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…
Read More
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…
Read More
“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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
You are browsing archives for
Imagine being 16 and heedlessly in love with a man almost 16 years older than you. Imagine eloping with him and then walking out of a broken marriage with two children and a third on the way. Imagine being in the shadow of a far more successful sister and initially having to sing her […]
We celebrate Rajesh Khanna with 20 of his most memorable songs that sum up his charisma, his magic, his unsung range and his indelible impact on the vocabulary of cinematic romance. This is by no means a definitive list (and is in no particular order) or the most comprehensive but tries to capture some moments […]
Mehdi Hassan’s voice was not the voice of populism. His was the voice of riyaz, of uncompromised passion and excellence..the kind you cannot stumble by but have to earn through years of application, commitment and diligence. This voice was not an easy voice to fall in love with, You needed to be all there..ear, mind, […]
My most resonant memory of 70s music is when during the preparations of our school annual functions, we would hear Lipps Incorporated’s Funky Town again and again. And again. We had no access to Western music except on radio and how this record landed up in a small town and in a school library beats […]
For the last few months, I have turned away from news on the television as well as the morning papers every single day. I had decided to see what my life would be like if I were to know nothing about what is happening around me. Obviously I had no choice but to know what was going […]
It’s only the second edition of the Delhi Jazz Festival but the anticipation around the fest this year is running sky high. With the fest just two days away, the phones at the organisers’ offices can’t stop ringing for passes and it’s a bemused Sanjeev Bhargava who answers every call with great patience. After all, […]
So David Guetta played at the HUDA grounds in Delhi. The crowd? Well, there were girls in formal gowns. I imagined what they must have said to each other before dressing formal. “C’mon we are going for a live concert, you know what that means? Pull out that gown I wore to Shilu’s reception! Yes, […]
I met music director Ravi Sharma a few years ago as a WorldSpace RJ. He was a guest at a concert and was put up in a hotel where I went to interview him at the end of what had been a long day for him. He was a little watchful in the beginning and […]
I did not want to write about Whitney Houston’s death because like Amy Winehouse, she too has been turned into a cautionary tale about the failure to deal with success, wealth, adulation and fulfilled dreams. When a glistening firefly crashes and burns..it is the done thing to perform an autopsy upon a life story. Oh, […]
2011 made us bid goodbye unwillingly and sorrowfully to… (Tribute: http://unboxedwriters.com/2011/12/satyadev-dubey-the-resilient-cactus/) Satyadev Dubey who wrote film dialogues like he was unaware of all the cliches and conventions that do not let cinematic characters breathe. And produced and directed theatre with a fierce passion that sought and demanded nothing but absolute attention and commitment from those […]
The other day while watching Kalpana Lajmi’s unsung, little cinematic ballad Ek Pal, I was amazed at how seamlessly Bhupen Hazarika’s voice wrapped itself around sprawling tea estates, gracious bungalows and the heart of its protagonist Priyam (Shabana Azmi) as she falls into a self-destructive passion for the frivolous Jeet Barua (Farooque Sheikh). Hazarika’s voice […]
I had an epiphany at the Metallica concert in Bangalore a few days ago. If I was an Auntie in the crowd, Metallica was made up of Uncles. That made me feel much better as I looked around and saw rockers with vomit matted on their hair and lying prone in the thick, wet mud […]