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 important thing to learn from this time in human history is that appealing to people’s better judgement, their higher selves, their intelligence and sense of decency and right and wrong no longer works. If you appeal to their baser selves, their misogyny and irrationality, their hatred for the loathed ‘others’ (be they women, the […]
How easy it is to judge folks whose shoes we have not walked in. The largely lonely battle Karan Johar fought to save his film from hyper nationalist bullies and his desperate video which I could not bring myself to watch, the patriotism tax of Rs five crore and the backlash that followed did not […]
American satirist Sarah Silverman recently sat down with New Yorker’s editor Andy Borowitz and said that Trump was infact a mirror of a section of the American society that believes in the xenophobic, narrow version of American nationalism. A nationalism that hates, excludes and wants to always be ‘Number One.” In what she asked, […]
In 1987, Roopkuvarba Kanwar, a Rajput woman was celebrated by a huge number of people in her community for committing Sati at Deorala village of Sikar district in Rajasthan. She was just 18 and had been married for just eight months to one Maal Singh Shekhawat. Thousands of people watched her immolation into a heap of […]
Kaale kale pig pe peeli peeli daant”, reads the letter somebody placed inside my desk. It takes my eight-year old mind a few seconds to process the message scribbled in pencil. To realise, that because of my plump build and dark complexion, I am the aforementioned “kaala pig with the peeli daant” to some of […]
Don’t be surprised by Prem Chopra ji gaslighting Tannishtha Chatterjee and telling her that her rage doesn’t count just because he did not get offended when he was called bald on Comedy Nights Bachao. Yes, she and her dark skin need the publicity, Mr Chopra doesn’t. Also please do not be surprised by the Pink […]
One newspaper memory lingers from the terrifying months of the Kargil war. There were two photos side by side on the front page of a national daily. One celebrating India’s win over Pakistan in a World Cup match and another one referring to the Army recapturing a key sector, if I remember correctly. In their […]
The country is suffering, while the elite are engaged in Facebook wars. Nothing is going to change till each of us makes up his or her mind to fight patriarchy, caste, communalism and injustice. The working class continues to exist on a pittance, and the politicians continue to roll in rivers of money. I was […]
“… cutting up women is a sport older than cricket but just as popular and equally full of obscure rituals and intricate rules that everyone seems to know…” ~ Mohammed Hanif, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti I’m reading Our Lady of Alice Bhatti as I travel trip my way across India, meeting women for the newest campaign of our NGO- an […]
After spending my formative years in a terrorism scarred state, I feel almost invulnerable on the streets of Bangalore. This is a fundamentally gentle city, usually too diffident and polite to give offence. This is the city where I fell asleep during a bus commute in the early nineties and woke up in the middle […]
No, there is no real evidence that Mr Bachchan’s daughter-in-law had to marry a tree before she could marry his son but a gentlemanly, deep-seated patriarchy has long been a part of who he is. Many years ago, on Karan Johar’s talk show, he expressed his sincere admiration and absolute respect for Kajol because she […]
Feminism is evil. Feminism destroys families. Feminism is anti-men. Feminism teaches women to see men as perverts, bullies and misogynists. Anyone who has had anything to do with feminism has heard these sentences being repeated again and again in different ways. A cursory search on the Internet for the memes on feminism throws up […]