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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She stood on the balcony and gratefully inhaled the heady smells of rain splattered mud, jasmine and cow dung. The sky was clear but it had rained during the day. Memories came flooding back as she gazed at the fronds of coconut trees reaching out from the back yard next door. The colours of the […]
On World Environment Day, I woke up to the smell of burning plastic. It was most probably coming from the garbage dump outside the boundary wall of our building, though I was too diffident to go look. It is not meant to be there, that dump but it grows unmonitored, unchecked everyday. Spilling over the road, claiming space meant […]
There’s a problem with our TV dish antennae in the building. It moves from its original place on the terrace, at least once every month. My mom suspects sabotage; I think it’s just the wind. But because of this, I can’t watch TV until I make a call to the company’s call centre in Indore (We are in Mumbai). […]
Not many people in India knew Syed Saleem Shahzad but his cheerfully round face along with the screaming headlines speaking of torture and murder at the hands of a shadowy entity that must not be spoken about lightly in Pakistan, stirred a deep sorrow. Shahzad was a man of truth. He did not play ball […]
Freedom of speech is increasingly becoming an anomaly in India, especially in the creative arts and like theatre personality Nadira Babbar recently said about the absence of collective liberalism, “Sab bura manne ko tayyar baithe hain.” Or as the catchline of the play says, “Don’t you dare say that!” We at Unboxed Writers are proud to announce a web […]
Imagine this. You are floating. Like a dreamy cloud in the starry sky. Like a leaf in a cool pool. Like almond slivers on a hot cup of kahwa. Like a lingering kiss on a cheek. You are still, but it is a moving experience. Staying in a houseboat feels just like that. It’s one […]
It began with Emosanal Attyachar. When I watched Dev D a few years ago, I felt as if my insides had been churned and that Sarat Chandra Chatterjee had died once again. There was nothing wrong cinematically with the film. The first half was visceral and brutally honest about the messy, inner universe of love. The lust, the anger, the impulsive severings that […]
“So what did you get from Kashmir? Pashmeena shawls, saffron, carpets, walnut wood articles?” asked an inquisitive neighbor. “Er…cricket bats,” I replied. She responded with a huge pause. And then I put the receiver away from my ears. “Cricket bats! Who on earth gets cricket bats from Kashmir? Why on earth will one get a […]
It is an accepted paradigm that most cities in India will face a water shortage and that managing sanitation will be a huge challenge. Institutions are taking action albeit slowly. Large scale infrastructure projects are rolling out. Water lines, sewage lines and treatment plants are all coming up. However this will not be sufficient. In […]
Everybody loves a love story, especially a real life one. But, while stories of people who had the courage to break the bounds of convention hold universal appeal, there also exist real life stories of deep and abiding love between people who live out their lives within the shackles of convention, in soul-destroying conditions, and […]
In a world filled with alternatives, one more seductive than the next, Grassroutes offers urban India a taste of rural living. Half a century after the green revolution hit India, our agricultural practices are still subject to the whims of the weather; our farmlands have been split and re-split into acres too meager to afford […]
America has saved the world again. After thousands of civilians served as collateral fodder in the “smoke em out” Bushfire in Iraq and Afghanistan post 9/11, the poster boy of global terrorism is gone. He did not go quietly into the night though and “personally” confronted the US forces after having dodged them for over a decade through cave bunkers and assorted […]