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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‘Maang meri..sindoor tumhare naam ka..haath mere..choodiyan tumhare naam ki, kokh meri..khoon mera par baccha tumhare naam ka..tumhari iss duniya mein kya kuch bhi hai mere naam ka?” When Vidya Balan’s Vasudha says these words to her insanely possessive husband (the unerring Rajkumar Yadav) in Hamari Adhuri Kahani, you recall the 80s when Mahesh Bhatt basically […]
Anurag Basu’s Barfi, India’s official entry to the Oscars has achieved nothing new, The controversy in the wake of its selection has been as old as the questions about just what guides our cinema juries to select films for a foreign forum. Was an epic mess called Jeans, a Vijay Amritraj’s production, chosen because of Amritraj’s […]
“Main keh raha hoon, main keh raha hoon, main keh raha hoon!” Everytime I watch a wannabe film on adult relationships..I remember this Kulbhushan Kharbanda (he is on the phone with his neurotic actress girl friend who wants to know if he has broken the news of their affair to his wife) dialogue from […]
India, for the first time after many decades is looking inwards. And as it does that as a nation, it has started to stare at the truth right in the eye and express itself with an honesty which had become as alien to us as the cinema we had started to make in the eighties […]
One of my favourite moments in Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth is Raj Kiran. Long before Shahrukh Khan appropriated Raj, Raj Kiran was Raj. The reason why we go back today to “koi yeh kaise bataye,” “tum itna jo muskura rahe ho” and “jhuki jhuki si nazar” is because the magic of Kaifi Azmi, Jagjit Singh and the devastating […]