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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Freedom is a word full of peril. Because it engages with something that exists beyond the possible, the real, the confined, the limited. Freedom in its purest sense is not a destructive word. It is not about leaving a footprint on someone’s toil but creating your own. A footprint on a path that is only […]
Whenever photographer Clare Arni steps on Bangalore’s MG Road, young vendors of cliches flock around her, mistaking her for a foreigner. The moment she starts chatting them up in mellifluous Kannada, they realise their mistake. Only an Indian can speak an Indian language with a complete understanding of local particularities and without a trace of […]
In the 80s, when you opened a film magazine you came across Gautam Rajadhyaksha’s name pretty often. I still remember one shot of Tina Munim curled up on a sunny window ledge with a cup of tea, smiling into the camera as if she had just woken up and found a friend. I remember cutting […]
Stashed away in an old cupboard, inside a bag neatly folded around its contents, are old memories calling out to me from photo albums. This overtly melodramatic wistfulness has been triggered by my crashed hard disks that contained all the photographs of all my trips made in the last few years. No amount of software surgery has been successful on them […]
You can capture silence only if it captures you first. Only if you allow it in your soul and let it settle down down like a pool of blue nothingness, with not a ripple on its surface. Just a liquid translucence mirroring the sky. Only eternity. Not the drama, the furor and the noise […]
It takes more than passion to achieve what Mohan Khokar did. He was like a man possessed, who collected everything that was possible on the subject of Indian dance. Dance aficionados would be familiar with the man who was himself a dancer, dance teacher, scholar and collector but for those who are not, an […]
I had just come back from a week-long trip when the doorbell rang. Fervently hoping it would be the home-delivery guy, I opened the door to find my 53-year-old neighbour, the good samaritan that he is, standing sheepishly with all my post. Sheepish is a trait I don’t normally associate with this effusive father […]
It was an out-of-focus photograph – of close friend and fellow artist Anjum Singh setting up her show at Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi – that started it all for Manisha Gera Baswani. A lesser eye would have perhaps rejected the ‘flawed’ image, but being an artist herself, Baswani knew that it had […]
Sharmila Shah cuts a pretty picture but the pictures she clicks are not just pretty. They have something that comes from the core of her life-loving, vibrant personality. Sharmila does not do things in half measure. She enjoys good food, travel, music, friends and everything life throws at her. She makes the most of the gifts and the challenges of […]
“There are different forms of war everywhere… War zones of a different sort where we are often the banal and apathetic audience.”
Most unusual career choices are happy accidents. Atul Pratap Chauhan had no early stirrings of a passion for photography. In his village, a photographer was someone who clicked passport pictures or wedding photos. Atul was slated to invest elbow grease in the food industry when a professional photographer arrived at his restaurant to conduct a shoot. Watching him capture nuances of shape, colour, […]
On Sunday mornings, at a temple (close to 300 years old), in the heart of Secunderabad at General Bazaar, the devout come to offer their prayers. I clicked some images with the hope of capturing the ambience of a devotional place and to also explore our belief in God and all that we do in the name of faith. So as […]