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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Rajat Kapoor is not made for water-tight definitions. So yes, he acts in films and writes them and directs them too but then there is a theatre and the fact he acts on stage and yes, directs too. The one common thread in all pursuits is the need to tweak, deviate, be new, be alive […]
When a play has been declared ‘Housefull’ two weeks before it is being staged, you know its fame has preceded it. I would not have got to watch Atul Kumar’s The Blue Mug either (The last ticketed show is today at Delhi’s Kamani Auditorium), if it had not been for the intervention of a common friend […]
Power can be mellow, vulnerable, beautiful. And yet ripple with invincibility in the face of whatever life can throw at you. That is what actor, writer, director of Ay Ombe theatre and educator Josefina Baez embodies. The capacity to always be open to bliss and pain, learning and teaching, silence and celebration, spirituality and psychology, the idea of ethnicity […]
Sheeba Chadha’s gaze is like a flame cutting through fog. Almost as if everything she has felt and lived has been melted in a furnace and poured into her eyes. She is incredibly vital on screen, on stage, on television and yet there is a restfulness about her. And when she kneels on the stage, looking […]
Everything becomes a memory one day. Some memories make us and some, we make. Some we edit, some alter us. Life is not just what happens to us but we think happened to us. But nothing is more vivid than the time when we were experiencing the world with untutored eyes, with young senses as […]
When Bhanu Bharti, acclaimed theatre director and NSD alumnus, decides to stage a play, he doesn’t go looking for ‘interesting adaptations’ and ‘inspired scripts’. He doesn’t bother about reaching out to the masses with risqué comedies or flamboyant productions either. He chooses to write, instead, intense plays based on pertinent social issues that happen around […]
Ashish Vidyarthi does not like the easy way out, either in life or his work. A few weeks back, in Bangalore’s hallowed Ranga Shankara auditorium, he was pacing the stage restlessly before his solo performance in Nadira Babbar’s acclaimed Dayashankar Ki Diary. When asked for an interview, he was unwilling at first and understandably so because I had not seen the play […]
In a packed Ranga Shankara auditorium (with producer Nimi Ravindran conscientiously paying auto fares to all those who could not get tickets and had to go home) on a Sunday afternoon, the second last show of Ajay Krishnan’s hit play Butter and Mashed Banana induced tears of laughter. And then some thought. And how is this for a […]
Gulshan Devaiah’s big moment is here. And if he does not become one of the breakout stars of his generation, it will be because the world is askew. He was one of the few reasons why an underwhelming Dum Maro Dum had its moments. As a manipulative, street smart recruiter of the unsorted young in […]
A few years ago, when I met one of India’s youngest and most promising playwrights Ajay Krishnan at the Ranga Shankara cafe, he was sitting casually on a bench, one knee peeking out of torn denims. For a writer and director whose play Butter and Mashed Banana had freshly won a slew of awards, had been short listed […]
Freedom of speech is increasingly becoming an anomaly in India, especially in the creative arts and like theatre personality Nadira Babbar recently said about the absence of collective liberalism, “Sab bura manne ko tayyar baithe hain.” Or as the catchline of the play says, “Don’t you dare say that!” We at Unboxed Writers are proud to announce a web […]
This piece was written by Sunil Vishnu K, the founder (along with actor Karthik Kumar), of one of India’s most vibrant theatre groups, Evam, as a personal tribute after the demise of theatre legend Badal Sircar. Badal Sircar passed away recently. Disillusioned, alone and unknown to the world. On the day the assembly election results were on page 1, […]