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…
Read More
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…
Read More
“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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
You are browsing archives for
Imagine a city floating on water. Not an island, not a city tormented by floods, just a city which has rivulets instead of streets and boats instead of taxis. A city where buildings are erected on foundations of wood submerged in water. Venice is the capital of the Veneto region in North East Italy and […]
The Gods would have taken one giant stride to reach Dunagiri from Almora, I took the road less travelled. A road that unravelled through fields governed by the Kumaon Mothers of the Earth, all of whom are busily engaged in turning the tapestry of their agricultural blanket into the rich colours of autumn. Grasses and […]
Having been exposed to the writings of Rabindranath Tagore, the biography of Ramakrishna (a mystic and the spiritual master of Vivekananda) and Bimal Roy’s movies, my heart yearned to experience this land called West Bengal. I reached Kolkata in early March and my cousin broached the subject of Dakshineshwar temple, the abode of goddess Kali […]
To make a jungle safari spine-chilling, breathtaking, and totally remarkable, you will need a driver-cum-guide who knows the jungle like the back of his hand, a freshly prepared unfenced camp site, a lean and dark Masai for protection, eerie animal sounds to garnish the night, and heaps and heaps of good luck for animal sightings. […]
Don’t allow your first impression of Luxembourg (a European country and city of the same name) to be the last one! For, this is a place that sneaks up on you. My first tryst with the country started with a schlep down the Luxembourg airport – one of the tiniest in the whole of Europe. […]
Fresh apricots are neatly stacked over the yak hair blankets, to be dried under the scorching sun. While sipping the renowned salty butter tea (said to be an acquired taste) we watch the village fields down in the valley, coiled like a green snake between the rugged mountains. The silence is sometimes broken by the […]
What comes to mind when one hears of a certain region called Tuscany in Central Italy? Some would say brilliant wines like Chianti, others would say famous artists like Botticelli, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci while some probably would also be reminded of the macabre story of the Monster of Florence. For me, Florence-the capital […]
I was in the first batch of inward fellows of the National Foundation of India’s ‘Northeast Media Exchange Programme’. It was 1996-97 and I went to Mizoram. My subject was ‘Changing traditional patterns and the youth of Mizoram’. Though this travel piece has nothing to do with my fellowship subject, it is a by-product of […]
I have always been a fan of slow travel and fast talking. In the beginning years of being on the road, it was cheaper anyway to settle down in one place and get to know it rather than hurtle from place to place like a Paparazzi tourist. Also there was the hassle of moving from […]
The chaotic streets of Cambodia’s capital give a sense of the turbulent history of this land of contradictions and surprises. As our car nudges its way inch-by-inch through the melee, where motorbikes and luxury cars jostle with heavily laden bullock carts at the point where Charles de Gaulle Boulevard intersects with Mao Tse Tung Road, […]
All civilisations rise and fall but at Angkor, the remains of the great days of the ancient Khmer civilisation slumbered deep in the heart of the jungles of North Western Cambodia like a sleeping beauty waiting to be discovered for centuries. Abandoned finally by the Khmer after being sacked by the Thai in 1431, Angkor […]
Strasbourg, according to an Internet search is the principal city of the Alsace region in the North-East of France and is close to the German-French border. It is situated on the Ill river and can boast of being a miniature representation of France with a flavour of Germany. The train ride from Stuttgart to Strasbourg […]