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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At the age of twelve, she had crossed the borders from Bangladesh. She was a refugee of the India’s independence movement. She found shelter in her maternal uncle’s house in the suburb near Calcutta. She is 92 now. The distant memory of her journey across the border is crystal clear though she cannot recall a sentence […]
The shorter days and longer nights make me thankful for the warmth of the sun and the long lazy days of summer that never ended. Pumpkins, squash and sweet potatoes in abundance remind me that Mother Earth will provide for us even when the cold winter winds blow. A roof over our heads and family […]
As I leafed through some old albums, I came across a photo of my grand father sitting on his battered teakwood chair. The chair had hosted multiple generations of children, grand- children across genders, age groups. The chair stayed in the semi open living room area and that was where my grand father would supervise […]
You can be surrounded by a room full of people and still feel alone…alone in your frustrating circumstances, grappling with seemingly inconsequential problems that no one really sees as problems. How you wish you had someone who would understand. And you could draw strength from your loved ones and fall back on their support. And […]
This is not my regular Thanksgiving post where I give thanks for all my blessings. The brainwave for this post came about when I was washing dishes – anyone who knows me knows how much I hate doing dishes. As I sunk my fingers into the dishwashing detergent (because the dish rag was dirty), my […]
No this is not yet another ode to Maggi noodles, so you can stop groaning. Maggi was on my black list for a while now after I heard about the wax coating on the noodles and that it is difficult to digest. Anyhow over the past several years I have been slowly weaning my family off […]
I listened to the ticking of the bedside clock in the dead silence of the night, each repetitive beat filling me with fresh guilt, ache and remorse. How I wished to travel back in time to that careless moment, erase it and then change the course of events to a much happier ending. In that […]
It had been just a few days since she got the news of her incurable illness from her physician. It had taken a while for the seriousness of the matter to sink in and finally she had managed to ask, “How much time do I have?” The doctor, after a few moments of deep thought […]
Maybe it’s the hormones or the overcast skies that are a regular feature of this part of the world. Maybe it’s my inability to get a decent job. Dang it! I blame all of the above for pushing me into this limbo. Winter blues hit me bad when I was in Boston and now […]
I was recently writing an article about genetics and came across the nature versus nurture theory. I’ve heard of it before but never applied it to my life, until now. You see I have been fighting nature and possibly nurture all my life. My Dad and I have a lot in common. We are both […]
Hard to tell if memory inhabits me or I inhabit memories ** of magazines lining my mothers tin trunks smelling of the 70s and recipes of apple fritters songs on radio a window seat that opened to dreamscapes painting themselves in my head life that went on flowing unabated through everything .. memories of homes […]
They say there are five stages of grief. Seven maybe. Either way, I think I can say I’ve been through about four. Or am going through them – they’re going back and forth for me to be unable to pinpoint which stage I’m at, right now, at this very moment, yesterday – who knows? […]