Home and Diaspora

Countless dreams blink and vanish in a country which is becoming increasingly competitive at every stage of life. Taare Zameen Par aimed to attack the problem at the very beginning of this cycle, when the dreams are the loudest. The lead character Ishaan (Darsheel Safary) is depicted as a symbol for today’s childhood. His mind […]

‘Chak de!’ is essentially a love story starring Shah Rukh Khan, only the beloved is India. India has immense passion and potential for sports, which was channelled through cinema for the first time by this Shimit Amin film. It was the first film to draw attention towards the state and relevance of other sports in

Rang de Basanti exemplifies modern India’s understanding of patriotism and it promotes the sentiment in the most energetic way possible. The only way you can get the youth to talk about the true meaning of patriotism is by igniting the passion that drives it and that is what the director achieved with this film, forcing

The portrayal of cops in Bollywood had always been in shades of Black or White, barring Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya (1983), before Ab Tak Chappan changed the scenario. The film follows the life of a crime branch inspector and encounter specialist Sadhu Agashe (Nana Patekar), famous for his 56 kills. There are no emotional, patriotic

Adopted from a book by the same name on the true events of 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts, Black Friday is a riveting piece of cinema. The film narrates the cause, the process, and the aftermath of the bombings in such detail and honesty that it can easily be confused with a documentary. It comes with

Trust Rajkumar Hirani to bring out an unusual theme and turn it into a no-nonsense entertainer with a message. Very few films can compete with the freshness and feel good nature of this film that tells the story of a goon who sets out to become a doctor in his own unique way. The film

Nobody wrote tragedies better than William Shakespeare. And to interpret one of his greatest stories, Macbeth, in a Mumbai underworld setting, and be able to bring to life its complex characters on screen is an enormous achievement. Maqbool is a masterpiece, an acting manual for a generation of actors, and a guide on how to

The brilliance of cinema is in interpreting and bringing forward those aspects of our lives that we ourselves are blind to. Monsoon Wedding did so with such lucidity that it embarrassed a majority of the audience. The film brought on screen the conversations that were never to be heard, secrets that should never come out