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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I had been to Simla when I was 11 and even then people spoke about the crowd, excessive development, commercial establishments ruining the city and the downward slide of the once summer capital of India. I don’t remember much about that trip. I had gone with my parents and my cousins, and like all family […]
Travel for me is all about getting to know the local people through their culture, arts and traditions, and their food. While I don’t think I am a foodie from what I understand to be the modern sense of that word… I don’t understand ingredients, can’t guess what’s in the pot unless told, and I can’t […]
On a scenic hill top in Munnar, we noticed a small coffee stall and decided to stop for a break. The stall was run by a young, chatty guy who showed us his village located at the foot of the hill… not very far. We could see a church and a few quaint houses down […]
The terrible attack on a Nairobi mall sometime back was heart-breaking and I hope and pray a tragedy like that never ever occurs again. I was in the city over two years ago and came back with a suitcase full of memories. I was in Nairobi only for a day but here are a few unique […]
7 days. 6 nights. 2 girls. And 5,780 sq.kms of an island to explore. Who would say that’s anything short of a recipe for a mind-blowing adventure! We stepped out of Ngurah Rai International Airport one hot Saturday afternoon and learnt our first lesson barely 10 minutes after – When in Bali, get ready for some […]
At the Singapore Zoo Splash Pool, Philip – a wet and slippery 300 kg sea lion with twinkling black eyes, – lurks dangerously close. He slowly turns his huge head so that his whiskers graze my ear and bends to peck my cheek. A picture is clicked and the moment preserved for posterity. I can die in […]
To the music of the waves lapping the moonlit sands and Bruce Springsteen trying to keep time with them (from a stereo system), a lean and curly-haired, bare footed waiter is zigzagging his way towards our candlelit beachside table. One can tell he is a little tipsy. And not just from the way his Bermudas […]
Starting a travelogue on Ladakh or La Dags – the land of many passes – is not easy. Where do you begin? With the fat brown marmot with teeth like Eddie Murphy that you startle basking in the sunshine in the middle of a mud track? With the herd of handsome golden wild asses – kiangs […]
“Vegetarian!!!” intoned our cousin D, succinctly. “No fish, no chicken, no egg, no meat.” The waiter in the restaurant in Avanos, Turkey, nodded enthusiastically and then…looked blankly at us. Of the three of us, only D was vegetarian, rigidly so in fact and we needed to be sure of what would be served. By now, […]
Honestly, before I visited Masai Mara, I never gave much thought to what an wildlife Safari would be like. I never wondered about wildlife. I didn’t watch much of National Geographic while growing up. But then, I got a chance to witness an African Safari in all its glory and I can’t be more thankful. […]
‘Travel’ is a beautiful word. It breathes deep, sets you free and replaces familiar routes, responses and landmarks with the unexpected, the surprising. As you leave behind a city you live and work in, an invisible string gets loosened and releases you. The sky opens up. The sunlight becomes more concentrated and pure. Green fields […]
The aircraft had to land on this narrow piece of land that led straight to a valley. And that valley was where an ill-fated aircraft had crashed a few months ago, it had just gone on and off the runaway! That is all I could think of during my entire descent into Mangalore. I held […]