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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In Raj Kapoor’s Awaara (1951), Shashi Kapoor was a cherub with the eyes of a little devil. As the disadvantaged child of an impoverished mother, you see him brutalised by a cruel world, lose his innocent faith in life, in goodness and turn to petty crime to survive. This shift could not have been easy […]
When Poonam Dhillon was in her 20s and already a well-known film actor, she received the news of her father’s demise. On the way home, in a flight, as she battled a haze of tears and grief, she was surrounded by fans who wanted a picture, an autograph, a smile. This moment, and many […]
Jab Tak Hai Jaan..a prophetic title in retrospect. Perfect for a man who worked till the last year of his life with the medium that he loved, and had shaped and redefined. Call it a coincidence but for some reason, I started watching my favourite Yash Chopra films in the past one week and marvelled […]
In the 70s and the 80s, cinema was an Eastman colour, 70 mm or cinema-scope as the case may be, ‘cannot bear to miss a scene’ event. And if you have not watched Trishul and Deewar or Kala Patthar or Sholay in a cinema hall, you will never know what it was like to be in the heart of […]
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. […]
In the 70s and the 80s, when I was growing up in Patiala, a framed poster next to a small shop near Sheran Wala Gate (a prominent locality), routinely heralded the arrival of a new film in town. On my way to the school in rickshaw everyday, I would watch that poster, trying to guess the story line of the […]