A couple of weeks ago, as the CAA protests started gathering steam, I tweeted a video from a gathering in Bandra’s Carter Road. It prompted a gentleman on Twitter to label me a “bloody Khalistani”. My name was enough for him to sum up my entire existence. This is what happens when communities are othered and demonised.
Read MoreIn film after film, in Chhoti Si Baat and Baaton Baaton Mein, in the universes of Basu Chatterjee and Hrishikesh Mukherjee, on public transport and in Bandra apartments, Amol Palekar played the man on the street. Who else could essay a white-collar worker with the soul of a poet, who you might meet on a train or a bus, if not him?
Read MoreIt was with great anticipation that I awaited Modern Love, the Amazon Prime Original show which dramatises, with fictional flourishes, some well-loved Modern Love columns. But I needn’t have held my breath. The show takes everything that makes the column series profound, and flattens the hell out of it.
Read MoreBatla House, the John Abraham-starring film, will no doubt open to praise and paisa, unfettered by the fact that, 11 years later, the actual encounter that saw two alleged terrorists and police officer MC Sharma killed, is still one of the murkiest cases in the annals of Delhi Police’s speckled history.
Read MoreI am from a post-Partition migrant family, but I have no idea where my roots lie. My grandfather, my last “sarhad paar” connection, passed away and I grew obsessed with the idea. I pined away for a name, but all I had to go on was a “Jhelum kinare” village. How do you feel a longing for a place you’ve never been to?
Read MoreIn the backdrop of the Pulwama attack, whose freedom of expression should we be concerned about? We don’t shut down the folks propagating #TerrorismHasAReligion, or journalists who purportedly declared Aligarh Muslim University, a “university of terrorists”. But we shut down people like Amol Palekar.
Read MoreRearview is a column that draws connections between the events of the past week. This week, a government that is committed to optics, with initiatives like Pariksha Pe Charcha 2.0, has to contend with runaway elements like Hindu Mahasabha leader Pooja Shakun Pandey who reenacted the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.
Read MoreRearview is a column that draws connections between the events of the past week. This time, two much mythologised Indian women occupied our timelines. The legend of Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi was brought to life by Kangana Ranaut’s blustery Manikarnika, while the legend of Priyanka Gandhi came alive in Eastern Uttar Pradesh.
Read MoreEarlier this week, the participative nature of the internet peaked, when people all over the world gathered to make a stock of an egg, the most-liked post on Instagram. Yup. The same internet that led to the proliferation of the Arab Spring bonded over an inanity.
Read MoreIn India, every day presents a new diversion, a new amusement. This week, we discovered the Kauravas were “test-tube babies” in a giant leap backward for science, and Kerala’s “Women’s Wall” protest against the violence at Sabarimala, showed us how to do solidarity.
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