A humming word

Context: This poem is for Shah Rukh Khan. During the lockdown, his movies and memories that flooded my heart kept me going as I missed meeting my colleagues and friends, whom I love dearly.  Poem: Love wore jeans and t-shirt  and spread its arms on a screen and gyrated, spreading its charm I had no clue, around me, what was going on  my heart swelled watching this scruffy haired man   Of course, over the years,  I learnt love is not what is seen  or unseen but what is felt  But whenever I think of love  S R K is how it is spelt 

"I am dying since ten years" - Debbie says when Joseph Mascarenhas (Joe) justifies his disappearance over several evenings and tearfully tells her how their friend Rob is diagnosed with Stage 4 Brain Tumor. He comfortably tries to escape the whole confrontation with Debbie until she coerces him to play for a sailing band and earn enough for her and their son. Live your dream is a powerful yet a dangerous notion. How far can one go for their dream? In the mortar and pestle of life, it is often the dreamer's family that gets pounded. Joe, claiming to be emotional and broken, spends ten years of his life, teaching guitar and performing in nondescript clubs. While Debbie's life takes a U-turn and she ends up being the stronger of the two and managers their family fish business. The stench of the fish doesn't leave her. While his friends have moved ahead, Joe, decides to stay stagnant. Debbie despite being the pushy householder lets him be, thinking he will make her p...

There are few movies that will tear you up and there are fewer movies that take a dose from reality and do that and that’s the movie: Tumhari Sulu , played perfectly by Vidya Balan. The movie will remind you of someone: our own personal Sulu. We all know a Sulu amongst us. A mother. A sister. A wife. Or could be any woman you know who moulds her life as per her family responsibilities.   Yes. Yes. Men are great and are equally wonderful.   But just focussing on Sulu here. The quintessential mother or any responsible person who wakes up at 5:30 am and carries on her chores, unquestionably. Be it rain or hail. Her clockwork avatar is difficult to emulate. Try waking up at 5:30 am for a couple of days knowing the pile of responsibility apart from work and you’d be shaken. But for Sulu it is the norm. But with a difference. She has the zeal and the zest to do something. She makes daal with equal fervour as she makes love. She plays lemon and spoon with the same focus a...

Dear volunteer with a good ear, The movie, Dear Zindagi directed by Gauri Shinde, that stars Shahrukh Khan and Alia Bhatt, and the more recent, Marriage Story directed by Noah Baumbach, that stars Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, clearly underline the need for a therapist. A therapist is a third person who offers a perspective that your biased loved ones cannot. While depression has to be taken seriously, so has to be therapy. You cannot move about saying "Please, talk to me. I will be your ears." Sorry, you're not a student of psychology. Sorry, you're don't champion mental health problems. Skills such as empathy, counselling, trust are embedded in them through years of learning and training and they are professionally adept to handling people with anxiety and mental health issues. If a friend or relative says, I have a stomach pain, you don't say, come I will diagnose it. I have given pudin hara to my friends earlier and they were fine. Yo...

The word is partition literature in itself. But who was Manto behind those stories? Behind Thanda Ghosht, Toba Tek Singh, who was this bespectacled man who was against partition and believed Bombay (now, Mumbai) was the love of his life? Can he be confined to being a writer who put his flesh and blood to write about he flesh and blood during the 1947 partition? And that what’s the movie does. A writer is a writer even beyond his books—his life are the pages of his life that he writes them. It isn’t a nine-to-five job—even when Manto was a father, husband, brother, he was a writer in motion—his thoughts, his words entered pages through the humdrum of daily life. He never wrote about silver linings or about freedom struggle but wrote about struggle for freedom of ordinary people living in the belly of our cities—things that people wouldn’t talk about. And Nandita Das has molded her cinematic expression like a poet would mold words into a poem and let the actors add assonance...

