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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One of the reasons given to explain the bleeding cuts inflicted on Abhishek Chaubey’s Udta Punjab is that Shahid Kapoor’s Tommy ‘Gabru’ Singh swears when drugged and even when sober! The problem with the film however is not profanity or vulgarity. In any case, the current head of the Central Board of Film Certification of India, Pahlaj Nihalani’s […]
Food is history, geography, a tug of nostalgia, a memory, a personal story, an emotion, a smell, an aftertaste, a sense of home. Though I am not a foodie, my first book replayed the compounded smell of agarbatties and rasgullas in a cinema hall canteen in Missamari. And the street food in Patiala. The kind I […]
Along the western border of Punjab where India ends and Pakistan begins (or the other way, depending upon which side you’re looking from), there lies a stretch of no man’s land, marked off by rusty barbed wire fencing. It hides the scar where a country was once cut into two. Overlooked by the bunkers of […]
It is said that every artist dips the brush in his or her own soul and paints the inner most self on canvas. Tejinder Kanda does the same as he digs into his recollection of a carefree childhood spent amidst green, open fields and fresh, clean air of rural Punjab. In a show titled Transmutation, […]
Damp, narrow lanes with houses huddled together. Peeling walls, fading patinas. Melding terraces. Halwai shops. A musty little bakery with unlabelled bread. Young girls and boys in clumsy cardigans. A young boy’s shelves packed with medals and trophies and books, some of them in Punjabi. Boxes of pinnis. Mustard and sugarcane fields and school girls […]