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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The thing about an Indian thali is that chances are slim any one of your taste buds will ever sit idle. It’s a constant explosion of flavours outdoing each other in pungency and sweetness. And the best part is once you are hooked, you keep going back. The INK Conference, in association with TED, […]
There are many beautiful cliches about Mumbai, most of them true. The one you can absolutely not argue with is that it is hospitable down to its last square inch. Most of Mumbai’s fabled energy comes from that. From the fact that it welcomes everyone. No one can politicise the heart of Mumbai though yes, they […]
The sky was incredibly radiant and the sun was shining as bright as a new coin above our heads. I heard complaints about the scorching heat from my younger brother Boltu and sister Sheenu, the youngest in the family. My older sister Durga…her whereabouts are not known ever since she got married. We are all two years apart. I am approximately 12 as […]
If you live in Bangalore, hacked limbs of trees piled up by the roadside are commonplace. Avenues once drenched in the deep, dense shade of tree canopies are today rubble strewn, choking with traffic. Trees that have been part of our cityscape and memories for decades are suddenly found butchered to death and heaped together in […]
Maria Susairaj (needs no introduction, does she?) has walked out free, with law and a smiling god by her side and as I write this, she has zoomed off to the airport in a swanky tourist car with police security, to possibly fly into the Bangalore sunset. This after being accused of destruction of evidence, in this case, a body chopped in hundreds […]
Galloping away on a wish That the family has no hungry day And the night passes by easily Like the river. The hilly terrains and breathtakingly beautiful places beckon tourists from across the world. The tourists, beckon horses and ponies. And the horses and ponies are the source of income for many. Yes, ponies feed […]
One Sunday morning, sipping my cup of coffee, I happened to glance through the matrimonial column and literally choked. No, I did not find a suitable husband for myself, far from that. But what did draw the breath out of me was the obsession with fair complexion. There was not one single advertisement, which didn’t mention, “Wanted fair bride/bridegroom.” I mean, […]
VS Naipaul’s comment on women writers (The Nobel Prize-winning author declared that women’s writing is “unequal” to his, during an event at the recent Hay Festival), is scarcely worth responding to. Surely all writers know that we leave it to readers and time to judge our writing? And surely it is in bad taste to declare, […]
Editor’s note: This piece was written by the author as a Facebook note in response to the manner in which young celebrities are speaking out to defend the freedom to drink. Actor Imran Khan, it was reported, intends to file a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) against the Maharashtra government’s decision to raise the legal age limit for alcohol consumption to 25 years. I was touched to see […]
Truth is hard to speak. And harder to live. No one knows that better than a journalist. After 16 years of working in the media and assorted newspapers, I have no illusions left about the purpose of reporting. The hunger for truth does not alone drive the media houses. They tell little but sell a lot more. Yes, new stories […]
About three or four years ago, in a crowded Mumbai restaurant, a male friend, who weighs at least 150 kgs, asked me, “Have you stopped exercising?” A female friend who was with us, and who, since the time I have known her, has put on at least 20 kgs, chimed in, “Yea, you were very […]
In a packed Ranga Shankara auditorium (with producer Nimi Ravindran conscientiously paying auto fares to all those who could not get tickets and had to go home) on a Sunday afternoon, the second last show of Ajay Krishnan’s hit play Butter and Mashed Banana induced tears of laughter. And then some thought. And how is this for a […]