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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In Pyaasa, Guru Dutt’s 1957 classic, the protagonist Vijay (He too is an anti-hero who takes on the establishment but his weapons unlike the edgy Vijay we saw in the 70s are poems, not punches) goes wandering in the lanes where young women are being bought and sold as objects of sexual gratification and sings, […]
Just heard that a young woman who had been raped and set on fire was left to die by the roadside just around the corner from where I live a few days back. She was found by a neighbour’s dog who was out for a walk. The police whisked her away and there has been […]
I’ve been suffering from serious case of writer’s block for the last few weeks- every time I sat down to write a new post I’d give up after a few minutes because I didn’t feel like I had anything specific to say- nothing had agitated me enough, nothing had made me angry enough. Fortunately or […]
A recent article by The Economic Times’ resident editor, Mr Sriram Ramakrishnan, titled “Left-liberals in India completely unaware of despotic regimes“, came across as one of the most blatantly biased and factually incorrect opinion pieces from an editor in recent times. You will hopefully excuse my choice of words. Mr Ramakrishnan does not leave […]
A few weeks ago, I met author Shashi Deshpande to interview her in the wake of her resignation from the Sahitya Akademi Council. She spoke about her reasons to quit in a pragmatic, matter-of-fact way.She is not on Twitter or Facebook and unlike the best-selling authors of this generation, does not feel the need to […]
Writer’s note : This post was published first in The New Indian Express, Bengaluru on October 12 In a tranquil home that is over 35 years old but is as timelessly evocative as a piece of great literature, author and Padma Shri awardee Shashi Deshpande is nursing a cup of tea. She is grateful that the […]
We all have Rashomon realities. We may be living one story but those watching us maybe seeing something very different. The Rashomon effect of course is the offshoot of a Kurosawa classic where colliding interpretations swirl around a crime. Not hard to see why Vishal Bhardwaj would choose the same technique to tell the story […]
Imagine this: You’re at a party with a bunch of your friends. You’re a little buzzed. Eventually the music dies down and you all end up crashing at your friend’s house. You wake up the next morning and you know something’s not quite right. Something happened but you’re not ready to talk about it. You […]
Actor, author, columnist, passionate aesthete, Padma Shri Tom Alter has just arrived in the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore to deliver a lecture on ‘Sports & Arts in Modern India’. If he is tired, it doesn’t show because Tom is used to being many things all at once. Over the last few days, he has […]
“As the picture of the drowned Syrian boy went viral, the emotional outpourings on social media left me somewhat cold,” so says an article in an online magazine, trying to convey that though the death of the young child, (clad fetchingly, it says, in a red T-shirt and blue jeans) was tragic, it showed […]
“The girl looks alright, is a classical dancer preparing for her first stage performance, works as a teacher, earns a decent salary. When she met us she said she would continue performing on stage if the extended family permits else would give up dancing. She also said that after marriage she would continue to […]
We have been here before but let us do a body count, once again.Safdar Hashmi is a distant memory, so he does not count. He was murdered In 1989, while performing a street play. Rationalist Dr. Narendra Dabholkar (65) was shot dead near Pune’s Shanivar Peth area in 2013. Not too long ago, anti-toll campaigner […]