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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Garv: Pride and Honour was a movie Salman Khan starred in 2004. The film was about how the righteous brother and upright cop played by Salman avenges the rape of his sister. We will get to the irony of that theme later but this film directed by Puneet Issar was insufferable, tacky and turned rape into, like […]
Orlando. I remember you. Sitting right in the heart of Florida, you are a place where dreams come true. Where magic unfolds. Where a confluence of people from around the world come to enjoy dream vacations. Sunshine, sweet oranges, laughter, fun and good times – that’s what you are all about. I remember spending some […]
One of the reasons given to explain the bleeding cuts inflicted on Abhishek Chaubey’s Udta Punjab is that Shahid Kapoor’s Tommy ‘Gabru’ Singh swears when drugged and even when sober! The problem with the film however is not profanity or vulgarity. In any case, the current head of the Central Board of Film Certification of India, Pahlaj Nihalani’s […]
It was a moment of vindication though she was not looking for one when Kalki Koechlin walked across the stage in Rashtrapati Bhavan to accept a well-earned honour for her role in Margarita with a Straw. This was a film that normalised and mainstreamed a cerebral palsy patient as a full-bodied, ferociously intelligent protagonist. The […]
Remember the Dalit girl being dragged through the streets of Muktsar? And Pushpa and Murti, the Dalit teenaged girls in Badaun in 2014 whose rape and hanging was referred to by the shocked Western media as India’s Mango tree case? A case that was dismissed by CBI director Ranjit Sinha with this statement, “Our probe […]
The death of Pratyusha Bannerjee underscores the distance between Indian television’s most popular narratives and reality where women do not always have monochromatic inner lives and a monumental forbearance that is almost as fake as the jewels worn by the Simars, the Gopis and the Anandis. ** The irony could not be more cruel. Pratyusha […]
An old woman bashes a bunch of puppies to death because she cannot stand the noise they and their mother are making in the neighbourhood. Visuals of a man killing stray dogs in Delhi go viral. A mother elephant and her babies are stoned randomly on the Wayanad-Mysore NH. A man is beaten and tied […]
Many years ago when Javed Akhtar along with Shabana Azmi was touring the country to present the stage adaptation of Shaukat Azmi’s book Kaifi Aur Main, I had asked him at a press meet if the Ganga Jamni tehzeeb he represented so beautifully would fade away after him along with a few remaining voices […]
I’m taking up another ad as part of ‘Conditioning is for Hair, Not Minds’ – a series in collaboration with The Spoilt Modern Indian Woman. This one is by Whisper Ultra. The ad review suggestion was made by award-winning bloggerSheena Dabholkar, who is also the co-author of this post. So let’s begin. I was sent a […]
“Kaanch ki haandi ko kitni baar chadhaenge ?” How many times will you put a glass bowl on flames and pretend to cook something in it? Last night, this question was asked by Kanhaiya Kumar as he addressed a charged gathering of hundreds of young JNU scholars who with joyful irreverence laughed at […]
Hello again! The ad I am taking up for the “Conditioning is for Hair, Not Minds’ series in collaboration with The Spoilt Modern Indian Woman is by TVS tyres- watch it here and cringe once again at Indian TVs favourite misogynist, Kapil Sharma. The commercial starts with Sharma offering a lift to a young man holding […]
Here’s the next edition of ‘Conditioning is for Hair, not Minds’ in collaboration with The Spoilt Modern Indian Woman. The ad I am taking up is Amazon’s new groundbreaking (not) social experiment, titled “When a Woman Shops”. Check it out here. The ad begins with a group of men, in a generic, posh, urban living room, talking […]