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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Telephonic interviews take away the visual texture from a story but you don’t miss it when you talk to theatre, TV and film actor Heeba Shah. She speaks with immense clarity and leaves no awkward pauses for you to fill. Between tackling cinema of multiple genres, doing theatre and moving homes, she performed an Ismat […]
“Javed bhai, hum Dilli haar gaye hain!” (We have lost Delhi), yells Naseeruddin Shah as a violently bitter sepoy in Shyam Benegal’s Junoon (1978). That scene is hard to forget. As is the fact that it was on the sets of Junoon that Shah first met Ismat Chughtai, one of the bravest literary and […]
Shama Zaidi does not want to talk about her mother Qudsia Zaidi nee Umt-ul-qudoos Abdullah because you do not talk about a lifetime of love and loss over a telephone wire. 2014 is the centenary year of Begum Zaidi, writer, social worker, theatre producer and founder of the Hindustani Theatre in Delhi in 1954. […]
Between a film shoot in Shimla, a personal tragedy, rehearsals and performances of his new play Hamlet-The Clown Prince, actor Vinay Pathak talks on the phone like someone who has travelled a lot, is exhausted but knows he has miles to go before there will be a snatch of silence. He wants to tick off […]
BANGALORE: Is Hamlet you and me and everyone in between? Is he, denuded of his geography and history, just someone torn between his possibilities and his realities? Aren’t we all? Is he a man of suppressed humour, someone craving to laugh at the injustice of it all, aching to discard the accoutrements of […]
Actor and former VJ Purab Kohli is enraged by the recent rape of a child in Bangalore and the crimes against women in the rest of the country. “I thought, after the December 12 case in New Delhi, these incidents would stop but they seem to be spreading like an epidemic. I just sat […]
Former VJ, actor and Internet entrepreneur Cyrus Sahukar is an entertainer even on the phone. He recreates a rainy evening and a traffic jam in Mumbai with little inflections and you can sense his life is a blur. A happy one, we suppose though he says, even his mother doesn’t get the hectic thrum of […]
She is hard to classify or sum up in stock phrases that are usually used for a mainstream female actor. She strains against the tyranny of preconceptions about women and their bodies in cinema and in life. She speaks passionately against misogyny at every level. In language that does not sound like sloganeering but […]
“Finger on your lips,” in class “Silence please,” in the library “shhh…,” says a cute baby in the poster at the doctor’s clinic “Don’t talk when 2 adults are talking,” “keep quiet..” ** These are both, memories and scars from our childhood. It’s no surprise then that staying silent is the order, instruction, advice we […]
Have they come for you yet? They could be anyone. A new oraganisation committed to keeping women out of pubs, jeans, self-hoods and a sense of freedom. Khap elders calculating whether you can fall in love with a boy in the same village and if you do, whether you should be hung in public or […]
The Company Theatre was formed by Sheeba Chadha, Atul Kumar, Manish Chawdhary and Sanjeev Sharma in 1993 in New Delhi. This year it celebrates two decades of creativity, laughter, tears, toil, struggle and triumph. In a country addicted to cinema and cricket, for a theatre group to have come so far and created a new mindscape […]
An overcast afternoon and the paper lamps in Ranga Shankara cafe glowed and swayed in the breeze. Friends, colleagues and members of author, playwright, mentor, poet Vijay Nair’s extended family slowly filled up the empty spaces and occupied the benches, chairs and even the steps leading to the cafe. The event organised by theatre […]