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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** If you are a writer, you will always find a story or a story will find you almost as if someone had set up a moment for you to look at and pointed, “Take note..remember this..write this down.” On an unplugged holiday after almost a decade when I refused to carry even a laptop […]
This journey past old habits of entrenched inertia took me beyond mountains, lakes, fields and farms where green, pink, purple, yellow, orange homes stood in wilderness like unopened gifts. Past bridges land fills villages, towns and nothingness towards the unknown with strangers to teach that.. no place is unknown and no one a […]
Twenty minutes have passed since baggage collection at Swarnabhoomi Airport. So far, no sign of the Bangkok Taxi man who had promised online to take us across Bangkok over the next three days. Mom’s worry lines are deepening. Mamaji (Col Rawat) has acquired the lips-tightly-stretched “they’re all cheats” look. Saransh,10, is sulking since his […]
The seeds of my love affair with San Francisco were sown the very day we were acquainted. What started out as a mere check mark on the to-do list of a travel aficionado, culminated into a full blown obsession which grew exponentially with each passing day. This is the story of my bitter sweet […]
So we went to Goa. Again. It is such a lovely place. I plan to retire there you know, like some 40 million others… buy a small plot of land near the sea, open a shack, not do much, eat a lot, go for walks and hang out with the locals. I love the […]
They say that if you make the mistake of venturing into the Himalayas even once you are doomed. Because they keep calling you back. Neither pictures, nor words can capture the magnificence of those mesmerising bugyals and towering peaks whose beauty brought tears to my eyes. Hope some of you will read this travelogue and feel […]
There are dozens of places on this planet which stake claim to the coveted appellation ‘Heaven on Earth’. We even have one in the midst of all the so called squalor in India – Kashmir. But this is not a sonnet praising the beauty and serenity of Kashmir; it is a humble offering to […]
Something intriguing and fascinating is in the air. The mere memory of a place is regenerating and revitalizing lost and even non-existent connections. A certain band of people, well into their40s and 50s, who once knew each other as children in a never-never land called Pachmarhi, are reaching out across continents, countries through charged cables […]
“I don’t care how big and fast computers are, they’re not as big and fast as the world.” ~ Herbert Simon When was it that the travel bug bit me? Was it when I started to read travel books? Or was it during my trip to the Valley of Flowers? Or perhaps my annual trips back […]
Not in my wildest dreams had I imagined that driving across a frozen mountain pass at 13,714 feet, one cold, grey afternoon, I would come face to face with a young soldier. Who would teach me a lesson for life. That a soldier doesn’t die when a bullet whips into his head, piercing his woolen […]
Two people met, became friends (not sure when love happened) and decided to get hitched for the better. Like any other inter-caste marriage, this Assamese-Bengali alliance also went through a lot of high drama before it could culminate into a marriage ceremony that seemed interminable as rituals followed rituals to appease Assamese and Bengali sentiments. […]
“So, how are you going to travel to Mumbai? Train?” asked my grandmother when I called to tell her that I am travelling to the city of dreams for the first time on work. I said, “Ajji, they’re sending me by flight. Indian Airlines from Bangalore to Mumbai and Kingfisher on my way back home.” What […]