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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Ordinary people do not interest Hindi cinema anymore and that is why even if Mani Ratnam’s artifice free protagonists from OK Kanmani (who did not think it was necessary to interrupt their love story to endorse Vero Moda, Coca Cola and Anita Dongre’s wedding wear) are channelled in Ok Jaanu (a Karan Johar production), they […]
While channel surfing a few days back, I saw Mika Singh punning upon Diana Penty’s surname and adding to good effect, “And Mika Kaccha!” I guarantee that you will not hear anyone in the film fraternity rising up in instinctive disgust over this comment just as most of them kept quiet when Salman Khan rose […]
Naseeruddin Shah is a national treasure but he never set out to be one. His ambitions differ from most actors who come into the industry fuelled by nepotism on steroids. When we talk about outsiders making it big on their own terms in Hindi cinema, let us please start the conversation with the likes of […]
Sayani Gupta is the young, brave, literate face of Hindi cinema. Someone who is keenly interested in the craft of acting. The actor who starred most prominently in Tasher Desh in 2012 and recently in Margarita, With a Straw, will also appear in an important role in Anurag Basu’s forthcoming Jagga Jasoos. She spoke […]
We see what we want or perhaps need to see in cinema, in music, in the books we read, the people we meet. On days we are open to life, we see even the yellow butterfly flitting past the auto, the way a pink bloom falls on a car bonnet from a neglected tree, how […]
What we learn from Naseeruddin Shah’s autobiography And Then One Day..A Memoir (Penguin Books India/Hamish Hamilton), is what we need to learn. No more, no less. Nothing extravagant about milestones reached, rewards gathered, boxes ticked. Like tempered chocolate or like a quintessential Naseer performance, the writing is perfectly poised between a melting point and gradual, cool normalcy. This celebrity […]
You can touch the surface of life or live it inside out. You can just see what is visible or sometimes close your eyes and open your mind. And perceive the intangible as well. Few films manage to make you realise the difference between connecting with life and just skimming through it but Sai Paranjpye’s Sparsh did […]
Telephonic interviews take away the visual texture from a story but you don’t miss it when you talk to theatre, TV and film actor Heeba Shah. She speaks with immense clarity and leaves no awkward pauses for you to fill. Between tackling cinema of multiple genres, doing theatre and moving homes, she performed an Ismat […]
“Javed bhai, hum Dilli haar gaye hain!” (We have lost Delhi), yells Naseeruddin Shah as a violently bitter sepoy in Shyam Benegal’s Junoon (1978). That scene is hard to forget. As is the fact that it was on the sets of Junoon that Shah first met Ismat Chughtai, one of the bravest literary and […]
I am fishing for the right quote by Manto to begin this write-up. As I unearth some old books from my college days, I realise that Manto is not someone, who can be put away between the pages of history forever. It was hard to ignore the man when he lived and it is hard […]
Watching Naseeruddin Shah as an exploitative superstar in The Dirty Picture may have reminded you once again of the many faces and skins and voices and bodies he inhabits as an actor. The film also made me recall some encounters I have had with the actor who never says the typical things, and never bothers […]