Criticism and essays on cinema, books and popular culture for The Hindu, The Indian Express, BuzzFeed India, The Hindu Business Line, Outlook, Arré, and NewsCentral24x7.
Ramin Bahrani on adapting Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger for Netflix — why the Iranian-American director of Man Push Cart was always the right person to tell India's great underdog story.
Creator Rangita Pritish-Nandy on Four More Shots Please! Season 2 — an Amazon Prime show about four flawed, complicated women that refuses to soften its characters for audience comfort or advertiser ease.
Armaan Malik on deleting his Instagram, signing with Arista Records, and releasing 'Control' — his first English single, which arrived not as a career pivot but as a genuine artistic reinvention.
Aalia Furniturewalla dropped the surname and became Alaya F — how Pooja Bedi's daughter turned a New York filmmaking epiphany into a breakout Bollywood debut opposite Saif Ali Khan.
Russell Peters on Deported, his Amazon Prime special, growing up Indian in a racist Canada, and whether a comedian who built his career on ethnic jokes can still land them in 2020.
Anthony Maras on making Hotel Mumbai — his film about the 2008 Taj attacks — and the decade-long process of honouring survivors' stories without reducing their grief and terror to spectacle.
Geeta Gandbhir on Why We Hate — a documentary tracing the origins of human hatred from the Holocaust to contemporary extremism, asking whether the instinct is hardwired or simply well-practised.
Twinkle Khanna's digital platform Tweak aims to be India's Refinery29 — a lifestyle and culture destination that takes the modern Indian woman seriously, on her own complicated, unretouched terms.
Lionsgate arrives in India with 17,000 titles and a focus on regional language content — a challenge to Netflix and Amazon in a streaming market that is simultaneously crowded and wide open.
Four short films that approach loneliness and ageing with uncommon tenderness — a meditation on what it means to grow old in a world that has quietly stopped making room for its elders.
Begamon ka Bhopal documents the rich, matriarchal cultural heritage of Bhopal — a city whose Nawabi history has been nearly erased — through the art, architecture, and living memory that remains.
The increasingly porous border between news and entertainment is creating a media landscape where information arrives packaged as spectacle, and the facts quietly relocate to the footnotes.
Searching for Saraswati becomes the first Indian documentary to feature on the New York Times's Op-Docs platform — a milestone for independent Indian non-fiction and its international reach.
Netflix bets on documentary shorts — a resurgent, frequently underestimated sub-genre — releasing a new roster of films that compress enormous global stories into brief, exactly-right form.
The Emmy race reveals the golden age of television in precise relief: who gets nominated, who gets overlooked, and what the ballot tells us about prestige drama's real criteria for success.
A film that spins its central premise in every possible direction — sometimes dizzying, occasionally brilliant, always in motion, never quite willing to let its characters stop and sit still.
Amole Gupte on protecting children's imagination from an education system that rewards conformity — and why cinema alone might be able to teach what India's schools have quietly stopped trying to.
High production values and polished surfaces cannot compensate for the absence of genuine human insight — a review of a film that chooses spectacle over everything else it could have been.
Get Me Roger Stone chronicles the career of America's most unrepentant political operative — a documentary so infuriating it will make you want to throw both your hands and your dinner.
Netflix's feminist programming promises liberation but frequently delivers a commercially safe version of it — why the platform's girl-power shows rarely follow through on their most radical premise.
A survey of Indian music's most restless practitioners — artists who refuse to stay in one register, one genre, or one tradition, and thrive precisely because of that wilful refusal to settle.
A photographer on maintaining inner stillness when the world through the viewfinder is anything but — what it means, practically and philosophically, to shoot with peace rather than anxiety.
Kevin Spacey on House of Cards in the age of Trump: the moment the show's vision of political ruthlessness stopped being fiction and began tracking uncomfortably close to the actual news.
Mae Thomas's music podcast MAED gives long-form space to artists like Indian Ocean's Amit Kilam — a conversation about what it means to make original music in India across several decades.
India makes almost no films for children: why children's cinema remains chronically underfunded, ignored by studios, and absent from the cultural conversation despite an enormous young audience.
Documentary filmmakers face censorship, funding withdrawal, and political hostility — a conversation on why free expression matters more for non-fiction cinema than almost any other creative form.
