A friend once shared how her daughter was stopped by a teacher in her school and told , “Your breasts are too big for you to walk like that.” She went on to develop an apologetic, stooping posture for life. Shame is coded in the DNA of a young girl. And docility is force fed. […]
In Marriage Story (now streaming on Netflix), there is a moment so infinitesimal that you can miss it if you just blink. A child caught between his politely but stubbornly adversarial parents, is seen playing with two toys in a quiet corner. And then he speaks as one toy to another, “I was falling and […]
Someone I know, recently shifted to an old age facility. Another resident, (in his nineties incidentally), asked her within days of her arrival , what languages she was conversant with. When she named Bengali in the list, he snapped, “I will report you to NRC people.” Hate you see gives a sense of purpose to […]
On the day freedom fighters and lifelong friends Ramprasad Bismil and Ashfaq Ullah Khan were hanged, and a few weeks after the death of Shaukat Kaifi, I heard Shabana Azmi on a channel, quoting the famous couplet penned by her father. “आज की रात बहुत गर्म हवा चलती है, आज की रात न फ़ुटपाथ पे […]
In a country where women are raped and occasionally burnt by packs of predators, the most powerful image in the past few days was this. A few young women from Jamia Millia Islamia protecting a cowering young man from police violence. And the women of Bangalore, forming a protective circle around men to shield them […]
“So, you’re imagining things again.” “You’re stupid. You always get it all wrong.” “I never said that, it never happened.” Rings a bell? It’s true that there are times when we can misunderstand, misinterpret or overreact to a situation. However, ask yourself, if it’s always true by putting your thoughts on trial under the light […]
I’ve been following the global #MeToo Movement for a few years now, torn between celebrating the outpouring of sisterhood and solidarity for survivors of sexual harassment and appalled at the shame and ridicule they were being subjected to for speaking out. The #MeToo implosion in India followed a scarily similar turn of events, raging through […]
Soni (now streaming on Netflix) captures what it feels like to walk in a woman’s body on deserted streets, even when you are not a marked victim but a law enforcer in disguise. It also shows the futility of the police uniform on the body of a woman when she wants to do more than […]
Mohan Rakesh’s Ashaadh Ka Ek Din has served as a stencil for many stories about love, ambition and regret. Sarthak Dasgupta’s Music Teacher (on Netflix) is also a retelling of that familiar story of a romantic, Himalayan idyll interrupted by ambition, with a gender switch thrown in. There are also traces of A Star is […]
There is a telling scene in Ritesh Batra’s film Photograph (playing on Amazon). Two scenes in fact that mirror each other. In both, Miloni (Sanya Malhotra marvellously exuding a contained wistfulness) is at a shop to buy a dress. The first scene shows her standing noncommittally before a mirror while her sister and mother argue […]
I chanced upon The Wife, Colette and Big Eyes in a serendipitous sequence and all films are about the complicated reasons women allow their life and work to be appropriated by men. And also because societal constructs do not easily grant them their autonomy as creative, complex beings. The Wife is directed by Bjõrn L. […]
Kabir Singh is not an anomaly. He is just the ultimate culmination of the privilege that male protagonists have enjoyed in Hindi cinema for a long time. Raj Kapoor slapped and manhandled Nargis in Awara (1956) because she playfully called him ‘Junglee.” But he had a messy, heartbreaking backstory so she had to rescue him […]