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 world has become unbearable to me. The more I try to center myself and tap into inner peace, the more junk it throws at me. I love the trash-to-treasure idea but what do you do with random acts of violence with absolutely no motive or reasoning? It’s hard to erase those images from […]
Just a story in a newspaper. your life and death. A picture of you and the ones you loved more than life itself. but it’s just a picture a snatch from a better time. when you still were you. when you believed you could make it through. when the years had not chipped away at […]
Hope on a gray day. A sprightly sunflower. A bunch of ox-eye daisies. A field of marigold. Sarson in full bloom. A vase of chrysanthemums in a room. A sweet round motichoor laddoo, a crisply succulent jalebi. Food for the body and the soul. Lemon tarts and coffee. A brightly beaked myna. An arch of golden trumpets. Lantanas in a […]
Was it coincidental that I wrote the introduction to the Chicken Soup for the Indian Woman’s Soul on the eve of Woman’s Day? As I wrote it many years ago, I recalled women who have triumphed in big and small ways and changed lives and perceptions without ever being acknowledged. Women who don’t bail out easily […]
God has a way of keeping his favorite children close. Every time I begin to settle for something, he has a way of shaking me. God: This is not what I planned for you; your destiny is greater than just settling into the mundane, then just making do with what is available. I am on my way to […]
I can smell it in the air The smell of change And dissipation of fear The Light breaking through the clouds That have hung over us for far too long I can feel the love It fills me up and brims over A promise and an answered prayer As the dawn of a new […]
When hope leaves you Like a drop sliding on a leaf, Like a bubble bursting anon; When fear of loss, Stalks you forever and ever; When in the sunshine of hope, Despair follows you Like your own shadow; When time creates furrows on the skin And cracks in relationships; Then…. Even the pen […]
I can count the number of movies I have cried in. Anjali, Taare Zameen Par, The Notebook and Titanic. This week I added a new one to my tearjerker list – Dolphin Tale. It is a tale of triumph. Overcoming odds. Resilience. The American Heritage dictionary defines resilience as the ability to recover quickly from […]
Pic By the author Our lives are not in a constant even flow. There are troughs and crests interspersed with the routine business of living. While the crests are easy to ride- being as they are about intense happiness, success, joy et all, it’s the troughs which get us down and out. Unhappiness, grief, or […]
The sun had begun to set on the horizon. Chanda’s frail arms could no longer carry the weight of Bablu. Cold and tired, she put him down on the cobbled pavement. The old mansion looked deserted. Chanda and her brothers huddled together to keep warm. “Will he come?” she wondered looking at the box in […]
The Communication Skills session ended, I walked out and then someone said ” Excuse me Ma’am.” I turned around to find a bunch of ladies. One of them said, “Usha wants to share her story, she has written it down for you.” I had given an assignment in class about sharing a real life experience. Usha […]
It is not easy, to love yourself, when you seem unimportant and seem to not contribute to a life It is not easy, to believe in yourself, if you are not doing anything apparently meaningful It is not easy, to see that, what you’ve built your entire life on, is a shaky foundation ready to crumble anytime It […]