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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Like textured tapestries hung in mountain cabins, internationally acclaimed, Japanese American artist Rima Fujita’s works have the warmth of a log fire. They bloom and flow and vibrate like all the colours of nature and imagine what secret gardens of the soul look like. Fairies and transcendent humans and animals co-exist in valleys and meadows […]
Maqbool Fida Husain passed away on June 9, in 2011 and left behind a legacy that is misunderstood by a few but loved and celebrated by many. Many years ago, he was visiting Husain Sankalana in Bangalore and sat chatting with journalists. Bare feet, a long brush in hand, eyes twinkling with laughter. Despite […]
There is a moment in the 2003 Julia Roberts starrer Mona Lisa Smile where Katherine Ann Watson, an art lecturer introduces her students to Jackson Pollock’s art and there is a hush in the room as a larger-than-life canvas fills up the silence with a wordless roar. There is nothing to say really because Pollock’s art […]
Mirror shards, watches, mechanical junk, hardware parts, golden beads, glitter construct a woman’s bust on paper, while from her bosom emerge a series of ethereal red roses-their lightness well contrasted with the heaviness of the robotic women. The nose accessory, forehead bindi and the facial features bespeak a South Asian face. These women are often part goddess-part cyborg; deified […]
Curtains part to give entry into the scene of the Last Supper when Christ discloses that one of his twelve apostles will betray him. The scene is characterised by chaos and cacophony, suspension of volume and depth and a severe compression of pictorial space. The figure of Christ looms (picture above: Last Supper. […]
It is hard for me to write legibly about the quiet legend of Gokuldas Sadanand Shenoy. I did not know him personally and yet I feel I know him in a way that is instinctive, beyond the realms of academics and art history. While soaking and absorbing the book,Shenoy-Footprints (put together with painstaking passion and insightful […]
When every work requires you to stop for at least a few minutes to absorb the intricacy in the carefully assembled objects, you know that this is no ordinary show. New York based artist Samanta Batra Mehta brings together a potpourri of antique and vintage objects for her debut solo show in India, at […]
GS Shenoy was a quiet, self-effacing force of Nature. It is only when he painted that you saw the swirling galaxies within, the many worlds within worlds. Interlocked pieces of thoughts. Thoughts with edges and texture and imprints of fading memories. Thoughts that are like scrunched up papers. Like rocks that want to melt. […]
If you are a cynic who feels that Mahatma Gandhi has gone out of fashion, or that his bespectacled, simpleton imagery fails to inspire any more, maybe it’s time to look at contemporary art. At the India Art Fair 2013, one could find the Mahatma reinterpreted by several artists – in minimal portraiture to kitschy […]
She reminds me of Umrao because she really was. The young Umrao in Muzaffar Ali’s 1981 classic film, I mean. Years later I met her as an artist in her own right, not just as the daughter of MS Sathyu and writer Shama Zaidi. ** Recently, I met her again at the Sathyu home […]
From its very first edition in 2008, India Art Fair has only grown from strength to strength. As the mega-art event, now in its 5th edition, there will be once again a deluge of Indian and international art at the exhibition venue of NSIC grounds. With as many as 106 exhibitors from 24 countries part […]
“I am the ‘memory keeper’. I have become a memory keeper because I was born wedged between the sunset of one era and dawn of another. Existing between eras is to live in a space where people forget to keep records because they are eager to forget the past and move on to the future. […]