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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“Iss daur se sabhi ko guzarna padta hai..himmat mat haar bete..shunya nahin zindagi saamne hai tumhare.. insani rakt ek hamesha behne wali Ganga hai..pusht dar pusht woh behti hai..tum jiyoge tabhi hamari jade jiyengi.. marusthal mein apni ma ke cactus ban jao..yaadon se apne ko seecho, maut ka dar kise nahin lagta par iss dar […]
Novelist and short story writer Bhisham Sahni once observed, “A short story is like lodging in a house one night and moving away the next morning, whereas a novel is like coming into a town where you have to bide for months on end. In a short story, every word must have some eloquence, every […]
Rajat Kapoor is not made for water-tight definitions. So yes, he acts in films and writes them and directs them too but then there is a theatre and the fact he acts on stage and yes, directs too. The one common thread in all pursuits is the need to tweak, deviate, be new, be alive […]
When a play has been declared ‘Housefull’ two weeks before it is being staged, you know its fame has preceded it. I would not have got to watch Atul Kumar’s The Blue Mug either (The last ticketed show is today at Delhi’s Kamani Auditorium), if it had not been for the intervention of a common friend […]
Power can be mellow, vulnerable, beautiful. And yet ripple with invincibility in the face of whatever life can throw at you. That is what actor, writer, director of Ay Ombe theatre and educator Josefina Baez embodies. The capacity to always be open to bliss and pain, learning and teaching, silence and celebration, spirituality and psychology, the idea of ethnicity […]
Lahu Sambhaji Khade died on July 8, 2011 at Kavlapur village, District Sangli. He was 78 years old. Nobody knew Lahu Khade. However,thousands of his fans in villages across Maharashtra knew and loved Kaalu. Lahu Khade was the Kaalu of the Kaalu-Baalu Tamasha that he established along with his brother Ankush Khade. Ankush was […]
There is a moment in Dil Chahta Hai when in a festive sangeet crackling with sudden hostility, Rajat Kapoor rises and stands next to Aamir Khan. His nervousness masked by the way he touches his nose fleetingly. But you know instantly whose side he is on and you remember that moment. Just as you remember the scene in Monsoon Wedding […]
Sheeba Chadha’s gaze is like a flame cutting through fog. Almost as if everything she has felt and lived has been melted in a furnace and poured into her eyes. She is incredibly vital on screen, on stage, on television and yet there is a restfulness about her. And when she kneels on the stage, looking […]
Have you noticed, how for every point, life offers a counterpoint? As if to remind you that for every ‘this,’ there is a ‘that?’ And for every Delhi Belly, there is The Blue Mug? How absolutely wonderful that on a day when my memory had been reduced to a cuss word and the rumble of someone’s upset stomach, life also […]
Everything becomes a memory one day. Some memories make us and some, we make. Some we edit, some alter us. Life is not just what happens to us but we think happened to us. But nothing is more vivid than the time when we were experiencing the world with untutored eyes, with young senses as […]
When Bhanu Bharti, acclaimed theatre director and NSD alumnus, decides to stage a play, he doesn’t go looking for ‘interesting adaptations’ and ‘inspired scripts’. He doesn’t bother about reaching out to the masses with risqué comedies or flamboyant productions either. He chooses to write, instead, intense plays based on pertinent social issues that happen around […]
Ashish Vidyarthi does not like the easy way out, either in life or his work. A few weeks back, in Bangalore’s hallowed Ranga Shankara auditorium, he was pacing the stage restlessly before his solo performance in Nadira Babbar’s acclaimed Dayashankar Ki Diary. When asked for an interview, he was unwilling at first and understandably so because I had not seen the play […]