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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Aromatic air, the hustle and bustle of men and women working furiously to churn out local, authentic and traditional meals at food counters and proudly exhibiting an array of mouth-watering delicacies. The buzz and the energy of those who cook and those who love to eat . I am not just talking about food, but a food paradise. ** This is […]
The only part that can be appropriately labelled as ‘excruciating’ in a 3.5 week vacation home (India), is perhaps the 20+ hours spent cooped up in an air-plane or counting crows during layovers. An 8 hour flight from Detroit to Amsterdam, wandering aimlessly through the occluded corridors of Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport before boarding the next […]
A pea-shaped face peeked from behind a set of rusted iron doors at the Taj Mahal palace as I firmly rapped the heavy door-knocker against its metal backrest. “I wish to look around”, I said determinedly in response to the quizzical expression that stared back at me. The possessor of the tiny, question-marked face – Abhinav, a […]
The city of Bhopal is like a mysterious old bard. In a tattered gunny bag swung over one of his atrophied shoulders, he hides a treasure trove of rare gems plucked right out of history books. It takes effusive flattery, gentle persuasion and an unrelenting perseverance to get him to allow a peek into his […]
We’ve just come back from a 10 days trip where we drove around 1800 kms from Mumbai to North Karnataka and back. Over the last seven years we have enjoyed quite a few road trips and while we aren’t adventure junkies, there is always something to be learnt from each trip and some advice to […]
“It’s just here. Step out of our gate, walk for around five minutes and you’ll see a chhota road, take that and keep walking. It’s easy. In just one hour, you’ll reach.” This was the goodbye message from our manager at Three Chimneys at Gethia, our halt for two nights near Nainital. The road suggested […]
I had gone to Nasik last year with a few friends. It was more to enjoy the drive just after the monsoons, and we stayed at Sula’s resort Beyond. While Beyond is not bad, it is definitely not worth the premium. This year when the monsoons came to a close, a road-trip to Nasik hovered again […]
Blame it on the book I’m reading (Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul) or the interest in seeing the cultural impact of it being in both Asia and Europe, but I can’t deny that I’m completely smitten by Turkey. Now before you think that it’s just another country in the Middle East, let me show you this: No, it’s not […]
Experiencing a city during the festive season is like meeting someone on their wedding day. People tend to be on their best behaviour the day they are getting married. In fact, even the most obnoxious ones are amiable and benign on this day and just so, even the most vicious cities are friendly and becoming […]
The temple city of Rishikesh is around 250 kms away from Delhi. It is a famous weekend destination spot for the city folk from the National Capital Region (NCR). Rishikesh is a melting pot of spirituality, adventure and home to numerous well known temples. It is also a favourite tourist destination for foreigners who visit it for few […]
A thick green forest, vast grassy stretches, and a river running through the undulating landscape. And to think all this is a mere 100 km away from Bengaluru Cross Kanakapura, and you will get to see hamlets of about 30-40 families punctuating the forest. As we go past Sathanur and take the Muthathi road (which […]
Food is history, geography, a tug of nostalgia, a memory, a personal story, an emotion, a smell, an aftertaste, a sense of home. Though I am not a foodie, my first book replayed the compounded smell of agarbatties and rasgullas in a cinema hall canteen in Missamari. And the street food in Patiala. The kind I […]