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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A friend once shared how her daughter was stopped by a teacher in her school and told , “Your breasts are too big for you to walk like that.” She went on to develop an apologetic, stooping posture for life. Shame is coded in the DNA of a young girl. And docility is force fed. […]
Kabir Singh is not an anomaly. He is just the ultimate culmination of the privilege that male protagonists have enjoyed in Hindi cinema for a long time. Raj Kapoor slapped and manhandled Nargis in Awara (1956) because she playfully called him ‘Junglee.” But he had a messy, heartbreaking backstory so she had to rescue him […]
The Joker of 1993 was Michael Douglas’ William Foster in the film Falling Down. The protagonist Foster did not wear a mask though. He in fact, took off the masks of civility, politeness, political correctness, self-control and compassion to fall into a vortex of a toxic sense of personal persecution. His litany of woes? […]
Duckback raincoat Bata shoes Camel ink Hero pen Nataraj pencils I’ve reached a point Where lists of things Once familiar Comfort me But I don’t believe things are worse The world Was always burning The skies Were always red And the end Was always near Near enough to smell The burning Of time But with […]
“Men who want to be feminists need not be given a space in feminism. They need to take the space they have in society and make it feminist”. -Kelley Temple For some reason, this year began with a number of my male friends accusing my writing of being “alienating” and “scary”. I was told (by […]
Just heard that a young woman who had been raped and set on fire was left to die by the roadside just around the corner from where I live a few days back. She was found by a neighbour’s dog who was out for a walk. The police whisked her away and there has been […]
Not only action but also inaction can hurt. Violent action is direct and has obvious forms like killing, injuring, beating, taunting, mocking, and insulting whereas violent inaction can be subtle and indirect. Violent inaction can be both intentional, I call it Manipulative Passivity and it can be unintentional which may be termed as Ignorant Passivity. Both can hurt significantly […]
I read this article in The Times of India the other day, with a growing sense of dismay. No – am not talking of accidents, murders or rapes. Those seem to be happening as routinely as clockwork, even now. I’m talking of Nirbheek (I believe that’s what it is called). Nirbheek is said to be India’s first gun for women, a […]
We believe that God made this Universe and populated our World with His creatures including his masterful creation, humankind. Strangely, we also believe that He then called all those he had made in his own image and said, “I now pronounce you Hindu and Muslim. And Jew and Christian and Buddhist and Jain and Sikh.” […]
In the end the bulldozer wins every argument. The war for real estate in India is waged brutally and with precise, cold blooded violence and the builder-politician mafia wins every time because we are not a democracy. We are a country where people like you and me rights only in theory and you just had […]
Truth, Goodness, Beauty are the highest virtues, the lofty peaks that we aspire to reach while we climb the slippery slope. Yes, indeed the way to virtue is slippery. Virtues are ideals but in practice we may need to dilute them. But the trap is that we may tend to dilute them to the extent […]
The last few weeks have had a daunting effect on my mind; the events around the world creating many shifts in thought processes and forcing me to question the very basic of human existence — trust. Humans seem to have a very skewed perspective of their actions sometimes. “Aren’t you being inhuman?” is an oft-repeated […]