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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Imagine a city floating on water. Not an island, not a city tormented by floods, just a city which has rivulets instead of streets and boats instead of taxis. A city where buildings are erected on foundations of wood submerged in water. Venice is the capital of the Veneto region in North East Italy and […]
Don’t allow your first impression of Luxembourg (a European country and city of the same name) to be the last one! For, this is a place that sneaks up on you. My first tryst with the country started with a schlep down the Luxembourg airport – one of the tiniest in the whole of Europe. […]
Fresh apricots are neatly stacked over the yak hair blankets, to be dried under the scorching sun. While sipping the renowned salty butter tea (said to be an acquired taste) we watch the village fields down in the valley, coiled like a green snake between the rugged mountains. The silence is sometimes broken by the […]
What comes to mind when one hears of a certain region called Tuscany in Central Italy? Some would say brilliant wines like Chianti, others would say famous artists like Botticelli, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci while some probably would also be reminded of the macabre story of the Monster of Florence. For me, Florence-the capital […]
Good Sadhu Babas should never be as you expect them to be and Rocket Baba is no exception. Though over 70, he has the body of a fit 30-year-old, his skin and eyes are clear and his voice just booms. He arrives at the house of his student, my rakhi brother Gopal, like an angry […]
I was in the first batch of inward fellows of the National Foundation of India’s ‘Northeast Media Exchange Programme’. It was 1996-97 and I went to Mizoram. My subject was ‘Changing traditional patterns and the youth of Mizoram’. Though this travel piece has nothing to do with my fellowship subject, it is a by-product of […]
I have always been a fan of slow travel and fast talking. In the beginning years of being on the road, it was cheaper anyway to settle down in one place and get to know it rather than hurtle from place to place like a Paparazzi tourist. Also there was the hassle of moving from […]
Strasbourg, according to an Internet search is the principal city of the Alsace region in the North-East of France and is close to the German-French border. It is situated on the Ill river and can boast of being a miniature representation of France with a flavour of Germany. The train ride from Stuttgart to Strasbourg […]
Deriving inspiration from the famous quote ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss’, my companion Arjun and I embarked on a journey further south to the ancient city of Rome, the capital of Italy and a land of great historical significance. My hyper planning had given birth to a small red notebook whose pages were filled […]
Chacha ji is my balcony buddy in Vashisht, in the North Western Himalayas during the summer season. A balcony buddy is someone to sit and watch the human traffic pass beneath and around us with, someone to make the odd comment to or interjection about anything and everything with. Someone to pass time with. From […]
I reckon there are probably not too many people who travel these days without the benefit of a guidebook but for those of you who do, you may be interested to note that it is not permitted to walk across the Friendship Bridge that marks the no mans land between Laos and Thailand. Don’t ask […]
It has been all of one month since I arrived in Stuttgart and I can already claim to have visited four neighbouring countries. It’s as if I have wheels attached to my soles which do not allow me to spend a single weekend at home. The trip to Vienna and Salzburg was one of these […]