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
There is a big noise in the media about just who Vishal Bhardwaj’s Rangoon belongs to. Well, it does not belong to either Kangana Ranaut or Shahid Kapoor. Or Saif Ali Khan for that matter. It belongs to no one and well, nowhere because Vishal Bhardwaj, whose Maqbool and Omkara cohesively wove Indian narratives into Shakespearean […]
One of the reasons given to explain the bleeding cuts inflicted on Abhishek Chaubey’s Udta Punjab is that Shahid Kapoor’s Tommy ‘Gabru’ Singh swears when drugged and even when sober! The problem with the film however is not profanity or vulgarity. In any case, the current head of the Central Board of Film Certification of India, Pahlaj Nihalani’s […]
In parts, Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider replays keynotes from a classic Shakespearean dirge with a sly wink. So we are offered the jovial grave diggers. The skull gnashing in glee. The sinner in a moment of redeeming prayer. The ghost who is not a ghost afterall but is Roohdar..the keeper of another man’s soul and all its agony. […]
Damp, narrow lanes with houses huddled together. Peeling walls, fading patinas. Melding terraces. Halwai shops. A musty little bakery with unlabelled bread. Young girls and boys in clumsy cardigans. A young boy’s shelves packed with medals and trophies and books, some of them in Punjabi. Boxes of pinnis. Mustard and sugarcane fields and school girls […]