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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She stood at the end of the long gali. He was waiting still. Standing patiently, peeping from behind the yellow minaret next to the big gate. Hundreds of pigeons sat on the gate’s rusted iron rods and the pale, cold cement of the boundary wall. She did not take her gaze off him, nor did he stop […]
He is mine… all mine. No, not all mine. A part of him belongs to her as well. He says he loves me, has always loved me, for as long as he can remember. But he lies, I can see it in his eyes, I can smell her on his collar, his skin. She is […]
Everybody loves a love story, especially a real life one. But, while stories of people who had the courage to break the bounds of convention hold universal appeal, there also exist real life stories of deep and abiding love between people who live out their lives within the shackles of convention, in soul-destroying conditions, and […]
I am lost in my own being Knotted, twisted, reeled in, I see a being unrecognisable staring at me from space. A wanderer, longing to reunite with what was once her soul. Love demands from you everything you can’t give. It pokes fun at you, flogs you, and then bleeds you to death. I have […]
We do not fear dying; we fear being forgotten. That’s why we have death anniversaries, barsis and shraadhs . That’s why we have graveyards longing for someone to stop by. That’s why we have urns on ledges and frames gracing our walls. But I don’t want to be those bones lying in wait. I want you to show me how […]
Alarm rings at 4.45 A.M. Brush. Drink one litre of luke warm water. Jogging outfit on. Leash the dog. Run for 45 minutes Stretch for 15. Get home. Hard boil two eggs. A glass of milk. No sugar. Shower. Formal white shirt. Formal trousers. Matching tie. Shining shoes. Instruct maid. Leave for work. Check mails. Answer […]
This is a love story like no other but let me start at the very beginning. Two years ago when I was editing life stories of Indian women for the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, I received a mail from Aamrapali Bhogle. My first reaction was of total disbelief. No way in hell could a woman go that far into […]
Akshi was in the bathroom, taking her fourth bath of the day. Ram smiled to himself over her obsession and proceeded to pick her an outfit for the evening. The deep green salwar-kameez … it’s her favourite, but the colour is all wrong for an evening out. The pink and beige one … nah, too […]
A red blur flashed around her, a grin barely visible beneath the sparkle of the jewels. Another blur, green this time, and some purple. She ran through the crowd, head whipping around rapidly, looking for one specific blur. His blur. Faces leered at her from behind vibrant masks. The bright lights did nothing to ease […]
Not the love that watches. Not the love that waits. Not the love that bides its time. Not the love that obeys the clock, the traffic, laws of the season and reason. But the love that is here and now.. Like an impetuous embrace, The sweat on the brow, The sun on the skin, Like […]
Victor Rangel-Ribeiro’s Loving Ayesha and Other Stories (Harper Collins India) is a collection that first appeared in 2003, but apart from a couple of stories, that have appeared in magazines, I read this entire collection only just now and this late discovery is a matter of regret as also thrill. It was the title story, Loving Ayesha I read first. I did […]
Okay, so what if that bus you missed or had to board, the detour you were forced into, the cup of tea that you spilled, the stranger you kept running into or the familiar face you kept running away from were all part of a big plan? What if, nothing was an accident? What if that […]