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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From Aatish Taseer to George Calombaris to late Charles Correa, we had the privilege of initiating some of the best conversations of 2015 with purveyors of change in cinema, theatre, food, music, urban planning and so many different walks of life. Here are a few interviews we enjoyed doing this year. Cinema Rajat Kapoor: A Sudden Shower It is the […]
A few weeks ago, I met author Shashi Deshpande to interview her in the wake of her resignation from the Sahitya Akademi Council. She spoke about her reasons to quit in a pragmatic, matter-of-fact way.She is not on Twitter or Facebook and unlike the best-selling authors of this generation, does not feel the need to […]
Writer’s note : This post was published first in The New Indian Express, Bengaluru on October 12 In a tranquil home that is over 35 years old but is as timelessly evocative as a piece of great literature, author and Padma Shri awardee Shashi Deshpande is nursing a cup of tea. She is grateful that the […]
Sometime around 1973, author Shashi Deshpande lived in the campus of the KEM Hospital in Mumbai and would often see a young, sprightly nurse pass by. Sometime later, she learnt that this young woman was Aruna Shanbaug. And that all the promise of her life had been snatched away by a ward boy who […]
`Trying to remember our way back into past realities, past rooms, past beliefs is a first step towards measuring the depths of change in ourselves and the world. It’s also a reminder that the progress we may now take for granted is the result of many major accomplishments of the past and just the beginning of […]
Barbara Epstein calls reviewing a special skill. In India unfortunately, no skill seems to be necessary. Anyone, just about anyone, it seems, can do a review of any book, any author, any genre. To quote Doris Lessing: ` … a young man or woman, reviewer or critic, who has not read more of a writer’s work […]
VS Naipaul’s comment on women writers (The Nobel Prize-winning author declared that women’s writing is “unequal” to his, during an event at the recent Hay Festival), is scarcely worth responding to. Surely all writers know that we leave it to readers and time to judge our writing? And surely it is in bad taste to declare, […]
Draupadi: “It’s begun. They are already preparing, they have decided on war, they know there will be war. But why, then, did they not tell me that? Why did they make me believe it is my decision, my doing? Why? Kunti: “Five splendid sons. The sons of Pandu, that’s what they called them. Pandu’s sons! […]