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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“I fell in love with my then girlfriend and now wife over a bowl of fish curry she cooked for me. The best I have ever tasted. She is a chef too and favours more modern flavours. And we have two kitchens in our home. An open contemporary one where she does her modern stuff […]
There are cities where you let yourself be pampered. There are cities where you cannot help but complain about the chaos. And then there are cities where even though you complain, you still revel in its charm. Its character. Kolkata – truly a city of the lords, that now seems at least two decades behind […]
As a wanderer, I have been to places that have made me squeal in happiness, and others that have silenced me in awe. Places that render me motionless. But at times, I have chanced upon places that have made me experience all of that at once. Kumartuli, Kolkata. Where forms are fashioned out of clay. […]
Rajat Chaudhuri’s Hotel Calcutta has just been published (Niyogi Books, 2013). He lives in Kolkata, and besides his novels, he has also written short stories, essays and book reviews. The few questions I asked Rajat below are really not enough to convey the richness and variety of his writing work but his answers I […]
I remember I wrote my first poem at the age of seven. It was ‘ Ek je chilo bador, Se kheto sudhu gajor (Once there was a monkey, who ate only carrots)’. My parents had a hearty laugh about it. My father, then told me that Gurudev’s first poem was ‘Jol Pore, Pata Nore’ (It […]
This is what Vidya Balan has done. She has distilled the Indian film heroine beyond her size, skin colour, weight, objectification in item songs and orchestrated stardom created around the din of endorsements and tiny roles in big budget films to performance. And presence. The kind that makes you look at a woman beyond her […]
Having been exposed to the writings of Rabindranath Tagore, the biography of Ramakrishna (a mystic and the spiritual master of Vivekananda) and Bimal Roy’s movies, my heart yearned to experience this land called West Bengal. I reached Kolkata in early March and my cousin broached the subject of Dakshineshwar temple, the abode of goddess Kali […]