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 not written a movie review in a long time. I watch movies selectively. I do my research on the story, on the conclusion and then decide to expose my senses to this massively powerful medium of absorption. There is enough conditioning in the human mind without me deliberately exposing it to the unnecessary, […]
Never before has Assam witnessed such a mass hysteria as people pour in from different places to bid goodbye to the ‘jajabar’ (a wanderer) for one last time as he lies in a glass-covered coffin, silenced by death. Lovingly addressed as ‘Bhupen da’ by the young and the old, Dr. Bhupen Hazarika was a cultural […]
The other day while watching Kalpana Lajmi’s unsung, little cinematic ballad Ek Pal, I was amazed at how seamlessly Bhupen Hazarika’s voice wrapped itself around sprawling tea estates, gracious bungalows and the heart of its protagonist Priyam (Shabana Azmi) as she falls into a self-destructive passion for the frivolous Jeet Barua (Farooque Sheikh). Hazarika’s voice […]
I quietly play the soulful music and talk to the silent chords, my heart plays. But there is a music in distress too, that just doesn’t die. Even when there is peace, I can see so many pieces within. Whether you come or not, my soulful symphony will go on. I can’t stop the dance, […]
I had an epiphany at the Metallica concert in Bangalore a few days ago. If I was an Auntie in the crowd, Metallica was made up of Uncles. That made me feel much better as I looked around and saw rockers with vomit matted on their hair and lying prone in the thick, wet mud […]
Today He will look across the wall at the other the shadow that was once a person They don’t talk much Not at all infact And exist only in disjointed halves that don’t fit They know each other but see just the wall and hear footsteps arriving and leaving They hear voices songs, laughter But […]
I don’t think in images. When I close my eyes, I see faceless people composed entirely of words and emotion dressed in sentences and punctuation. Story-less phrases flit across my eyelids, there one moment and forgotten the next. Feelings sit in boxes in the corner of my mind, fermenting, until they are more concentrated than […]
Every lover of ghazal has a Jagjit Singh memory. My first one is part of my book Perfect Eight and recalls a cassette my father brought home to play on our first tape recorder. Kal Chaudvani Ki Raat Thi, sang the Sikh who sounded like an Urdu poet and occasionally like a Sufi pir. His […]
In 1995, I met Bangalore-based danseuse Rashme Hedge Gopi on a routine assignment that turned out be not so routine after all. She was a leading exponent of Bharatnatyam and for years had travelled to France, Germany, UK, Africa and USA, the erstwhile USSR , performing and representing India at prestigious international festivals. And then […]
I woke up one morning and I couldn’t hear E anymore. The note, not the letter. It was just gone. I first noticed it on the way to work, listening to an old mixtape of classic rock songs, wondering how come I hadn’t remembered how jagged and minimalistic these wayback arena rockers really were all […]
This is not a personal story and yet it is. Sometime in 2009, I found myself living a dream in the studios of WorldSpace India and freeing the voice I had not been able to speak in. The voice of stifled poetry and childhood dreams. Even more gratifying was the fact that I was a small part of […]
I remember the morning after Mohammed Rafi’s death in 1980. It was my turn to read the news in the school assembly and I remember preparing instead a small tribute to the singer and ending with the lines, “Jab Kabhi Bhi Sunoge Geet Mere, Sang Sang Tum Bhi Gungunaoge.” I realised the meaning of these words sometime in […]