Haider, Fanaa and Mission Kashmir, all major star vehicles, speak of listening to what both ‘nationalists’ and ‘terrorists’ have to say
Category: Essays
The Ghosts of Albert Pinto
The lives of those who collect our trash, serve our meals and drive our vehicles are in focus again. The Hindi film has returned to working class concerns with Super 30, Gully Boy and Bharat
Are Independence and Partition Male Experiences?
In Hindi film, the woman is rarely the protagonist of a Partition or Independence narratives. But Bengali film always centers the experience of women in such narratives. An introspection The 2018 Bengali film Ek Je Chhilo Raja, while largely mediocre, has an interesting question towards its tail. The film centres on a real-life legal battle for property in India, known…
Why Don’t These Girls Work?
In the recent batch of Bollywood films set in bright, ‘mithai’-loving small towns, the heroines are assertive and sexually confident but rarely have careers or career aspirations
The Privilege of the 0.1%
If cinema is a lens to understand society, then both
Placebo and Munnabhai MBBS tell you two things–why doctors evoke such dislike, and why they themselves appear dehumanized and alienated, out of love with the work they have spent so
many years in training for.
The New Viranagana and the Memories of Nadia
A figure leaps headlong onto the screen, fully armoured, face hooded by a helmet. Spears are sent clattering, sentries hurtle across the room, Bajirao and his lieutenant watch in surprise. We don’t know whether this is a man or a woman, friend or foe. Could this be Mastani? The anticipation was nicely set up by the trailer for Bajirao Mastani,…
The Tribal Hero in Bollywood
SS RAAJAMOULI’S BAAHUBALI: THE BEGINNING opened in theatres on 10 July last year, in a season overcast with the muscular release of Yash Raj Films’Bajrangi Bhaijaan, starring Salman Khan. Baahubali, featuring the Telugu stars Prabhas and Rana Daggubati in lead roles, came with one of the biggest budgets of any Indian film (Rs 175 crore), the promise of spectacular vistas…
Oh! Calcutta
Old-world charms and multi-cultural delights are discovered in ‘dirty Calcutta’ By Sohini Chattopadhyay | 1 December 2015 The grey, gorgeous sulk of the Kolkata monsoon is best spent in bed, listening to the intense, melodic rain. Another way, equally endorsed, is dreaming with a book and a pot of tea, preferably, with the phone switched off.Home for the rains this time…
It Happened One Night
Thirteen people have been sentenced to 20 years for the gangrape of a tribal woman in West Bengal’s Birbhum district earlier this year. The trial was so swift that the judge didn’t wait for forensic test results. Many Rashomon versions of the case exist, but the long shadow of one political party is common to all of them
The Bengali Woman’s Running Diary
I began running, in grief and confusion, five years ago. My grandmother passed away suddenly one morning, a couple of days after my cautious and measured father allowed himself to answer without a sigh that she seemed much better. A little more than a week before, she had been sent home from the critical care unit, and I had interpreted…