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
Every lover of ghazal has a Jagjit Singh memory. My first one is part of my book Perfect Eight and recalls a cassette my father brought home to play on our first tape recorder. Kal Chaudvani Ki Raat Thi, sang the Sikh who sounded like an Urdu poet and occasionally like a Sufi pir. His […]
Even if you are not a connoisseur of Indian classical dance, don’t miss the five-day Ananya Dance Festival that will be held in Delhi this October. Now in its tenth edition, Ananya is one of Delhi’s most awaited cultural events that has wowed the audience year after year with its innovatively packaged presentation – an […]
In the 80s when I was just learning about western music, trying to decipher lyrics, identify bands and singers with their music, all with the help of an old fashioned radio displayed in our drawing room and the two request shows that would play on All India Radio over the weekend, there were a few […]
There was a time not so long ago when the royal courts of Lucknow shimmered to the lilting melodies of thumri. Around 1847, the Nawab of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah and his court singer Sadiq Ali Khan are credited with developing thumri into a popular style to which the courtesans danced. It is to revive […]
I woke up one morning and I couldn’t hear E anymore. The note, not the letter. It was just gone. I first noticed it on the way to work, listening to an old mixtape of classic rock songs, wondering how come I hadn’t remembered how jagged and minimalistic these wayback arena rockers really were all […]
On August 4, 1929, a voice was born. A voice of abandon, mischief, romance, barely contained madness, of rich, malted cadences. The voice that went by the name of Kishore Kumar. But then Abhas Kumar Ganguly or Kishore Kumar was more than just a gifted voice. He was an actor who could let himself loose […]
This is not a personal story and yet it is. Sometime in 2009, I found myself living a dream in the studios of WorldSpace India and freeing the voice I had not been able to speak in. The voice of stifled poetry and childhood dreams. Even more gratifying was the fact that I was a small part of […]
I remember the morning after Mohammed Rafi’s death in 1980. It was my turn to read the news in the school assembly and I remember preparing instead a small tribute to the singer and ending with the lines, “Jab Kabhi Bhi Sunoge Geet Mere, Sang Sang Tum Bhi Gungunaoge.” I realised the meaning of these words sometime in […]
It’s easy to be superstitious. It provides us with the comfortable closure that we often look for. It’s easy to ascribe grandiose significance to numbers and dates that would otherwise only be notches in the general randomness of the universe’s being. In chemistry, they call that natural sense of randomness; Entropy. And Entropy makes hard […]
Just today while channel surfing, I refused to watch The Dark Knight beyond a few scenes even though it is marvellous cinematically, because as I tried to explain to my son..the idea of evil in the film is so dark and so overwhelming that it drains us of any belief in life as a meaningful experience. It makes us believe that no matter what […]
RD Burman is not a tragic story even though his last years were coloured with heart breaks and set backs. Even though his faith in his craft was shaken. Even though, the man who saw the future was relegated to the past by short-lived musical trends. He is not a tragedy because his music is […]
The performing animal left the circus on June 25, 2009 but we continue to anoint his remains, repair the broken halo and embroider a velvet shroud to celebrate him. He, who in his lifetime was first built and then taken apart in a bloody arena for all the world to see. What is it with fame? What is it […]