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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I did not know Valsa Mathew but sometimes, you do not need to know a person too well to imbibe instantly and with absolute certainty that there is something very special about her. I first saw Valsa nearly a decade or so ago when accompanied by my mother, I went to her son Vivek Mathew’s […]
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 […]
His lips quivered and tears streamed down his wrinkled cheeks as he held the yellowing piece of paper close to his heart. Memories of the love of his life flashed in his mind forcing a ghost of a smile to linger on his face. He read once again the note she had given him on […]
On the day of her Shradh, everything is normal. The maids come and go, people go to work, children go to school, the trains and the buses struggle to run on time; the sun rises, it will rise to its highest position at noon, and then disappear, letting the moon take over. It is just […]
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? […]
You went in what they call ‘an unnatural way’. They usually mean a murder, suicide or an accident. They mean you died young. Suddenly, even 40 is young when you are dead. If you’re alive, though, it is the opposite. You went without a goodbye. You went leaving a trail of devastation behind you. You […]
A sword lodged in stone. That is how Francisco Goldman describes a daughter’s love for her missing father in his visceral tribute to his late wife Aura Estrada in his book Say Her Name which is partly a grief diary of a devastated husband and partly a fictionalised account of life after the death of a […]
Sorrow can be solid; you can feel it thumping, knocking the air out of your lungs, rendering you incapable of drawing breath, air inches away but so still, you cannot suck it in. A thousand thoughts rush through your brain and rush into your veins, pushing your blood harder and harder until you feel that […]
The thing about death is, you cannot call. You cannot call them again. Ever. I think that is what tears you apart, what tears you up.
This balcony is perfect. It gives the luxury of both shade and sunshine from the morning sun at the same time. You can sit in such a way that your legs are warmed by the sun while the head rests in the cool shadows. Of course, you can reverse the order. But that was the […]
I was a tad surprised when he told me that he wouldn’t be able to meet me late evening since it was late, and he would have to return home. You don’t always expect guys to rush homewards just because it is a trifle late. We had initially planned to meet early evening, but another […]
Grief should be a story well told.. we should be able to say, “Ah well, it was a life well lived and sad that it ended.. But here is the thing… nothing was left undone, unsaid, unexplained, hands were held, love shared, pain halved.. peace embraced, sure, it ended too soon.. the full stop came […]