Every two years, the Film’s Division (of India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting) organizes India’s oldest and largest showcase of non-fiction, short fiction and animation: the Mumbai International Film Festival. This year’s festival was held from January 28 and February 3, featuring 800 titles. However, this number excludes several acclaimed…
It’s 2:15 a.m. and I am humming the tune of “Ederlezi,” approaching the Suada and Olga Bridge toward the Grbavica district of Sarajevo, Bosnia, where I have rented a room. Grbavica had suffered heavy shelling in the 1990s when Sarajevo was under siege by nationalist Serbs. Window sills bloom with…
I bought my first lipstick when I turned 30. Blood red, it brightened my face. That same year, a Bollywood movie, “Lipstick Under My Burkha,” narrated the lives of four women in a mid-size Indian town for whom wearing lipstick was a metaphor for how they sought a spoonful of…
“Have dinner at home. I’ll fetch you at 10pm.”
“Yay!”
For the past year, for every weekend that I was in my city of Mumbai, this was the one-sentence text between R and I.
R, a 20-year-old student of media, who amazed me the way she taught herself video editing…
On the afternoon of December 26 in 2017, on Hans Bhugra Road in India’s metropolis of Mumbai, four women were arrested as they tried to prevent their homes from being demolished by the city’s municipal body. One of them was Chhaya Thakur. Her elder daughter was in the office at…
