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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Hindi film music composer Daan Singh passed away of liver complications in Jaipur at the age of 78 on June 18, 2011. He was like a fast-traversing, low intensity meteor that just showed up and sped away very very quickly. You wonder why. During my several visits to Jaipur in the last two years, I did make […]
Robert Allen Zimmerman is still here and still relevant.We still have living amongst us a man, who wrote lyrics like, “I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.” We will never […]
It began with Emosanal Attyachar. When I watched Dev D a few years ago, I felt as if my insides had been churned and that Sarat Chandra Chatterjee had died once again. There was nothing wrong cinematically with the film. The first half was visceral and brutally honest about the messy, inner universe of love. The lust, the anger, the impulsive severings that […]
Coke Studio had stolen my heart way back in 2008 and my friends would look at me in puzzlement when I put up excited status updates about CS. For those who still don’t know what Coke Studio is and suspect it is a rave destination, here is a short summary: In a studio setting in Pakistan (actually […]
Never meet Gulzar during lunch time, especially when it hasn’t been served yet. When he is hungry, he gets into a foul mood, refuses to answer in more than monosyllables and makes mocking comments like “I am busy arranging marriages” when asked what keeps him occupied these days. What we have said to upset him […]
It is almost dusk and the sun looks like a luminous paper lantern hanging in a distant balcony. The sky’s canvas is slowly getting transformed into an abstract medley of red and orange strokes. On the earth below, in a corner of Nehru Park where Bhakti Utsav took off last evening, a different magic is happening. The Manganiar singers – […]
Watching a rehearsal of Prayog 3 at Delhi’s Kamani Auditorium is like witnessing an enchanting duet between tradition and modernity. This particular act is titled Kaali and the eight dancers are enacting the movements of the ferocious killer goddess, Bhadrakali, as popularly known in the South. The haunting background music adds to the dark mood. Death […]
We live in troubled times. We gasp in horror at the scams and scoundrels who surface every now and then, begin to voice our hopes when people like Anna Hazare talk of reform and wait for another round of media blitzkrieg to unite us emotionally – even if it is the next Indo-Pak cricket face […]
This April, Nazia Hassan would have been 46 years old and I am suddenly wistful for a wonderful summer in Dalhousie when I first heard her sing. It was around 1981 and my nani, addicted to Pakistani soaps like Ankahi had really no patience for Doordarshan but even she had to sit and watch when a Pakistani teenager, wearing […]
How does she reconcile a rockstar voice with the full moon bindi and the jasmine gajra and the glorious Kanjeevaram? Usha Uthup just does. More than 30 years down the line, she is still the mistress of sweet ironies. A darling once again of mainstream Hindi film music fans after her star vocal turn in Saat […]