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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Some believe 80’s to be the worst period in the history of Indian cinema. I beg to differ – but only a wee bit. My early film viewing experience is mostly spread across late 80s- early 90s so I could safely say I’ve had the best (or worst) of both the decades. The 80s had indeed reached the […]
Are you looking for a DVD of the Apu Trilogy? Log on to a site called “Movie Mail” (http://www.moviemail-online.co.uk/film/12274/The-Apu-Trilogy-(Box-Set)/) and buy it online for 26.99 GBP…Or do you prefer Ritwik Ghatak? Get DVDs for The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara) or A River Called Titas (Titas Ekti Nodir Nam) from the BFI website (http://filmstore.bfi.org.uk) at 10.99 GBP each. All loaded with […]
I learnt at five just what Hindi cinema means to middle class India when I heard my father talk about Dilip Kumar’s death scene in Ganga Jamuna.“Tabahi macha di,” (he was devastating) he said. Films were a part of everything we lived through in Patiala. Terrorism, joy and grief. Happiness meant a scooter […]
India, for the first time after many decades is looking inwards. And as it does that as a nation, it has started to stare at the truth right in the eye and express itself with an honesty which had become as alien to us as the cinema we had started to make in the eighties […]
The world of Hindi films is largely driven by money and stars with a big following. Quite obviously the stakes are dangerously high when big films featuring big stars hit the screen. They may not deserve the hype that surrounds their releases but every media platform is milked dry to promote a lavishly mounted film. […]
A writer came to me with a script today and his own story was more interesting than the one he had written. I might have offended him by spending far more time listening to him about his own search for recognition than listening to the reams of material on his laptop he tried to engage me with. This young boy […]
Katrina Kaif as a rock star (She struts in slow motion towards the camera in crazy boots, with smoke curling out of her lips, strumming a guitar). Katrina Kaif as another version (there have been many) of Geet in Jab We Met, ready to elope in the dead of the night with a phrase about […]
It was a toss between Shankar Jaikishan and RD Burman. The film was Teesri Manzil and it was left to Shammi Kapoor to decide who he wanted to compose music for the film. It was an unprecedented privilege for a Hindi film hero but nothing could be denied to Shammi Kapoor in the 60s. In […]