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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Decades before Article 15, a certain film delivered a stunning cinematic punch line against oppression. A woman of privilege who lives in the “upper” regions of a fictional city, appears in front of men who have gathered to decide whether a nullah running through the “lower” parts of the city is dirty or not. The […]
While performing a street play in Sahibabad township, on 1 January 1989, Safdar Hashmi, a member of the Communist Party of India , a playwright and activist, was attacked and murdered by the followers of an election candidate. What followed was unexpected. During the staid Doordarshan coverage of the National Film Festival Awards, Shabana Azmi […]
How easy it is to judge folks whose shoes we have not walked in. The largely lonely battle Karan Johar fought to save his film from hyper nationalist bullies and his desperate video which I could not bring myself to watch, the patriotism tax of Rs five crore and the backlash that followed did not […]
You can touch the surface of life or live it inside out. You can just see what is visible or sometimes close your eyes and open your mind. And perceive the intangible as well. Few films manage to make you realise the difference between connecting with life and just skimming through it but Sai Paranjpye’s Sparsh did […]
In the Golden Age of Hollywood, India represented little more than a mystical land of Rajahs, snake charmers, nubile princesses and elephants. Cannot really blame them – our own cinema of the time was filled with Rajahs and princesses of our own! In Hollywood, this image held sway till as late as the 60s, with […]
Shyam Benegal’s cinema never loses the plot in trying to project itself as a breakaway, alternate idea. His films never preen and say, “Let me show you something you have never seen before,” even though his cinema in the 70s was quietly, unobtrusively radical both in content and in form. He has always had a social […]
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 […]