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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“Men who want to be feminists need not be given a space in feminism. They need to take the space they have in society and make it feminist”. -Kelley Temple For some reason, this year began with a number of my male friends accusing my writing of being “alienating” and “scary”. I was told (by […]
”They said, for the sake of the country… But the country isn’t the earth beneath our feet, it is the people. Have any of you ever spared them a glance? Oppression for the sake of the country is oppression of the country. But you won’t understand. Travel as far on the road as you can […]
Sometime back, Aamir Khan was reviled because his wife was disturbed by what she read in the newspapers and for the sake of their son, wondered if they should settle in another country. Khan said loud and clear that it shocked and devastated him that his wife could feel that level of fear. In the […]
I am taking up yet another commercial rife with regressive clichés about Indian women and their “place”. This one, a part of Mother Dairy’s “Ma Jaisi Koi Nahin” campaign almost made me barf harder than a glass of sour milk. Watch the ad here (and try not to cringe, I dare you). It begins with […]
Watching Bhupendra Chaubey’s contempt for Sunny Leone (He did not even care to pronounce her name correctly) in a brutal interview on CNN IBN reminded me of an episode many years ago when my son was about six or seven and as a working mother, I had taken him to a media event I was […]
The ad I’m taking on today is actually one that’s being hailed as progressive and gender inclusive by many on social media. That’s right; I’m talking about BIBA’s new “Change is Beautiful” ad. However, I’m disappointed to report that it’s not as ground breaking and stereotype changing as the makers would have you believe. Here’s […]
The ad I am reviewing today is by Everest Masalas. The commercial starts with a woman in her office, thinking of, or rather vividly picturing her daughter asking her “Aaj kya banega?” (What will you make today?). She goes home, looking mildly frustrated and asks her two kids and husband, “roz roz kya banaun?”(What am I […]
When a friend of mine asked me to review Angry Indian Goddesses, I was quite apprehensive. I don’t have what is generally considered “good taste” in films. I’m a little ashamed to admit that my films of choice are cheesy chick flicks that end with confessions of love and kisses in the snow. However, I […]
The media is constantly bombarding us with images: billboards, commercials, films, sitcoms- all of which have a huge impact on the way we think, feel and talk about society. Among the millions of messages the mainstream media sends us every day- a particularly damaging one is of the representation of gender roles. Regressive, damaging stereotypes […]
How does one explain evil? Paris? Syria? The tragedy of a refugee who is now a non-person in the absence of a home, a geographical, historical, personal reference point? Who has seen a missile tear into his home, his wife, his daughter and who now has to start again with what remains in a country […]
As I wait for the city to limp back to life between power cuts, internet troubles and cell phones with no signal, I feel like I have been stripped down to the bare minimum. No more escaping reality by drowning oneself in technology. Suddenly there is too much free time and too many people around […]
A minute before I was about to write this blog, I wrestled with an array of thoughts. Should I write about this? Should the world know? Is it necessary? Then I gave room to this thought: It might help somebody. And, that’s enough! I just finished Jerry Pinto’s Em and The Big Hoom. As always, […]