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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When Manas National Park was removed from the UNESCO World Heritage Danger List in June this year, there was a lot to cheer about. The hard work put in by conservation groups has been recognised, but a bigger danger lies in the future — one that can virtually wash away the national park. Well, almost. […]
The brutal beating of senior advocate Prashant Bhushan in a Supreme Court chamber for his comments on Kashmir has established one thing that the art of graceful disagreement is truly lost. Even something as apolitical as hindi film music on YouTube attracts hate mongers stewing in rabid nationalism,regionalism or religion and politics. A popular website […]
A writer came to me with a script today and his own story was more interesting than the one he had written. I might have offended him by spending far more time listening to him about his own search for recognition than listening to the reams of material on his laptop he tried to engage me with. This young boy […]
Ambition has no gender. Fulfilment in life and work is not a gender specific pursuit and yet somehow, marriage, family and professional success often become chemically disparate when it comes to women in India. Are Indian women really free to be ambitious? Can they truly be unbound as they break open boxes, knock at glass […]
In July this year, the Editor of Mint, R Sukumar, created a bit of a flutter when he wrote of an anchor with a business news channel who got three times her earlier salary, for agreeing to leave the top two buttons of her shirt unbuttoned, after switching jobs. Sukumar admitted that the column was […]
[This article was published in ‘Communalism Combat’s’ tenth anniversary issue in 2003. However, the arguments still remain relevant.] 10 years is a numerically compulsive occasion for retrospection. Both for Javed Anand, Teesta Setalvad and their team, and for those well-wishers like us who have seen them wage a lonely battle since 1993. The introspection bit […]
She could hear the soft, feeble, whimpering cries somewhere next to her. Her mind which was in an anaesthetic haze slowly began to focus back on the source of the sound but the excruciating pain made the task difficult. She wanted to relapse back into the blissful oblivion of unconsciousness just for some more time […]
The Supreme Court, in 2006, had passed a landmark judgment directing all State governments and the Union government to reform the way police forces function all over the country. One of the directives was that Police Complaints Authorities (PCAs) should be set up in all states. The intention was to make the police accountable for […]
The chaotic streets of Cambodia’s capital give a sense of the turbulent history of this land of contradictions and surprises. As our car nudges its way inch-by-inch through the melee, where motorbikes and luxury cars jostle with heavily laden bullock carts at the point where Charles de Gaulle Boulevard intersects with Mao Tse Tung Road, […]
After a human tragedy, the debri is cleared, remains of lives gathered and mourned and then every year, we revisit in our mind, the Ground Zero of grief and loss and try to make sense of it. Tragedies where innocent lives are lost cannot be contextualised and justified. But yes, some tragedies are better documented […]
I was a tad surprised when he told me that he wouldn’t be able to meet me late evening since it was late, and he would have to return home. You don’t always expect guys to rush homewards just because it is a trifle late. We had initially planned to meet early evening, but another […]
When you look at a tragedy, it is not the magnitude of statistics that counts in the end but the human cost, the value of each life lost. Yes, we are a democracy and that is why even after losing so many innocent citizens, the unprotected,the unprivileged, the unacknowledged ordinary people in countless terrorist attacks, […]