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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Aah, the Utopian politics of Madam Secretary. No mention so far (I am on Season 3) of white lone wolves with “mental health” issues shooting down people, no pro Nazi rallies, no racism, no out of control police officers shooting black kids (one mention in passing) or the debate about reproductive rights of women, the […]
The bunk bed went yesterday. In the living room the 40-inch TV lies on the floor, devoid of its stand. The coffee tables and end tables gone – even their impressions on the carpet – gone. Very soon this house will be empty. Emptied of occupants and emptied of possessions. It will no long smell […]
The world is divided between them and us. Between the disempowered and the powerful. Between survivors. And oppressors. And what better way to tell a story about dispossession, migration, transition and struggle than to assume not just one voice but many? To narrate not just one but diverse histories embodied in Japanese mail order […]
Recently I made a new penpal in America. Here’s a copy of the first letter I posted. Dear Holly Wood, I hope you are doing well. I know you have been awfully busy trying to come up with all sorts of movies, and I understood from your last letter that you are feeling extraordinarily stressed […]
We were walking down the streets of the busiest city this side of the Atlantic. There was paper everywhere – in the windows of old, battered-down bookshops and on the unbalanced tables of the street vendors selling novels in languages that were foreign to my ears. There were flyers about missing dogs and moving sales […]
After a human tragedy, the debri is cleared, remains of lives gathered and mourned and then every year, we revisit in our mind, the Ground Zero of grief and loss and try to make sense of it. Tragedies where innocent lives are lost cannot be contextualised and justified. But yes, some tragedies are better documented […]
America has saved the world again. After thousands of civilians served as collateral fodder in the “smoke em out” Bushfire in Iraq and Afghanistan post 9/11, the poster boy of global terrorism is gone. He did not go quietly into the night though and “personally” confronted the US forces after having dodged them for over a decade through cave bunkers and assorted […]