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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Living in the cities, news of disappearing farmlands and increasing numbers of farmers’ suicides is just another media story for most of us. But when a creative artist chooses to bring the harsh truth right at our doorstep, there is no way one can look the other way. New York based Kiran Chandra, diminutive in […]
So the Talwars are back in the dock for their daughter’s murder. Last year, I read in a magazine what they had to go through during the erratic investigation of their daughter’s murder. The account of their misery was written by someone who knew the couple and can vouch for the fact that the good doctor has “gentle hands. What […]
In the early 90s, during the last gasps of terrorism in Punjab, terrorists in a desperate bid to penetrate the social fabric passed a diktat that women will only dress in salwar kameez and saffron dupattas. The argument was that jeans and other visible symbols of modernity were against tradition and culture. The fear of […]
So in a snazzy Internet centre where am sitting and filing this, a young shop assistant asked his senior, “So what happened to that Anna Hazare thing?” The senior shook his head confusedly and gestured that he had things to do. That more or less sums up what has happened if not to the anti-corruption […]
If the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government was still looking for obvious signs of a slowdown, it cannot get find one better than this. India’s new car sales this October fell the most in more than a decade in the face of rising fuel costs, expensive loans, and prolonged inflationary pressures. Sales of passenger […]
Whenever photographer Clare Arni steps on Bangalore’s MG Road, young vendors of cliches flock around her, mistaking her for a foreigner. The moment she starts chatting them up in mellifluous Kannada, they realise their mistake. Only an Indian can speak an Indian language with a complete understanding of local particularities and without a trace of […]
I am an Indian based out of Singapore and this is a short chronicle of my feelings about my home since I left it to make a living in a foreign country in January 2006. My husband and I moved to Singapore in pursuit of our personal dreams and aspirations around six years back. Our […]
Every Indian at some time or another has come face-to-face with communal disquiet. A few such memories and stories found their way in my first book Perfect Eight. For a young girl brought up in a uncompromisingly secular home, the Babri Masjid demolition was a devastating event. As were the 1984 riots. Both shattered this […]
It was a sunny winter afternoon, and as cold as it gets in West Bengal. We, a group of journalists, were on a press trip to Mahishadal in West Bengal’s Midnapore district. It was one of those occasions when seniors would be tied up, giving a rookie an opportunity to report. With barely a year […]
I am obsessed about this country. I love it to the point of hating it and then tumbling back into loving it all over again. I hate the callousness. The chuck-a-plastic-wrapper-outta-the-window attitude. I hate people spitting all over the place. Wonder if they would spit on their dining table. I hate the chalta-hai (anything goes) […]
Terror is not a body count in a news report or a headline for those who have lived through it or lost a loved one to it. It is the twitch of a lost limb, the memory of a loved face and a sense of random victimhood and the question, why it had to be […]
More than four persons per day were killed in police and judicial custody in India between 2001 and 2010. The total of 14,231 persons includes 1,504 deaths in police custody and 12,727 deaths in judicial custody from 2001-2002 to 2009-2010 as per the cases submitted to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC).The New Delhi-based Asian […]