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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The first time that I set my eyes on her, she managed to steal my undivided attention. As she flitted from person to another, I sat there a bit mesmerised, a bit intrigued. Not quite like a dead leaf of the fall, yet she almost went past with gay abandon, virtually rudderless. And then landed […]
She woke up with a start; it was way past her regular time. She hurried through her morning chores and rushed to get to the water tap. Her toddler son on one hip, a huge stainless steel pot on another, she stood patiently in the line of harried women waiting for the welcome sound of […]
Recently, two news reports more or less summed up the chasm between less and excess in India. An NGO alleged that 64 Bhil children in Madhya Pradesh’s Satna district have died of malnutrition. On the other hand, Hyderabad got ready to celebrate its version of the Spanish Tomatino festival and a friend created a Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=185221971542829&id=134206369977723#!/pages/Protest-the-Tomatino-festival/156765734401050) to question the sanity of […]
The sky was incredibly radiant and the sun was shining as bright as a new coin above our heads. I heard complaints about the scorching heat from my younger brother Boltu and sister Sheenu, the youngest in the family. My older sister Durga…her whereabouts are not known ever since she got married. We are all two years apart. I am approximately 12 as […]
She stood on the balcony and gratefully inhaled the heady smells of rain splattered mud, jasmine and cow dung. The sky was clear but it had rained during the day. Memories came flooding back as she gazed at the fronds of coconut trees reaching out from the back yard next door. The colours of the […]
The other day I caught Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive and founder of Facebook on a dated episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show. Yes, the same where he declared that he would be donating $100 million to update and revive the public school system in Newark. Despite the resentment I felt at the way foreign channels in India keep palming off stale content to us, I watched […]