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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Over a decade ago, at Alliance Francaise de Bangalore, I spoke with a youthful conviction on why Hindi cinema must never be dismissed as just another drug to keep the masses oblivious to the real issues of governance, poverty, disenfranchisement, corruption and more. When gently asked by the moderator, why Hindi cinema could not be […]
On October 10, 1964, the whole nation was shocked to hear about the sudden and tragic death of the great stalwart of Hindi cinema Guru Dutt. Not only because he was a great film director, producer and actor; but because he was only 39 years old. His fame was defined by four films Pyaasa, Kaagaz Ke […]
In the film industry, the transition is not that clear. We have had good cinema, off and on, more dependent on the directors- so Satyajit Ray (who along with masters from Bengal and South India influenced world cinema and not just Indian cinema and was active in years 1955-1991), Guru Dutt (1950s), Raj Kapoor (1950s,60s,70s even […]
I met music director Ravi Sharma a few years ago as a WorldSpace RJ. He was a guest at a concert and was put up in a hotel where I went to interview him at the end of what had been a long day for him. He was a little watchful in the beginning and […]
I discovered Guru Dutt rather late in life. As a teenager, I always found him too intense. Someone who reminded me of dark, forbidden corners within. Of spiralling gloom you could lose yourself in, just the way he had. Even though he had made sunlit films like Baazi, Jaal, Aar Paar, Mr and Mrs 55; […]
The Indian film industry is one of the largest in the world, and Indian cinema is unmatched in its variety. Tracing the history of Indian cinema through the traditional methods is not tedious – it is too gargantuan a task. This is just an attempt to revisit the Indian film history, and look at various […]
Just today while channel surfing, I refused to watch The Dark Knight beyond a few scenes even though it is marvellous cinematically, because as I tried to explain to my son..the idea of evil in the film is so dark and so overwhelming that it drains us of any belief in life as a meaningful experience. It makes us believe that no matter what […]