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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I promised myself that I would never write about Baby Falak or Baby Afreen. To write farewell notes to battered to death babies is such an inadequate response. We feel sorry, revolted, angry, maybe shed a tear or two. Write sentimental or passionate elegies and we go back to our lives and our realities. And […]
The Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has recognized the harsh reality of malnutrition in India by saying “India‘s “unacceptably high” levels of child malnutrition are a “national shame”. Our State women and child welfare minister Varsha Gaikwad in the Assembly’s winter session last year in Nagpur admitted on the floor of the house that only 68 children were dying […]
For the last few months, I have turned away from news on the television as well as the morning papers every single day. I had decided to see what my life would be like if I were to know nothing about what is happening around me. Obviously I had no choice but to know what was going […]
Women suffer. By habit, choice and circumstance. We feel inadequate most of the time. As home makers we wish we were out there, validating ourselves by earning money. When we have careers, we worry that the kids are growing up without good food on the table, without ironed clothes, without supervised homework. We don’t ever […]
This is not an authored article but we at Unboxed Writers feel bound to share this press release issued by the Free Soni Sori Campaign (Courtesy Kamayani Bali Mahabal). We must do more than just read this story. We must join our voices to make such atrocities impossible. In a global show of solidarity marking […]
This letter was published on the author’s blog a few days ago and subsequently Mr Shyam Benegal has distanced himself from Vedanta..we publish this piece here to inform more readers why it is important to see through Vedanta’s attempt to mislead the masses with its advertising clout. Dear Mr Shyam Benegal Greetings ! I met you first […]
“What we really heal when we are intimate with someone is our relationship with our own self.” – Deepak Chopra. Actually speaking the truth about my self is the most difficult thing to do since there is so much self righteousness ingrained from childhood. A childhood that is sadly always trying to fit into an […]
Now this is how a Punjabi describes a non-Punjabi wedding, ‘Hmm…It was quite simple… They had only upma for breakfast…’ and so on. You cannot miss the disappointing tone – a typical Punjabi, expecting a totally different scenario at a wedding. Even my spontaneous response was that of surprise, “Oh, really?” But later on I […]
A journalist friend says she feels murderous, well almost, when she receives press releases around Valentine’s Day with the opening pitch,”Its that time of the year again!” And am sure if the PR companies could afford it, the invites to various pink champagne events would come with heart shaped cakes, a cupid blowing kisses and […]
Like many expats I too went through the various phases of resettling back in India: ‘touristy’ excitement, disorientation, annoyance and frustration, gradual adaptation and finally bi-culturality that has now allowed me to find my own sense of belonging in what I still consider my hometown, Bangalore. This is not the Bengaluru I left in 1978. […]
Living in India, as all Indians know, is a daily struggle between you and your God. If you’re poor, it’s for survival; if you’re not, it’s for the patience to deal with the lack of fundamental civic services and civil liberties. Through it all, we ask that perennially pesky question to our Maker that […]
Who is afraid of Salman Rushdie? The fundmentalists? Politicians playing minority politics? Ordinary readers and writers who just want to read and write without any threat to their life and limb at the Jaipur Literary Festival? Alright so, it is absolutely safe for a cop in a police station in Punjab to beat a woman to pulp but not safe for authors to […]