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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One of my favourite moments in Love BreakUps Zindagi is when a twice divorced Govind (Cyrus Sahukar) sits in his Delhi barsaati with the woman he thinks is the answer to his search for love. There is a pile of home delivery menus between them and he puns on misspelt chicken dishes till she decides […]
At the end of every conflict, is a question. And an answer. Most of the times though when a conflict involves two genders, may be even a third gender, questions of honour, poverty fuelled desperation, rage and possibly violence against the weak or in response to the oppressors, there are no easy answers. At the […]
If you remember the seven minutes of Shefali Shah in Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya, you will remember also that she was the only beam of credible innocence in the film. If you remember her in Meera Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, you will remember also that she was the luminous dark secret of the film, a girl suffocated with the enormity […]
There is a moment in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides when Jack Sparrow says, “There should be a captain in there somewhere.” And by God, there is. There he is clambering ropes, trees, rocks, the limits of suspended disbelief, and making you believe even without the rather tame 3-D effects and the endless visual chicanery that […]
After watching Amole Gupte’s Stanley Ka Dabba, you grasp one thing with absolute clarity. That Taare Zameen Par may have had Aamir Khan’s name but it had Gupte’s soul. It was Gupte’s intuitive empathy for a child’s world view, his understanding of what pains a child, what makes him smile and, his ability to disappear into a child’s tender, sunlit soul that made Taare […]