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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Sometime in 2008, Talat Aziz was singing at a concert when the audience began to request a Mehdi Hassan ghazal. Hassan was grievously sick back home in Pakistan but on an impulse, Aziz called him from the stage and put the conversation on speaker mode so that the ailing maestro could hear chants of, […]
There are many ways to find a spiritual connect with life. You can find it in a concert, in a cinema hall, at a bus stop, at an animal shelter, in a book, in rain falling down on parched earth, in your mother’s cooking, in a phrase painted behind an auto, in a dream, in […]
Wo aa rahen hai jo biimaar kii dawaa ke liye Khamosh baithe hain sab chaaraagar duaa ke liye (he is expected to arrive with a cure for my pain..and the healers quietly wait too, with their hands raised in prayer) These lines are from a ghazal Begum Akhtar wrote though few know just what became […]
It is hard to encapsulate the velvet texture of her voice. Not cloyingly sweet but with depth, character and texture. A voice that unmistakably belongs to Bombay Jayashri. The singer and composer was in town to perform at the Bengaluru Ganesha Utsava and chatted minutes before her recital. The first thing to ask her is ofcourse just […]
For most people, radio is about air waves throbbing with music and banter but only a radio professional knows the diligence that goes into packaging seamless content. ** We asked RJ Rashmi Ramachandra just what she did as a programming coordinator at Timbre Media and she responds,”I was responsible for the functioning of Radio Falak […]
“Sirf ehsas hai rooh se mehsoos karo…pyaar ko pyaar hi rehne do koi naam na do.” (It is just a feeling..let the soul revel in it..let love be.. just love..try not to name it) So that in a nutshell is Gulzar for you. A man who does not name the obvious but will articulate what cannot be […]
A few days after Kishore Kumar’s birth anniversary, the ring tone of his son and singer Amit Kumar echoes a song befitting the occasion, Ye mahfil yun hi sajegi.. ye duniyan yun hi chalegi… jo dhadkan kisi ki ruke tum ruko naa..(The celebrations will continue, the world will go on…if a heartbeat stops somewhere..don’t stop […]
Jonzie Kurian was effortlessly natural on air. His humour and sense of music never ever faltered because he understood the medium, grew playfully risque but never crossed the line and never faked an attitude or an accent. It all began when he won a wacky verse contest. The ‘grand prize’ was the chance to sit in […]
Priya Ganapathy, former RJ, also the unforgettable lilt of Lingo Leela and Sister Stella remembers a night in the studios when her playlist was so exciting that she decided to not pack up. She grins, “I loved the playlist so much that I broke the rules and did an eight-hour talk marathon chatting up insomniacs and […]
The world of music has always been divided between populists and spiritualists. So though there is a Yo Yo Honey Singh, thankfully, we also have a Mohammed Vakil. Vakil, who won reality show Sa Re Ga Ma (Mega Final) in 1998, is now an established ghazal and sufi singer, the scion of the Jaipur gharana […]
In 2003, Mike Tollin directed a film about a real life character called James Effinhimer Robert ‘Radio’ Kennedy — a nickname he acquired because he was fascinated with radios and would carry one everywhere. The film was called, yes, Radio. How powerful and dangerous radio can be as a medium was captured in Talk Radio, […]
It is easy to grit your teeth at the irony of FM radio commercials. One entreats you like Gandhi, to become the change you want to see in the world because when a small change occurs, it could lead to a big one. Like living in a gated community named after an American valley, or […]