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 have been reading voraciously these days. My love for reading has begun irking the folks around me. They often remark, “Why do you want to read so much? Do something else. Reading is not everything.” But, I do not tell them that I think reading is the warmest, healthiest way to fill the abyss […]
While watching Imtiaz Ali’s latest film Tamasha, Eckhart Tolle’s bestseller, A New Earth came back to me. He writes how accumulated memories of angst, humiliation, denial, emotional suppression and anger form an invisible pain body within our body. In most people, this pain body remains unreactive till a trigger presents itself. And then there is […]
An aside. There is a moment in Imtiaz Ali’s Love Aaj Kal, when after being mugged by two hoodlums in a strange country, Saif Ali Khan sits beaten and broken by more than just the blows he has just received. And suddenly, the face of Meera, a woman he thought he had forgotten flashes before […]
Damp, narrow lanes with houses huddled together. Peeling walls, fading patinas. Melding terraces. Halwai shops. A musty little bakery with unlabelled bread. Young girls and boys in clumsy cardigans. A young boy’s shelves packed with medals and trophies and books, some of them in Punjabi. Boxes of pinnis. Mustard and sugarcane fields and school girls […]
Far before the debate warmed up about pregnant heroines signing films at all, there was Sharmila Tagore, visibly pregnant and carrying Saif Ali Khan Pataudi through the shoot of Asit Sen’s Safar. Decades before film magazines wondered if a married heroine could pull off roles beyond her comfort zone, there was Ms Tagore again, playing […]
“I think I am in love,” announced A as she plonked herself on B’s settee. “You think too much sweetheart…,” said an indulgent B. “I think this time round it is the real thing.” “You are always sure it is the real thing dear, remember X, and Y …and Z for that matter?” “X was […]
He : Need a lift? She : Did you see me asking for it? He: You do have to be rude every time don’t you? She: Why do you bother coming back then? He : Has it ever occurred to you that I truly care? She: Has it ever occurred to you that I genuinely don’t? […]
This is no fairy tale even though I married my long time girlfriend, Moon. We had been courting for aeons, literally. People spoke about how Moon and I disappeared behind the clouds at times. News about our celestial love affair spread as far and wide as Pluto. And you know how it is – can’t stop those […]