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 woke up yet again and looked at the alarm clock. I had set the alarm for six o’clock in the morning like I always did and there was still half an hour before the alarm would start ringing; but for some reason I couldn’t lie in the bed anymore. It was the start of […]
He enters my room, looks at my gloomy face and being the best friend that he is, says, “Sugar, wanna go for a walk?” I nod. We walk and walk, without uttering a single word. Reaching Marine Drive, we both sit down at our usual place. Everything still unsaid. Sitting next to him, gazing at the […]
It’s not love but the story we fall for the story we seek in the mundane, the ordinary, the predictable we look for signs for stars in dust for songs to come alive for messengers to arrive from distant lands bringing gifts of hope, faith and trust of answers to questions dragging their feet […]
“This only brings pain.” “There are so many obstacles.” “You are too simple to deal with this….forget this!” “They fight like dogs, can’t see each other’s faces, once they are over with this.” Those were Sujay’s esteemed friends’ opinion on ‘this’; the most dreaded yet sought-after human emotion – articulated by the four lettered word: […]
Surrounded by the eternal sunshine sold over the counters this time of the year, I often remember a few writers, film makers, song writers who tapped into the deep, dark, swirling complexity of human relationships and showed us stuff that does not come wrapped in golden paper with a bow on top. One of the […]
Shyam Benegal’s cinema never loses the plot in trying to project itself as a breakaway, alternate idea. His films never preen and say, “Let me show you something you have never seen before,” even though his cinema in the 70s was quietly, unobtrusively radical both in content and in form. He has always had a social […]
What The Godfather is to the male of the species, An Affair to Remember is to those who propagate the species. It makes women believe in that crazy little thing called love. Without us identifying with and holding up as ideal this paean to pure emotion, entirely devoid of, thank God, realistic flourishes, you would […]
I was in the first batch of inward fellows of the National Foundation of India’s ‘Northeast Media Exchange Programme’. It was 1996-97 and I went to Mizoram. My subject was ‘Changing traditional patterns and the youth of Mizoram’. Though this travel piece has nothing to do with my fellowship subject, it is a by-product of […]
The turning point in the shared history of Raj and Simran in Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (DDLJ) comes when she finds herself in the same room as him after a night of drunken mindlessness and worries if she has done the unthinkable. He convinces her that she hasn’t and she collapses in a […]
Acclaimed cinematographer and film maker Thomas Michael Cowan is a man of truth. Of that moment when stiff pretences and masks are peeled off and the real person emerges. So he pays a sudden compliment. Caught off-guard, I react and he amusedly observes, “See? I get a smile!” It is a game he plays often with the film narratives he directs. […]