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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In the days before relentless marketing made stars of one-hit wonders, there were legends like Kalyanji-Anandji pioneering live concerts all over the world, scoring thousands of hit songs in over 250 films, giving breaks to lyricists like Anand Bakshi, Gulshan Bawra, Qamar Jalalabadi, Anjaan, Verma Malik and M G Hashmat, and launching the careers of […]
An authentic actor’s face is unmistakable, unforgettable. The eyes speak volumes. Every frown stands out. Every snarl registers. When the lip curls, the nostrils flare, the forehead furrows, you watch without blinking, without a moment of doubt that the emotion playing out before you is real. To call an actor real is anomalous but what […]
When the sixties swung into the seventies to the beat of RD Burman’s Spanish guitar and Amitabh Bachchan’s angst, in retrospect, it was the end of the happy endings in Hindi cinema. 20 years into independence, the political reality of India had become far more complex, dark and divisive to allow films to be set on house boats, shikaras, […]
In the 70s and the 80s, when I was growing up in Patiala, a framed poster next to a small shop near Sheran Wala Gate (a prominent locality), routinely heralded the arrival of a new film in town. On my way to the school in rickshaw everyday, I would watch that poster, trying to guess the story line of the […]