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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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 are still unmarried. The mother also preying on the male interest in her life to figure if […]
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, […]
A heroine unconscious of her gender. Someone who stops a Home Minister’s car because, “I will plead no longer.. I ask for my father’s rights.” Someone who sits down her family and promises after relentless injustice has deprived them all of not just their land but their dignity in the courts and police […]
After years of search on YouTube, I finally stumbled upon Farmaan, a Doordarshan serial directed by Lekh Tandon. Based on the Urdu book Alampanah by Rafia Amin, the serial starring Kanwaljit Singh and Deepika Deshpande was a restless memory that even two decades could not erase. And for good reason. The story telling was honest to […]
I recently remembered the shows on TV as I was growing up. When TV meant one and then just two channels of Doordarshan. There was even a time when all programming stopped after 10:pm and I used to think that the late night shows on New Year’s eve were the greatest treat ever! Who knew […]
Note: I met Shernaz Patel in 2007 and it was a moment of personal significance considering, I grew up watching her on TV in the best years of Doordarshan and had read about her, without ever imagining that I would be interviewing her, one day. It was hard to look at Shernaz Patel and not […]
With tender fondness, I reminisce about the good old DD (yes, our own Doordarshan) days that formed an intrinsic part of my childhood. As I stroll down the memory lane, an era flashes by, of the 80s, untouched by the concept of channel flicking or the sway of TRPs. This was the time when television […]