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…
Read More
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…
Read More
“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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
You are browsing archives for
And suddenly Jhansi Ki Rani has become a cinematic trigger. First Subhadra Kumari Chauhan’s poem, “Khoob ladi mardani woh to Jhansi wali Rani thi” about the warrior queen was referenced by Rani Mukherjee’s Mardani (spot the connection?). In Omung Kumar’s Mary Kom, a wizened coach (Sunil Thapa) tells Priyanka Chopra’s Mary that her strength has […]
The issue with the casting of Sanjay Leela Bhasali’s grand production Mary Kom is that it does not reflect what Mary Kom stands for. Does Priyanka look like Mary Kom? No, she looks like Priyanka Chopra with an accentuated pout and a lot of muscle. Do we need a North-Eastern face to play a North-Eastern […]
The rush of blood to the head. The tingle in the spine as Rocky Balboa locks his eyes squarely with James ‘Clubber’ Lang in Sylvester after fighting his demons and running through walls of fear to the tune of Gonna Fly Now and Survivor’s smash hit Eye of The Tiger. And the lines. Apollo Creed […]
From a helpless young girl being pawed by a pack of hounds in Guwahati, the media focus has shifted now to a sinewy Manipuri woman punching her way to international attention. Some shift. I wonder how the powerful women competing in the Olympics come across to the moral sainiks. Women swimmers, gymnasts, weight lifters, […]