Joel Whitney's Finks documents how the CIA secretly funded literary magazines and shaped global intellectual culture during the Cold War — a book that recontextualises the art of an entire era.
A filmmaker on why ancient Indian mythology — plural, contradictory, trippy — is a far richer source for modern cinema than the linear, moralistic stories the industry tends to tell instead.
Baahubali 2 becomes only the third Indian film to release in IMAX — on the format, the scale, and whether the Rajamouli epic has finally found the screen it always deserved.
A look at the digital platforms and new media ventures redefining cultural connection in India — and how the right algorithm, like the right match, can change what you reach for next.
Ekta Kapoor's AltBalaji attempts to bring the Netflix model to India with bold, adult Indian original content built for an audience that mainstream television has consistently failed to reach.
On the quiet revolution whenever a magazine or photographer refuses to retouch: what unedited images of real bodies reveal about beauty standards, and who those standards actually serve.
Adam Curtis's HyperNormalisation argues that governments, financiers, and technologists colluded to construct a fake, manageable reality — a dizzying thesis assembled from decades of archival BBC footage.
Drishyam Films' Quest for Stories competition sets out to discover writers from India's smaller cities — a search for the authentic heartland voice that mainstream Hindi cinema has always bypassed.
The slow accumulation of small auditions, small roles, and smaller paychecks that constitute the years before stardom — a portrait of an actor still carefully waiting for the camera to turn.
An ode to headphones: the portable private concert, the urban armour, the device that carved a space for music inside a city that never stops generating noise of its own.
Sunny Gill arrives as a new kind of Indian superhero — flawed, region-specific, capeless — and quietly rewrites what Hindi-language comic book heroism is allowed to look like on screen.
Ava DuVernay's 13th connects the American constitution's slavery exception, mass incarceration, and systemic racism in a documentary that is as precisely structured as it is damning and urgent.
India's film censors routinely cut and restrict honest portrayals of women's lives — an essay on who the Central Board of Film Certification is protecting, and from precisely what, exactly.
On-demand streaming has quietly redistributed the power over viewing — how the shift from appointment television to personalised, on-your-own-schedule watching has changed what India actually watches.
Karan Johar's memoir An Unsuitable Boy promises backstage access to Bollywood's most glamorous dynasty, but reveals a man more comfortable performing candour than actually practising it.
A preview of 2017's most anticipated television — the shows, platforms, and storytelling trends that were poised to reshape how India's rapidly expanding streaming audience watches drama.
An artist on why Mumbai's anonymity makes it the only Indian city where you can wander without purpose — and how that productive aimlessness becomes a form of creative fuel.
Shweta Tripathi on Haraamkhor — signed in 2013, released in 2017 — why she refuses item numbers, and what it means to build an acting career on consistently difficult, uncomfortable choices.
Shlok Sharma on how Haraamkhor spent years in Censor Board limbo before finally reaching theatres — a case study in the quiet violence India's film certification system inflicts on honest cinema.
A personal essay on watching someone you love survive a brush with death from thousands of miles away, and the invisible support systems that hold artists together through private grief.
A survey of 2016's best television: the year prestige drama peaked, streaming declared victory, and the number of exceptional new shows finally outnumbered the time anyone had to watch them.
Karan Johar's candid moment on Neha Dhupia's podcast #NoFilterNeha signals a shift: Indian celebrities are finally choosing openness over carefully managed, reputation-protecting public silence.
On the discomfort of politically divided family dinners in India, and why liberals who win every drawing-room argument are quietly losing the far larger battle outside the room.
Aditya Chopra's Befikre delivers Ranveer Singh, Vaani Kapoor, and a mesmerising Paris — but leaves the story out. Three ways to watch a film that almost doesn't need one.
True Detective director Cary Fukunaga at the Jio MAMI 18th Mumbai Film Festival on genre-hopping, total immersion in a story, and why each of his three films inhabits an entirely different world.
Saiyami Kher on the correct pronunciation of her own name, her debut in Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's Mirzya, and what it takes to make a genuinely assured first appearance on screen.
Netflix data reveals which episode of Stranger Things and other breakout shows hooked Indian viewers — and what the hook point tells us about the anatomy of compulsive binge-watching.
A psychological study on verbal overshadowing reveals why professional critics — who describe films for a living — may actually remember and enjoy them less than ordinary moviegoers.