At a time when everything is politicised, be it birth, death, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, the notion of the home land and the reality of displacement, let us pause for moment to acknowledge the fact that Rami Malek, a child raised in America by Egyptian immigrant parents, and with one-eighth Greek heritage ended up playing […]
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Tag: review
Kapoor & Sons: Bitter, Sweet And Truthful
Watching Shakun Batra’s Kapoor & Sons (Since 1921) is like reading a book you are slowly but surely falling in love with. A book that you read curled up in a window seat on a rainy day, with a cup of tea by your side, hoping that the story will never end because it makes you taste […]
LBZ: Easy Warmth
One of my favourite moments in Love BreakUps Zindagi is when a twice divorced Govind (Cyrus Sahukar) sits in his Delhi barsaati with the woman he thinks is the answer to his search for love. There is a pile of home delivery menus between them and he puns on misspelt chicken dishes till she decides […]
Escape To Dignity
At some point in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, between tears and smiles, I wanted to punch the air with my fist and say, “You go Caesar!” Caesar. We will come to him later but on a day when I heard a supposedly well meaning teacher say, “Only if you take away something that […]
Memory Is A Blue Mug
Have you noticed, how for every point, life offers a counterpoint? As if to remind you that for every ‘this,’ there is a ‘that?’ And for every Delhi Belly, there is The Blue Mug? How absolutely wonderful that on a day when my memory had been reduced to a cuss word and the rumble of someone’s upset stomach, life also […]
The Baap Of Glorious Cliches
Bbuddhah Hoga Tera Baap opens with the iconic AB poster from Deewar silhouetted against the credits and those who grew up in that era, instantly feel the rush of blood going to their head. There was nothing, NOTHING like watching Amitabh Bachchan in 70 mm or Cinemascope, in the 70s and 80s, in flesh and […]
Shaitan: Wilfully Irreverent
It is hard to say if Anurag Kashyap Inc is intentionally subverting the vocabulary of romance in Hindi films but there is no deference towards it, either. So the sepia memory of Dev Anand running across glades and slopes under an open sky to the tune of Khoya Khoya Chand becomes a remix in Bejoy Nambiar’s Shaitan. The […]
Beautiful And Tepid
A train steaming desolately into the night. Carrying animals and humans, both equally desperate. Packed into cages, visible and invisible. The misery and the pain that creates the illusion of an “extravagant extravaganza” under the milky Big Top. A circus of miraculous animals who may be angry or hungry, clowns and performers who may have nothing to smile about, a shining showstopper leading a horse who may […]
I Am Not Invisible…
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 […]