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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Trust is a frightening thing to dive into. It is far easier to stay in fear. In a state of indecision, it is far easier to believe someone else’s version of our life than to believe in the small voice that tells us from within, “Its okay. Just jump into the abyss.” I don’t understand […]
I saw a young boy apply sudden breaks to his bicycle as it was about to run over the corpse of a crow. Perhaps the bird had tried to fly prematurely and had met with an accident. A question suddenly popped in my head– Why did the young boy consciously prevent his bicycle from running over […]
I remember the morning after Mohammed Rafi’s death in 1980. It was my turn to read the news in the school assembly and I remember preparing instead a small tribute to the singer and ending with the lines, “Jab Kabhi Bhi Sunoge Geet Mere, Sang Sang Tum Bhi Gungunaoge.” I realised the meaning of these words sometime in […]
It’s easy to be superstitious. It provides us with the comfortable closure that we often look for. It’s easy to ascribe grandiose significance to numbers and dates that would otherwise only be notches in the general randomness of the universe’s being. In chemistry, they call that natural sense of randomness; Entropy. And Entropy makes hard […]
Many many years ago, I saw a bit of Mani Kaul’s debut film Uski Roti on Doordarshan and what struck me even though I was a child then, was a cinematic vocabulary unlike any I had seen or had been exposed to. This film had pauses and long moments of silence when no one seemed in a […]
The performing animal left the circus on June 25, 2009 but we continue to anoint his remains, repair the broken halo and embroider a velvet shroud to celebrate him. He, who in his lifetime was first built and then taken apart in a bloody arena for all the world to see. What is it with fame? What is it […]
Hindi film music composer Daan Singh passed away of liver complications in Jaipur at the age of 78 on June 18, 2011. He was like a fast-traversing, low intensity meteor that just showed up and sped away very very quickly. You wonder why. During my several visits to Jaipur in the last two years, I did make […]
I don’t know where you are.. where you will go I do know you came from a place of light and laughter because when I looked up and saw your eyes I saw only sunshine and unblemished hope. I remember you as my childhood.. You in a hill side cottage playing chess with your nephew parodying the snatch […]
Grief should be a story well told.. we should be able to say, “Ah well, it was a life well lived and sad that it ended.. But here is the thing… nothing was left undone, unsaid, unexplained, hands were held, love shared, pain halved.. peace embraced, sure, it ended too soon.. the full stop came […]
Just last month, Maqbool Fida Husain was busy giving telecon interviews denying that his most recent painting, posted on the Internet immediately after Mamata Banerjee’s landslide victory in the assembly polls, had anything to do with depicting the TMC supremo as Maa Durga. “I have depicted India, to express that woman power is on the […]
Bomb blasts, murders, robberies. She grew up reading about these every morning in the newspaper. The concept of death however remained a mystery. If she ever overheard adults in the household talk about or mourn a relative’s or a friend’s death, she would enclose herself in a shell and talk to her imaginary friends about what followed in […]
The night I heard of Navin Nischol’s death, I watched Parwana (1971) on YouTube. Yes, the same film where he played the hero and Amitabh Bachchan, the second lead. The irony. Years later Navin Nischol played the second lead in Desh Premi (1982) where Bachchan, a superstar by now, was already playing a double role. […]