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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Being accustomed to receiving information about the outside world through the NDTV app on my phone and articles on Facebook, it’d been a while since I read an actual newspaper. However, paranoia emerging out of rumours about the city I live in being on “high alert” led me to pick up a copy of the Deccan […]
I’m taking up another ad as part of ‘Conditioning is for Hair, Not Minds’ – a series in collaboration with The Spoilt Modern Indian Woman. This one is by Whisper Ultra. The ad review suggestion was made by award-winning bloggerSheena Dabholkar, who is also the co-author of this post. So let’s begin. I was sent a […]
Here’s the next edition of ‘Conditioning is for Hair, not Minds’ in collaboration with The Spoilt Modern Indian Woman. The ad I am taking up is Amazon’s new groundbreaking (not) social experiment, titled “When a Woman Shops”. Check it out here. The ad begins with a group of men, in a generic, posh, urban living room, talking […]
“Men who want to be feminists need not be given a space in feminism. They need to take the space they have in society and make it feminist”. -Kelley Temple For some reason, this year began with a number of my male friends accusing my writing of being “alienating” and “scary”. I was told (by […]
I’ve been suffering from serious case of writer’s block for the last few weeks- every time I sat down to write a new post I’d give up after a few minutes because I didn’t feel like I had anything specific to say- nothing had agitated me enough, nothing had made me angry enough. Fortunately or […]
Imagine this: You’re at a party with a bunch of your friends. You’re a little buzzed. Eventually the music dies down and you all end up crashing at your friend’s house. You wake up the next morning and you know something’s not quite right. Something happened but you’re not ready to talk about it. You […]
I am not ashamed to admit that Aitraaz is one of my Bollywood guilty pleasures. I watch the film every time it’s on television-Not only do I find it highly amusing but I also find it interesting because it touches upon the fact that males can also face sexual violence. Anyway, as I watched it today […]
It all started with the outlet tube of the washing machine snapping open at the joint, a couple of weeks back. The existing tape had to be removed, the outlet pipes fitted together again properly and taped up securely with insulation tape. Once I was done repairing the pipe, casual conversation led to me […]
Even if the rapist had broken through the door and raped someone in the house, the woman victim would have been at fault. At least partially, because “taali ek hath se nahi bajti…” If the rape victim was an infant perhaps the reason would be her parent’s non- belief in god or perhaps her stars […]
The two convicts in the Pune BPO employee rape-cum-murder case, Purshottam Borate and Pradip Komokate, were sentenced to death, sometime back. News of sexual violence against women sends me into an overdrive.I am approaching 50 but am as angry, as touchy about this business of the second sex as I was, 30 years ago. The reason […]
Note: I met Aoife Mannix in 2007..the memories still linger though..of her robust world-view, her radiant poetry. After Aoife Mannix’s revolution changes the world, there will never be any wars because, “bullets will bounce where they come from, leaving no scars, just a trail of jelly beans.” Soldiers will only wear birthday suits. There will […]
Women suffer. By habit, choice and circumstance. We feel inadequate most of the time. As home makers we wish we were out there, validating ourselves by earning money. When we have careers, we worry that the kids are growing up without good food on the table, without ironed clothes, without supervised homework. We don’t ever […]