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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Being born an Indian means inheriting a big book of rules, principles and society norms as soon as we are born. We are taught from an early age that our behaviour reflects our family’s reputation and status, to listen and obey is considered a sign of goodness, to compromise and sustain a bad relationship is […]
When we hear about women, who are ill-treated in Afghanistan, Pakistan and a few other countries, we often catch ourselves feeling happy about living in India, where we presume that many women are independent, safe and considered ‘equals’. While the recent crimes unleashed against women prove that this country is not really women-friendly, I […]
When you are a girl of about eight, and you tell your parents and relatives that you want to be a police woman, you get a pat on your back and a smile, but fast forward the same statement by 10 years, and the smile disappears into a smirk and you hear, ‘You’re a girl […]
Did they say it’s the sparkle in both pairs of eyes, Or the bells ringing in surprise… Was the wave length supposed to match, Or is it just a good looking catch? ** Either the delight in the smile, or the money in a pile Is it the experience or its consequence? Was it the […]
As a child I used to sleep with my grandmother. She’d pull me close and whisper stories to me. Stories would roll by one after the other. Some nights she’d doze off even before the story came to an end and if I tried waking her up, she’d hold me even more tightly, mumble something […]
There will come a time in your life when you might be introduced to the novel idea that it is not just products that reach expiry dates, but people too! I am reaching the 25 year mark very soon and needless to say that leaves some very worried parents wondering if their beautiful daughter will […]
An ideal society should be class-less and caste-less, that is understandable, but is it right or even possible to build a society that has no family structure at all? What would be desirable – abolishing the family unit or a fundamental change in it? Social structures based on Caste or Class are either a religious […]
I first saw him in jeans and a white shirt, an orange knapsack over one shoulder. He never forgave me for asking if he was a good pilot, that first encounter. He claimed he stood on his toes to get picked for the Republic Day parade, so we could get to know each other in […]
A sword lodged in stone. That is how Francisco Goldman describes a daughter’s love for her missing father in his visceral tribute to his late wife Aura Estrada in his book Say Her Name which is partly a grief diary of a devastated husband and partly a fictionalised account of life after the death of a […]
The big, fat Indian wedding, with its larger than life sets and high-decibel music, has been the muse for many Hindi films, the latest being the blockbuster Band Baaja Baarat which made overnight stars of Ranveer Singh and Anushka Sharma. In the hands of Baroda-based artist Vasudha Thozur, the same celebration finds a new twist. […]
Images fly by. Trees and dogs, cows in alleyways, people. We catch familiar expressions…disgust at highly priced onions , the sly smile of a pickpocket, the anger in a girl’s eyes at the man who just leered at her, anxiety in the man’s as he waits for the daughter to cross the road and reach […]
Note: I have had the privilege to interview theatre personality and actor Arundhati Nag many times over a decade or more and this piece recalls many conversations about her life and work. You saw her award winning turn in Pa recently and even if she comes for a few seconds in an advertisement, you know, […]