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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A few days after Kishore Kumar’s birth anniversary, the ring tone of his son and singer Amit Kumar echoes a song befitting the occasion, Ye mahfil yun hi sajegi.. ye duniyan yun hi chalegi… jo dhadkan kisi ki ruke tum ruko naa..(The celebrations will continue, the world will go on…if a heartbeat stops somewhere..don’t stop […]
Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan) is walking out of a police station with his black-listed benefactor who has just bailed him out of jail. Ashwini Kumar (Dilip Kumar), a revered police officer and his father warns, “If you go too far on this path..you may not be able to return.” Vijay turns to face him and […]
When the sixties swung into the seventies to the beat of RD Burman’s Spanish guitar and Amitabh Bachchan’s angst, in retrospect, it was the end of the happy endings in Hindi cinema. 20 years into independence, the political reality of India had become far more complex, dark and divisive to allow films to be set on house boats, shikaras, […]
Imagine being 16 and heedlessly in love with a man almost 16 years older than you. Imagine eloping with him and then walking out of a broken marriage with two children and a third on the way. Imagine being in the shadow of a far more successful sister and initially having to sing her […]
This is what Vidya Balan has done. She has distilled the Indian film heroine beyond her size, skin colour, weight, objectification in item songs and orchestrated stardom created around the din of endorsements and tiny roles in big budget films to performance. And presence. The kind that makes you look at a woman beyond her […]
In the 80s, when you opened a film magazine you came across Gautam Rajadhyaksha’s name pretty often. I still remember one shot of Tina Munim curled up on a sunny window ledge with a cup of tea, smiling into the camera as if she had just woken up and found a friend. I remember cutting […]
It was a toss between Shankar Jaikishan and RD Burman. The film was Teesri Manzil and it was left to Shammi Kapoor to decide who he wanted to compose music for the film. It was an unprecedented privilege for a Hindi film hero but nothing could be denied to Shammi Kapoor in the 60s. In […]
Just today while channel surfing, I refused to watch The Dark Knight beyond a few scenes even though it is marvellous cinematically, because as I tried to explain to my son..the idea of evil in the film is so dark and so overwhelming that it drains us of any belief in life as a meaningful experience. It makes us believe that no matter what […]
RD Burman is not a tragic story even though his last years were coloured with heart breaks and set backs. Even though his faith in his craft was shaken. Even though, the man who saw the future was relegated to the past by short-lived musical trends. He is not a tragedy because his music is […]
How does she reconcile a rockstar voice with the full moon bindi and the jasmine gajra and the glorious Kanjeevaram? Usha Uthup just does. More than 30 years down the line, she is still the mistress of sweet ironies. A darling once again of mainstream Hindi film music fans after her star vocal turn in Saat […]