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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If you remember the seven minutes of Shefali Shah in Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya, you will remember also that she was the only beam of credible innocence in the film. If you remember her in Meera Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, you will remember also that she was the luminous dark secret of the film, a girl suffocated with the enormity […]
In the 1950s, Ralph Ellison wrote a novel called Invisible Man about the existential invisibility of African Americans and how the ‘other half’ simply did not see them. Their stories did not matter because no one acknowledged them as real. Among many other unforgettable lines, were these, “I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me. You often doubt if you really […]
Anirban Dhar or Onir, as we know him now, makes disconcerting films that disturb the equanimity with which Hindi cinema is watched. They ask questions not all of us are willing to face or answer. The abiding sense of isolation running through his work is not romantic or self-indulgent. It instead takes us into the heart and mind of an ostracised AIDS patient in My Brother Nikhil… This was a film that […]