first trailer, director Vikas Bahl, accused of sexual harassment by a former employee of the now defunct Phantom Films, was given a clean chit by an “internal committee.” The said committee […]
Says a woman cop in Unbelievable, a wrenching new Netflix original, “Rape has three crime scenes. The body of the victim. The body of the rapist. And the place where the crime actually happens.” The series also adds another crime scene to the list without naming it. The mind of the victim. Against which, a […]
Aarey Milk Colony was envisioned in 1949 by Dara Nusserwanji Khurody (winner of 1963 Ramon Magsaysay Award with Dr Verghese Kurien) and inaugurated with the planting of a sapling by the then PM Jawaharlal Nehru in 1951. Over the decades, it has grown to be one of Mumbai’s most cherished lung spaces. Weeks before the […]
The first picture is from the protests in Delhi’s Ramjas college in 2017. The second is from the ongoing JNU protests. There was another picture that I can’t find now. “Apno ki khushi aapki zimmedari hai, ” said a public service message on a board in the picture. And right in front of it […]
That viral video of Kangana Ranaut on a dummy horse without legs , issuing a blood curdling cry is emblematic of the kind of fake nationalism we are being asked to adhere to these days. It allows the lady in question to diss anyone she dislikes from Alia Bhatt to Shabana Azmi without watching her […]
It’s the summer holidays and I am content on so many levels. I have a good job, I have a home which I love and above all a wonderful, supportive family. This year, we’ve had a glorious summer. We’ve had hot, lazy days, barbecues and picnics and the temperature has only just dropped after about […]
I dreamt of many young girls who looked exactly like each other. All wearing purple. All playing , holding hands and perhaps singing on the roof of a Sufi dargah. The sky had birds, pigeons if I recall correctly. My dreams bring me peace when life can’t. I can’t even meet her eyes in that picture […]
I can’t get this image out of my head. A young survivor of the latest mass shooting in the US, clinging to a parent, with a Valentine’s Day balloon clutched in the hand. And yet another image. Of screaming children raising their hands in the air as a SWAT team breaks into an auditorium. And one […]
August 1947 was a watershed moment in the history of the Indian sub-continent. India – the jewel in the British crown – became an independent nation as it broke away from its imperial past of over 200 years. The joyful moment however was short-lived as independence unfortunately came at a heavy price in the form […]