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…
Read More
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…
Read More
“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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
You are browsing archives for
It is official. The award for the most unlikable male character of 2016 will be shared by Ranbir Kapoor’s Ayan in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil and Ranveer Singh’s Dharam in Befikre. These are clueless boys with the emotional and intellectual depth of a nine-year-old with the tumultuous hormones of a teenager and are paired with […]
While watching Imtiaz Ali’s latest film Tamasha, Eckhart Tolle’s bestseller, A New Earth came back to me. He writes how accumulated memories of angst, humiliation, denial, emotional suppression and anger form an invisible pain body within our body. In most people, this pain body remains unreactive till a trigger presents itself. And then there is […]
The closest we came to hearing jazz in a Hindi film in the ‘70s, was when Amitabh Bachchan’s dock-worker turned underworld apprentice Vijay, smoked away his foreboding in a bar; and Parveen Babi in a red gown slithered close to him with ‘I am falling in love with stranger’ playing in the background. The film […]
So there was a snore in the seat next to mine. The audience gave a derisive applause at the end of Vikramjit Singh’s debut film Roy, and laughed when a lovelorn heroine gasped with joy and fell into the arms of her lover and spoiler alert, merged into a painting that was at the heart […]
Love. Is it about looking for something or someone ‘whole’ and perfect out there? Or welcoming imperfection in people, situations because they mirror our lacks and maybe it is only the broken pieces of one soul that can fit into the gaps of another? Jane Fonda once wrote, “Life is not about perfection but completion.” […]
Though it was a night of glitz, glamor, and chutzpah crowded by the who’s who of filmdom, the underdogs clambered up the throne of entertainment at the recently concluded Filmfare Awards. And the biggies humbly accepted their defeat and made way for the path-breakers. Vidya Balan, who played a sex-bomb in a no-holds-barred performance in the Dirty […]
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, […]
An aside. There is a moment in Imtiaz Ali’s Love Aaj Kal, when after being mugged by two hoodlums in a strange country, Saif Ali Khan sits beaten and broken by more than just the blows he has just received. And suddenly, the face of Meera, a woman he thought he had forgotten flashes before […]