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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Shortly after I landed in Agartala towards the end of 1988, some seemingly philosophical questions confronted me. All for the wrong reasons, you know. Not because I was a Bengali who loved squandering time on theoretical balderdash. This was, after all, my first job and I intended to retain it. Come hell or high water. […]
The first time that I set my eyes on her, she managed to steal my undivided attention. As she flitted from person to another, I sat there a bit mesmerised, a bit intrigued. Not quite like a dead leaf of the fall, yet she almost went past with gay abandon, virtually rudderless. And then landed […]
I have always suspected that we Indians are schizophrenic. On one hand, we send our children to the best schools and colleges, hoping that they would get a seat in the best professional colleges across the world, earn money in dollars, travel to Hawaii and the Far East for holidays. On the other, we would […]
When a chord in struck simultaneously in many hearts and a vast number of people are stirred by a common cause, a mass movement is born. A mass movement is triggered because a cause moves the sentiments and/or justifies the rationale of many. It is a breakthrough of the seemingly weak against the so-called powerful. […]
What we felt today was a surge of pride. In Indian democracy. In the idea of people power. It was time for the two to meet. Because for a long time, they have existed in isolation. Today instead of uncultured politicians throwing chairs and abuses at each other, we saw in Lok Sabha, a certain […]
It is really upsetting to hear Kiran Bedi’s language and public statements like, “When the resolution is passed, the parliament will become a Pavitra Mandir.” The parliament is NOT a mandir, Madam, it is an institution. A democratic institution which has rules that must be obeyed. To say “jab tak resolution pass nahi hota , […]
I sincerely hope that the 74-year-old leader will now end his fast. Kiran Bedi proclaimed recently that Anna Hazare will continue the fast until the Jan Lokpal Bill is passed. Why doesn’t Madam go on a fast herself? Jokes apart, Anna Hazare should be a responsible leader now. He has established himself as leader of so […]
She woke up with a start; it was way past her regular time. She hurried through her morning chores and rushed to get to the water tap. Her toddler son on one hip, a huge stainless steel pot on another, she stood patiently in the line of harried women waiting for the welcome sound of […]
Indians, by and large, don’t need to be told about the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, leave alone reminded. We know Mohandas Gandhi had remarked at the time: “Plassey laid the foundation of the British Empire; Amritsar has shaken it.” We remember Rabindranath Tagore renouncing his knighthood given by the British. We also have been told of […]
The tell-tale photographs of the street protests in Srinagar and elsewhere in Kashmir that raged during the summer of last year are difficult to forget. Pitched battles were fought between Kashmiri youths and Indian security personnel. Indian authorities came down on the protests with a heavy hand and on the protesting youths too. Much was […]
When the burqa debate was raging across the world, a young Pakistani women’s rights activist, who doesn’t wear a headscarf as a rule, travelled to Jalalabad in Afghanistan to see for herself what it meant to wear one. This is her story. Gulalai Ismail, a 24-year-old university student in Islamabad, needed to go to Afghanistan […]
This write-up was originally penned for a friend’s online satire mag way back in August 2001 but re-publishing it seems to be a good idea. My colleagues were exhilarated. They were agitated too. So the woman who, they claimed, had killed hundreds and got away with it, had finally been gunned down. Quite rightly so, […]