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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I can’t get this image out of my head. A young survivor of the latest mass shooting in the US, clinging to a parent, with a Valentine’s Day balloon clutched in the hand. And yet another image. Of screaming children raising their hands in the air as a SWAT team breaks into an auditorium. And one […]
“Everything is fair in love and war,” says Rajkumar Rao’s vindictive hero in the viral trailer for Shaadi Mein Zaroor Aaana. This could have been the tagline of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmavati. The difference is that in the first film, the hero is avenging himself by punishing the woman who broke his heart. He wants […]
In a world where reductionist phrases simplify trends in unintelligent words, it is the season of supposedly “woke” men turning out to be predators. Case in point being Vikas Bahl, the man who directed Queen and also a few other successful men who were supposed to behave better than louts hanging around dark street corners, […]
Symbols matter. Symbols sum up ideals that are bigger than phraseology and represent the best of humanity. And no one knows how an intangible idea brimming with something vast and indefinable, gets distilled into a symbol and comes to belong to all of us. When artist Shepard Fairey created the iconic Barack Obama poster emblazoned with the word “Hope” in 2008-2009, […]
The US elections saddened me beyond belief. I didn’t know that an election process in a part of the world so far away from mine would impact me to such an extent. Truth be told, it has. I’ve considered myself an optimist and have always banked on the hope that the world is slowly gaining momentum towards […]
The important thing to learn from this time in human history is that appealing to people’s better judgement, their higher selves, their intelligence and sense of decency and right and wrong no longer works. If you appeal to their baser selves, their misogyny and irrationality, their hatred for the loathed ‘others’ (be they women, the […]
In 1987, Roopkuvarba Kanwar, a Rajput woman was celebrated by a huge number of people in her community for committing Sati at Deorala village of Sikar district in Rajasthan. She was just 18 and had been married for just eight months to one Maal Singh Shekhawat. Thousands of people watched her immolation into a heap of […]
An old woman bashes a bunch of puppies to death because she cannot stand the noise they and their mother are making in the neighbourhood. Visuals of a man killing stray dogs in Delhi go viral. A mother elephant and her babies are stoned randomly on the Wayanad-Mysore NH. A man is beaten and tied […]