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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Actor, author, columnist, passionate aesthete, Padma Shri Tom Alter has just arrived in the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore to deliver a lecture on ‘Sports & Arts in Modern India’. If he is tired, it doesn’t show because Tom is used to being many things all at once. Over the last few days, he has […]
Have you ever had a conversation in gibberish? Whispered sweet nothings, yelled expletives, expressed surprise or disgust using meaningless combinations of sounds? Try it out, and it will be one conversation you will thoroughly enjoy. You will learn how mere body language and meaningless sounds can evoke different emotional reactions in you, and in others. […]
It is the season of awards in the Hindi film industry and it isn’t often that small films get their own share of confetti and applause on podiums reserved for glistening blockbusters. But director and actor Rajat Kapoor and the Ankhon Dekhi team were taken by surprise when their little film with a big […]
Post 9/11, just as America began to view its history in a context where there was always a before and an after, will the Charlie Hebdo attacks colour the way France views itself? French theatre director, actress and puppeteer Aude Maréchal considers the question as she sips her black coffee in the Ranga Shankara cafe […]
Can Shakespeare be reinterpreted with irreverence? Can psychological drama meld into physical theatre? Can one actor play 14 characters? If you were to ask these questions to Australian theatre professional, Tref Gare, his answer would be a resounding, ‘yes.’ Gare was in India for the first time to perform in and as Kings’s Player from […]
Playwright Mahesh Dattani returns to his hometown Bengaluru with a play after almost two years though he was here in December to meet his sister. On January 30, Outgoing Free, a play written by Anupama Chandrasekhar, a Chennai-based journalist-turned-playwright and directed by Dattani will premiere at Ranga Shankara. ** The venue is very close to […]
It has been fours years of theatre and dramatic synergies at Bangalore’s Jagriti Theatre and founders Arundhati and Jagdish Raja celebrated the moment with their rapturously noisy team by cutting a cake. It however seems like yesterday when a spanking new creative space threw its doors open to theatre lovers in Bengaluru. ** Even today, […]
“The point of theatre is to create a microcosm and connect it with a macrocosm so that a story means something to everyone.” Director, actor and theatre doyen Sunil Shanbag is holding forth in the Ranga Shankara cafe between rehearsals of Stories In a Song, the play that played to a full house on November 7. Over […]
There is a moment in Mahesh Bhatt’s 1991 film Sadak when Sadashiv Amrapurkar’s Maharani, an eunuch who is also a brothel madam, is hunting for prey or rather two women who have escaped with their lovers from her clutches. In a parking lot where the silence is thrumming with fear and foreboding, Maharani is literally […]
Trust Punjabi theatre legend, Sangeet Natak Akademi Award winner and Padma Shri awardee Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry to treat the world as her stage. And to make personal connections with literary texts from diverse sources. In 2007, she had brought to the Theatre Festival, a searing Punjabi adaptation of South African writer Can Themba’s The Suit, a three […]
The play Taoos Chaman Ki Myna, was recently staged at AD Rangamandira in Bangalore and it was the culmination of an alchemy between Naiyer Masud, Gillo,Theatre Repertory and Atul Tiwari. The genesis of the play is interesting. For starters, Masud, a Persian and Urdu scholar is along with Manto and Qurratulain Hyder, part of a holy trinity of writers who truly transcend the […]
Sanjna Kapoor was about 10 when she shot the horrific church massacre scene with her grandfather Geoffrey Kendal in Shyam Benegal’s Junoon (1978). The film was produced by her father’s production company Film Valas. She also appeared as her mother’s childhood reverie in another family production, 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981). But the biggest ever family […]