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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Right at the onset, let me make it clear that I had a lot of issues with Kankar, the narrative about domestic violence that is about to conclude on Zee Zindagi. All the women in the serial with the exception of Kiran (Sanam Baloch), spend their lives sharpening invisible knives, wishing each other ill, pretending […]
In 1983, BR Ishara (arguably the first director in Indian cinema to shock middle class sensibilities with films like Chetana and Zaroorat that treated supposedly ‘wanton’ women with sympathy) made a film called Log Kya Kahenge. The film starring Shabana Azmi, Navin Nischol, Shatrughan Sinha and Sanjeev Kumar had some startlingly honest dialogues about a woman […]
Indian television does not usually allow a great deal of space for symbolism and subtlety but sometimes while surfing channels, you come across something that is done right, with a certain amount of empathy. Epic Channel for instance is replaying Tagore’s memorable fiction and even though nobody can redo Charulata after what Ray imbued the […]
Like all good actors, Aamina Sheikh is a chameleon. Her strong, striking face exudes both resilience and quiet simplicity in Pakistani soaps like Maat and Shikkan (now playing on Zee Zindagi) and yet when she wants to play a global citizen, she transforms herself in a second into a woman who drips effortless pizzazz. Born […]