The Sky is Pink is the story of Niren and Aditi, rather Panda and Moose, told through their daughter, Aisha Chaudhury’s point of view. The couple’s relationship is feisty yet cute. Two independent individuals, with different backgrounds, deal with love and anguish in different ways. The film is humorous and breathes life on a hot summer day. But why the title? In a frantic phone call from London to her son in Delhi, Moose asserts, “Your sky should be the color you choose it to be. If you want it to be pink, so be it.” And, we this kind of independence in their tabiyat throughout. Based on true events (the life of the teenager Aisha Chaudhury who succumbed to Pulmonary Fibrosis and an Immune Deficiency syndrome), the movie is about struggle and more importantly, her family that lived through it. Aisha Chaudhury wasn’t the only one suffering from pain, her father, Panda; her brother, Giraffe; and her mother, Moose, were too. Aisha has such cute names for her family mem...

As February passes like a soft breeze and we enter the simmering heat of March, it makes me wonder about love and Coronavirus. “ Choone se nahi pheltha hai ,” comes read a jocular post. Another reminded us how we, Indians, must not be scared of this virus: we can remove a tennis ball from a gutter, tap it and play with it. We can wash our hands off it yet it will be around much like love that we put on our guard around it and behave like it's coronavirus. Worse is love between people of the same sex. The most recent example for this is the film: Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan,  starring Ayushman Khurana and Jatinder Kumar directed by Aanand L. Rai. Albeit it’s a commercial hit, the film has made gay love a forced agenda. It portrayed how parents react in the most obscene and impractical way: they resort to avoiding the people involved to false attempts in suicide to questioning their own parenting to violent methods. Finally, they emotionally breakdown. The premise of...

If you have watched Chhichhore, please pardon me when I say this: wash your eyes with scenes from Dil Chahta Hai (what a wonderful movie with a believable story line). The premise of the movie Chhichhore, speaks of an IIT aspirant unable to bear failure and taking the extreme step of suicide; he slips into coma and his parents (Anni and Maya) doing the most atrocious thing to keep his zeal to live, alive: talking of their past and a reunion. The premise seemed like an improved version of Student of the Year where Rishi Kapoor gathers everyone to meet him before his last breath. Oh, sure SOTY is set in a galaxy far far away where everyone is party-ready and sings atrocious remix songs at the drop of the hat, and Chhichhore seems closer to reality and yet, seems far from it. And yes, it is not all that bad when compared to movies by KJo who directed movies about college and reunions wearing neon-tinted glasses and drinking some concoction that steered him from reality and logic. Howev...

Note: This is not a review. Please read it if you have or haven't watched the film. The article 15 of our constitution states: Article 15  prohibit the state from discriminating any citizen on ground of any religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them. And we all know that the Article 15 doesn't hold good in many states where riots, lynching are as common as tea stalls on a highway. That is why we all need a movie like this to remind us. The movie Article 15 is directed by Anubhav Sinha whose director's chair stands on the limbs of a few flops and a few hits. But this movie will keep his chair sturdy. Based on true events that took place in the unfateful year of 2014 in Badaun, Uttar Pradesh, the movie starts with a local folklore by the Dalits of the village led by Gaura, played impeccably by Sayani Gupta. The narrative is set on the premise of the caste and discrimination and like the aim or Arjuna, it doesnt move an inch left or right. T...

I was excited when the trailer was released and glad to see Ali Abbas Zafar choose the trajectory of India since 1947 till 2010 as a subject. But I was disappointed at the execution. He chose the convenient parts of our history and has woven a fairy tale around it. Yes, I am proud of our culture and heritage and our unity and our patience but also, what about the alienation in a new country, the struggles of every day life? I am glad they did not show Salman as a demigod throughout and kept him human, except when he grows old (he is athletic, even at 70 years. LOL.). The script writer chose to insert comedy at such sensitive subjects like stuttering and stammering (even Golmaal had done the same, remember?). The story is about Salman's journey since independence--from partition to the unemployment struggles to 1983 world cup to liberalisation to the new wave in India. The first half is excruciatingly hard to like--I enjoyed the circus part but disliked Salman's forced speeche...