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…
Read More
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…
Read More
“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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
You are browsing archives for
The Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has recognized the harsh reality of malnutrition in India by saying “India‘s “unacceptably high” levels of child malnutrition are a “national shame”. Our State women and child welfare minister Varsha Gaikwad in the Assembly’s winter session last year in Nagpur admitted on the floor of the house that only 68 children were dying […]
What can one person do?” This is the theme song of India, circa 2011. It is there in our airwaves, living, breathing and engulfing the citizenry in a convenient cloak of invisibility and irresponsibility. The system is bad. The British left behind a servile mess. Corruption is a given. What can one person do? And […]
This is not an authored article but we at Unboxed Writers feel bound to share this press release issued by the Free Soni Sori Campaign (Courtesy Kamayani Bali Mahabal). We must do more than just read this story. We must join our voices to make such atrocities impossible. In a global show of solidarity marking […]
Many of us hate supermarkets. Yes, you will see us thronging them and standing in endless queues and looking glad to finally have access to things that were once limited to TV screens a few years ago. But some of us hate them. We hate that the vegetables are sodden and oh-so-huge, which means that they are […]
Whenever photographer Clare Arni steps on Bangalore’s MG Road, young vendors of cliches flock around her, mistaking her for a foreigner. The moment she starts chatting them up in mellifluous Kannada, they realise their mistake. Only an Indian can speak an Indian language with a complete understanding of local particularities and without a trace of […]
I am obsessed about this country. I love it to the point of hating it and then tumbling back into loving it all over again. I hate the callousness. The chuck-a-plastic-wrapper-outta-the-window attitude. I hate people spitting all over the place. Wonder if they would spit on their dining table. I hate the chalta-hai (anything goes) […]
So is India a bag of clichés? A tired gag about scams? A joke poking fun at regional accents? An anecdote about food poisoning? A 12 page essay about the failure that democracy has turned out to be? A Facebook rant about traffic jams? A derisive tweet about corrupt politicians? A prime time drama helmed […]
We were walking down the streets of the busiest city this side of the Atlantic. There was paper everywhere – in the windows of old, battered-down bookshops and on the unbalanced tables of the street vendors selling novels in languages that were foreign to my ears. There were flyers about missing dogs and moving sales […]
In 1995, I met Bangalore-based danseuse Rashme Hedge Gopi on a routine assignment that turned out be not so routine after all. She was a leading exponent of Bharatnatyam and for years had travelled to France, Germany, UK, Africa and USA, the erstwhile USSR , performing and representing India at prestigious international festivals. And then […]
Good Sadhu Babas should never be as you expect them to be and Rocket Baba is no exception. Though over 70, he has the body of a fit 30-year-old, his skin and eyes are clear and his voice just booms. He arrives at the house of his student, my rakhi brother Gopal, like an angry […]
“We only hire native speakers.” This was the sixth time I had heard these words. My mouth turned dry, my face burned, and I felt the familiar sense of nausea. My sixth failure! I tried to protest yet again, the words beginning to sound hollow in my ears. I repeated what had come to me […]
“Democracy,” began our political-science teacher in her high-pitched nasal voice and her staccato accent, “Is a government of the ‘peeple,’ by the ‘peeple,’ for the ‘peeple.” I remember nothing else. I did mug it all up though, that and the rest of it, for the Board exams. Did pretty well too, come to think of […]