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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On the day freedom fighters and lifelong friends Ramprasad Bismil and Ashfaq Ullah Khan were hanged, and a few weeks after the death of Shaukat Kaifi, I heard Shabana Azmi on a channel, quoting the famous couplet penned by her father. “आज की रात बहुत गर्म हवा चलती है, आज की रात न फ़ुटपाथ पे […]
Why would a woman whose marriage is a painful farce stay with her husband for 30 long years? Perhaps for the joy of chatting up her son on a luxurious sofa in a beautiful home that resembles a Balinese resort and where a leaf falls noiselessly in a pool. She is Neelam (Shefali Shah) and […]
“Utaar Ke Phenk De Sab Janjaal Beete Kal Ka Har Kankal Tere Talve Hain Teri Naal” ** So when you peel and throw all conflicts and let the skeletons of the past go and your heels are like hooves with horseshoes, then you don’t run. You fly. And sometimes in life, the full circle spans […]
“Heere jo lagte hain woh mumkin hai angaare ho. Chingari lagte hai jo ho sakta hai taare ho,” husks Usha Uthup in Don 2 and the gold dusted line reminds you why Javed Akhtar was the other half of a legendary dialogue writing team that had understood to perfection, when to pull punches, when to […]
In Barsaat, yes, all the way back in 1949, when Raj Kapoor and Prem Nath went to the hills in a car, braving the wind and perhaps egged by boredom, they ran into love, tragedy, heartbreak and a life lesson or two. There have been many memories on wheels, intrinsic to narratives like Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi but why are we digressing? In 2001, […]
On the eve of the release of Zoya Akhtar’s second film Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, I went back to her debut and the clear-sightedness with which she revealed to us, the industry she works and lives in. It was with much relish that she added, little asides to the bonfire of celluloid vanities in Luck By Chance. The self-absorption of star makers. […]