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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Every morning, Nanaji would pull a chair under the old mango tree and with the sun warming his knees; he would wait for a steaming cup of black tea and the Dainik Jagaran to be delivered to him. Scooby, the big black part Doberman (with some mongrel genes that gave him a long bushy tail) would drool silently, waiting […]
It is a girl. She is walking down an uneven path on the barren hillside, placing her feet carefully on the loose stones. Her thin brown fingers are curled around some ferns with white spore smeared undersides that she uses to stamp Christmas tree shapes on her skin. She places a leaf at the back of the hand clasping […]
She peers hard into the massive wall of water that is 20 feet away from her. The wall that has drenched her entirely from so far away, she is too scared to go anywhere close to it. She is no longer sure if the water is tumbling down in giant gushes to the ground at […]
The living room vibrated with some unseen, leashed emotions. The moment he entered he could sense the shift in atmosphere. After a day well spent with his friends he was in a mood to watch some sports on TV, have some late dinner, check his emails and go to sleep. But the sudden tingling at […]
She has been sitting on that parapet wall for an hour now. She gazes out at a landscape that isn’t exactly a great view but it is a view to her nevertheless. There is a wide open ground. At the very far end of that ground, she sees a few shanties where labourers live and […]
You know, I am tired of your excuses. Sorry just doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s like we are going around in circles. Squares. See? How juvenile. I am kidding…am sorry…I am really very sorry. Can you please be the man I imagined you to be? I swear I will try, but no guarantees. There were […]
To Love. To lose. And to never love again is a sickening feeling. She had trusted herself, built a wall around her nobody would penetrate, yet it had happened. Probably one sided as she did not know his feelings for her. He said he loved her ….as a friend. An afterthought she would have never […]
When they fought, he would make up. And eventually, in a few minutes, she would relent, and the world would be perfect again. So when he left home to buy a strip of medicines that she needed, locking her inside the house like he did when she was cooking and not free to come close […]
There is nothing overtly special about this day. It is just another Saturday, the day of the week that goes fastest, and she is back to her domain, the kitchen, aromas sashaying their way out of the open windows, mustard and asafetida, curry leaves and green chillies chopped fine, like little green nose rings. […]
You walk ahead of me. And I keep pace with you when I can. Often, I lose sight of you. Suddenly…when I look down at a pebble I trip on, if I look at one of the sights that lie around me, if I stop for a moment to catch my breath. And you […]
The sky was a clear blue and fluffy white clouds sailed effortlessly from one end of the world to another and disappeared behind the looming mountains. The waves crashed on the shore, and rested for a moment before being pulled right back into the tide. The omnipresent wind fought long and hard with the trees […]
She waved good bye as she left for school, trying to manage her raincoat hood and blue umbrella – her own little sky, as she’d always quip. Her tiny shoulders bearing the weight of her school bag and this world. I watched from the window as she sneaked a peek through her umbrella to enjoy […]