Posted inPeople
Grandma Must Die
Every year, a brood of my relatives descends on our ancestral house in Mangalore to meet my great-grandaunt. The 102-year-old woman in the wheelchair is a wrinkled pot of gold.
Posted inPOV
Why Harry Potter Continues To Fascinate People Well Into Their Adulthood
Harry Potter became a teen fascination in an India that generally did not read books. While he ticked some boxes in terms of literature, it’s the ones he didn’t that explain his appeal and popularity.
Posted inPop Culture
Spunky Maheep Kapoor, Where Were You? Meet the Star of Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives
Visually stunning but supremely vacuous, The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives is a glistening heap of mediocrity, except for the binocular-wielding one-woman crime patrol of Juhu, Maheep Kapoor.
Posted inBollywood
Bollywood Has Always Been Ageist. Saand Ki Aankh Just Proves That
For an industry as distracted by, and obsessed with stars, it’s hard for senior actresses to find age-appropriate roles that do justice to their talent. Worse, when there arises an opportunity for a movie to cast them – like Tushar Hiranandani’s Saand Ki Aankh, that revolves around two sharpshooters in their sixties – they lose out to young actresses more likely to have box-office pull.
Posted inBollywood
How to Treat the Trans Community: A Lesson for India from Amol Palekar’s Daayraa
Back in 1996, Amol Palekar’s Daayraa, that revolved around a love story between a transvestite and a gang-raped woman, questioned sexual identities and saw trans people as a “miracle of nature”. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, however, refuses to see the trans community in the same light.
Posted inPeople
Black Money and the Half Brides of Uttar Pradesh
The demonetisation drive meant to target black money hoarders had an unfortunate casualty – the brides of Uttar Pradesh, whose parents could no longer pay their dowries.
Posted inPop Culture
In Marriage Story, Noah Baumbach Crafts the Love-Story In a Divorce
There is no battle in the stinging, visceral Marriage Story, a drama centred around divorce, the ultimate war against domestic decency. That’s because it doesn’t take sides, but offers a perspective, arguing that sometimes there’s no other way to love someone than to stop being in love with them.
Posted inGender
Smriti Irani’s Sanitary Napkins Remarks Were Twisted Out of Context. But They’re Still Regressive
Whatever her intentions, union minister Smriti Irani’s remarks on taking sanitary napkins into homes and temples fall neatly into a cultural norm that considers women “impure” for menstruating, capable of “desecrating” any place by their mere presence.
Posted inGender
Congrats Kangana Ranaut, You’ve Insulted Urmila Matondkar, “Soft-Porn” Stars, & Your Own Feminism
Urmila Matondkar’s comments that Kangana Ranaut was leveraging the public’s anti-Bollywood sentiment, prompted an unsavoury response from Ranaut, who appeared on a TV news channel to call Matondkar a “soft-porn star”. For a supposed feminist, how much further will Ranaut go in shaming women.
Posted inSports
Why India’s Semi-Final Loss Feels Like a Familiar Heartbreak
Although the Men in Blue often win at cricket, irrespective of the format, the failure to win knockout games must sting. The “45 minutes of bad cricket” that Virat Kohli identified as the reason for the defeat to New Zealand was not merely an aberration. Instead, it was another phase of batting failure that has had some part to play in at least four of the five recent knockout losses.