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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No this is not yet another ode to Maggi noodles, so you can stop groaning. Maggi was on my black list for a while now after I heard about the wax coating on the noodles and that it is difficult to digest. Anyhow over the past several years I have been slowly weaning my family off […]
Confessional writing can tear you apart, plunge deep into your darkest memories and like EM Forster would say, spread them out in the sunlight so that you as well those reading you can know the meaning of them. But there is confessional writing that seeks to understand and resolve pain and writing that just wants […]
A few years in the Goan villages have earned a morning ‘hi’ from many households I pass on the way to work. I’ve developed a deep respect for the local lifestyle, with a few years with Rose and Peter, at their Addams Family-esq estate in North Goa. Rose is an enigma, smooth faced and soft […]
She was no Nirbhaya…. Not born in the age of fast news; No voices, no candles, no protests, Grieved for her! She hadn’t gone out with a friend; No jeans; no mobiles; No reason for fingers to be pointed! Being a woman, her only fault! Half the world missed her story… A story…. Of […]
Margarita, With a Straw continues its triumphant journey across the world, taking director Shonali Bose to assorted festival podiums and vindicating her belief in her brave, little film, again and again. In an interview, Bose recounts the loss, the pain and the cathartic emotions that led to the making of the film. The tragedy […]
Vasuda Giri does not think of the future as a magical place where all her dreams will one day come true. She doesn’t have to because, every morning she takes a few deep breaths and begins the life of her dreams. In her twenties, she is no different from many of her friends who want […]
Life is all about contrasting decisions, each one making a new ripple; sometimes saving you and the other times destroying you. I have written before about letting go and moving on, but now, I’ll write about the opposite. About the virtue of holding on. Nowadays, people have lost the patience to tolerate cracks in […]
Life is a riddle. When we try and unfold its layers, we learn a little more. For most people, life does not unfold as a picture book story. As time moves, we see the colours fading. The innocence of childhood, the zeal of the sophomore, the spiritedness of youth; all of that fades into grey. And wisdom […]
Yesterday, on a friend’s suggestion, I read a poem called ‘On the Art of Kintsugi‘ by Ruth Padel. And then to understand it better, researched the pottery craft the poem was inspired by. Kintsugi, I learnt is a Japanese art/craft of fixing pottery and ceramic vessels. But it is no ordinary technique. It uses a gold based […]
There is a scene in Shonali Bose’s incredibly direct and brave film Margarita With A Straw where Laila (Kalki Koechlin), the protagonist is passing by a library in her wheelchair and looking through a glass wall at ‘normal’ people on the other side. This glass wall, as the film teaches us is not just something […]
I could feel my heart thumping and beads of perspiration sliding down my forehead as I took a deep breath and stepped onto the metallic rail that slithered into the night. My body stiffened as I saw a beam of light emerging from the tunnel. “This is it,” I thought as I squeezed my eyes […]
It had been just a few days since she got the news of her incurable illness from her physician. It had taken a while for the seriousness of the matter to sink in and finally she had managed to ask, “How much time do I have?” The doctor, after a few moments of deep thought […]