I’m recently returned from Goa, where I was at IFFI for a few days, doing mostly non-IFFI things, hedonistic and aimless. I saw a couple films, but that’s not what this post is about.
I was at IFFI because I’d been on the Panorama non-fiction jury. Did I want to take on this onerous task? Not [...]

I spent the last four days in Goa. It wasn’t a holiday of sand, sea and sangria, but a workshop held by Video Volunteers. On the other hand it did turn into a holiday of a different sort – of hard work, total immersion in an earnest experience, a genuine feeling of both giving and [...]

In the constant conversation about a technologist (by which I don’t mean technology per se but an approach that thinks a technical system can be found to solve everything) solution to the ideologically weighted issue of access and agency, the internet has taken up a lot of time, space and importance. People are always talking [...]

As a young woman, just starting working life, I remember going to my first ever Women’s Day rally about 19 years ago. A motley group of women and a few good men marching down a central Bombay street yelling: meri behna maange: Aazadi! Arre Jaativaad se: Aazadi – that’s still the most infectious chant I’ve [...]

I’ve been feeling a bit old lately - not only because the years are ticking on by- but because I realise now that in my life so far I can actually speak of something that changed in a seminal way, pinpoint a big shift: the shift being from using the term “alternative” when speaking of [...]

On Saturday night I tried to see a movie but it was houseful everywhere I tried. It was Madhur Bhandarkar’s “Fashion.” I had been looking forward to the movie with a mixture of trepidation and curiousity. Bhandarkar’s MNS tinted moralism is more than I can stomach for the most; but then there’s the sizzle of [...]

I always used to jump into the Bombay vs. Delhi debateiii with alacrity because I stood on no firm ground – my mother is from Bombay, my father from Delhi, which makes me from both places. And yet their families hadn’t “always” lived there – there were no ancestral homes to speak of, redolent of [...]