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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The website says this is a homestay, but it’s not; it is a heritage hotel… but not the fancy kind like the Neemrana property near Jaipur… not the kind where I would be embarrassed to walk in with my chappals and sit cross-legged at the dining table! Vivienda Dos Palhacos is simple, elegant, welcoming and […]
That slow whirl of the fan directly above my bed was the first sound I heard as I woke up… it felt familiar, but I felt disorientated. I scrunched my eyes, closed them to dull my ‘am-awake-lets-go’ over-active morning senses and heard my brain ask, “Where am I?” ** Rarely do I stay in a hotel that […]
Gaiety has got to be one of the complicated words in English, or at least for me. I always mess up the ‘e’, then need to lean backwards and stare at the word till it says I’m missing an ‘e’ or its ‘i’ before ‘e’… The actual Gaiety Theatre in Simla is not missing anything, and […]
I had been to Simla when I was 11 and even then people spoke about the crowd, excessive development, commercial establishments ruining the city and the downward slide of the once summer capital of India. I don’t remember much about that trip. I had gone with my parents and my cousins, and like all family […]
Travel for me is all about getting to know the local people through their culture, arts and traditions, and their food. While I don’t think I am a foodie from what I understand to be the modern sense of that word… I don’t understand ingredients, can’t guess what’s in the pot unless told, and I can’t […]
I visited Sri Lanka last year and that is the first time I came across a sandakada pahana or a moonstone. This is a semi-circular stone that is seen at the entrance of the temples at Anuradhapuram and Polonnaruwa. Buddhism flourished here and the moonstone became more and more pronounced with intricate carvings and came a […]
The aircraft had to land on this narrow piece of land that led straight to a valley. And that valley was where an ill-fated aircraft had crashed a few months ago, it had just gone on and off the runaway! That is all I could think of during my entire descent into Mangalore. I held […]
I love faces. I love the stories in them. Faces with nervous twitches. Open faces. Stoic faces. Faces that draw you in. Make you think. Shut you out as the distant outsider And a face with a life written on it. The past leading to the present, intertwined on one face. Telling stories about living […]
It started with the first visit to the Sanjay Gandhi National Park or Borivali National Park and we were amazed that we lived so close to such a large expanse of nature, and hadn’t explored it for so many years! And so we headed back next week to the Upper Kanheri Trail. The guide was […]
The Sanjay Gandhi National Park or Borivali National Park, as it is popularly known, lies in the Northern suburb of Borivali, Mumbai. It is acres of forest surrounded by the traffic, noise and the chaos of one of the most populated cities in India. It is remarkable that such a large National Park exists INSIDE a […]
Yazdani Bakery, an Irani cafe in Mumbai was opened by Meherwan Zend in 1953. He was a Parsi baker. And the building was originally a Japanese bank, but then was sold off. It is run by the third generation now and has about it, a certain quaintness. Like all Irani cafes, it seems to lack […]
We were in a forest, in Kaziranga, Assam. Maybe not as dense as you imagine in your head, but a forest with pathways and wild elephant dung in a path that criss-crossed ours as we climbed up and up. His footsteps trampled the grass and shrubs, he made his own way, while we followed the […]