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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In a country where women are raped and occasionally burnt by packs of predators, the most powerful image in the past few days was this. A few young women from Jamia Millia Islamia protecting a cowering young man from police violence. And the women of Bangalore, forming a protective circle around men to shield them […]
That viral video of Kangana Ranaut on a dummy horse without legs , issuing a blood curdling cry is emblematic of the kind of fake nationalism we are being asked to adhere to these days. It allows the lady in question to diss anyone she dislikes from Alia Bhatt to Shabana Azmi without watching her […]
“Everything is fair in love and war,” says Rajkumar Rao’s vindictive hero in the viral trailer for Shaadi Mein Zaroor Aaana. This could have been the tagline of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmavati. The difference is that in the first film, the hero is avenging himself by punishing the woman who broke his heart. He wants […]
There is a big noise in the media about just who Vishal Bhardwaj’s Rangoon belongs to. Well, it does not belong to either Kangana Ranaut or Shahid Kapoor. Or Saif Ali Khan for that matter. It belongs to no one and well, nowhere because Vishal Bhardwaj, whose Maqbool and Omkara cohesively wove Indian narratives into Shakespearean […]
The death of Pratyusha Bannerjee underscores the distance between Indian television’s most popular narratives and reality where women do not always have monochromatic inner lives and a monumental forbearance that is almost as fake as the jewels worn by the Simars, the Gopis and the Anandis. ** The irony could not be more cruel. Pratyusha […]
Actor Vishakha Singh is trending on social media right now as is actor Aarthi Agarwal but their stories could not be more different. Vishakha Singh reacted to an obscene comment on her fan page and dared the offender to show his real face in his display picture. She also asked him if he commented on […]
Madhuri Dixit recently received a notice from the Haridwar Food and Drug Administration for endorsing the nutritional value of Maggi, after the UP government found dangerously high levels of lead in a batch of noodles. While a debate rages about whether brand ambassadors can be held responsible for the quality of products, there is another side to the […]
While watching the opening shots of Queen, I remembered a machine knitted, beige pull-over I have not worn in years. The heroine’s grandmother brought back memories of a grand-aunt in Delhi who plucked her eye brows even in her 80s, had a smart bob and would pull up a high stool in her kitchen to […]