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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The patchwork of unfinished relationships, replaceable snapshots, the short-lived high of opening a new package, restless online scrolling, things that we don’t need but must buy, a flurry of vodka shots, a life lived from one plane hop to another, one missed connection to another. It is easy to dismiss Gauri Shinde’s Dear Zindagi as a […]
In the 1995 Ketan Mehta film Oh Darling! Yeh Hai India, a very young Shahrukh Khan played a character called Hero, a symbol of ambition that floats into Mumbai, on a straw of hope. The film was also about a foolhardy plan to replace the President of India with a clone. Most importantly, the […]
Vicky Kaushal in Masaan was unflinching and brave without any of the manufactured bravado we associate with a Hindi film debut. He was just part of a narrative, a face in a rich and teeming ensemble cast but then you started to notice a shy smile, a gaze that lingered when he sparred over the spice […]
The idea of entitlement is not new to the Indian film industry. Nor is the hegemony fuelled by privileged stars and their coteries. So it took someone of Nawazuddin Siddqui’s talent, 15 years to land his first solo lead in Manjhi (though he played a pivotal part in Gangs of Wasseypur) but all it took […]
Madhuri Dixit recently received a notice from the Haridwar Food and Drug Administration for endorsing the nutritional value of Maggi, after the UP government found dangerously high levels of lead in a batch of noodles. While a debate rages about whether brand ambassadors can be held responsible for the quality of products, there is another side to the […]
I loved DDLJ when I first saw it. I saw it twice in a single screen hall and once with my niece dancing in the aisles. People in the hall were laughing, cheering. The way they would have when Raj Kapoor’s Bobby first hit the screens in the 70s and as Shahrukh Khan once famously […]
There is a scene in Farah Khan’s Happy New Year where Boman Irani takes out a fully iced cake from a bag and says to himself, “I am going to have my cake and eat it too.” Two seconds later his face is buried in the gooey stuff and when he faces the camera, a […]
It is not enough to be Shahrukh Khan. He has to be Fair and Handsome and atleast in an ad attribute his success to a tube of fairness cream. Fairness is the door to great jobs, marriage proposals for women in our ads and beauty many have many shades, but in India, for a majority of […]
At a recent reality show, Rohit Shetty ribbed a young contestant about why he watched Shahrukh Khan only on TV. Did he not watch movies in the theatre? The young boy replied that in his village, there was no movie theatre. Shetty smiled good-naturedly and exulted, ‘If Chennai Express becomes a hit, I will build a movie […]
There was a bit of Yash Chopra in every one of his heroes. Like some of them he believed in an ever-after. In the integrity of emotion. Whether that emotion was hate etched like a tattoo on a wrist or anger over the betrayal of a father. Or lost love that a poet mourned […]
So here is the overwhelming thing. It is the anniversary of 1984 riots. It was Aishwarya Rai’s birthday yesterday and it is Shahrukh Khan’s birthday today and on top of that.. Bond..James Bond is wowing audience worldwide. So the media is in a tizzy trying to keep up. Why am I clubbing the 1984 […]
Vehmon gumaan se duur duur… Yakeen ki hadd ke paas paas… Dil ko bharam yeh ho gaya… Unko humse pyaar hai.. Rekha and Amitabh Bachchan framed by gregariously nodding yellow tulips. And a universal hope encased in the above lines. And romance as if it was a precious pearl preserved in a velvet lined jewel box. […]