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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The country is suffering, while the elite are engaged in Facebook wars. Nothing is going to change till each of us makes up his or her mind to fight patriarchy, caste, communalism and injustice. The working class continues to exist on a pittance, and the politicians continue to roll in rivers of money. I was […]
When I watched Tom Hanks’s The Terminal, I was left confused and am quite undecided even today on whether it’s a tale of resilience or a story about the helpless acceptance by a man of his circumstances. The way Hanks watches people come and go, all the while making himself comfortable in an airport terminal, hoping […]
The bunk bed went yesterday. In the living room the 40-inch TV lies on the floor, devoid of its stand. The coffee tables and end tables gone – even their impressions on the carpet – gone. Very soon this house will be empty. Emptied of occupants and emptied of possessions. It will no long smell […]
The only part that can be appropriately labelled as ‘excruciating’ in a 3.5 week vacation home (India), is perhaps the 20+ hours spent cooped up in an air-plane or counting crows during layovers. An 8 hour flight from Detroit to Amsterdam, wandering aimlessly through the occluded corridors of Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport before boarding the next […]
We moved in two weeks ago… For almost one-and-a- half months prior to that, there were workers in our house.. masons, carpenters, painters, plumbers, electricians, polishers… an army of more than 15 different people at different times getting the house in place for my family of two to move in. I visited the house often […]
Which side of the road do you walk? There is a parallel line. You look at the road And it gives you a stare right back. The road to home has always looked the same. It offered me a chance to go out and see another roads in the country. Where do you go but […]
The kitchen. Pretty much where she spent a greater part of her time. Randomly throwing spices, cleaning up and spraying repellent on little red ants that crawled their way up to some new tidbit they had stumbled upon. The bedroom. Clothes being folded, shelves being arranged, curtains being dusted, windows wiped clean. The ceremony of […]
Nafisa sat perched on the edge of her terrace, reading a poignant tale of lost love. Kemal was trying to absorb the fact, that his beloved Fusun was now a happily married woman. Each word in the story reflecting his pain and piercing through Nafisa’s chest. Just then the sky boomed with the soulful sound of the […]
One balmy afternoon, I built a house with cloth and bamboo shoots. walls splashed with yellow and brown roses. Egyptian cotton, I still remember! Soft and warm I curled in them. Empty utensils bubbling with joy, on a fire stoked by my dreams. A cabbage patch wrapped around me, My doors open for all to […]
When you arrive at Chandra and Anal Jain’s home, you walk into a radiant energy field. The couple belong to a certain lost age of refinement, unconditional warmth and hospitality that translates into tall glasses of lemonades, cheese crackers with olives, health advice, life questions, easy but deep conversations that begin sometime in the afternoon […]
There is a certain honest-to-goodness quality about actor Soni Razdan that translates into a commitment to the moment no matter what she does. Be it the vulnerable fierceness she exuded in Mahesh Bhatt’s film Saraansh or the comically mean daughter-in-law she created in Ramesh Sippy’s Buniyaad. Be it the struggle to stay afloat financially during […]