This is the post excerpt.
19. She loves to laugh and smile, as well as making others do the same. Sometimes she’s quiet and shy but sometimes she’s crazy, wild and weird. She is an avid reader. She loses herself in books but finds herself there too. She loves to dance and when life gets hard dance helps her. She’s obsessed with coffee,chocolates, sunsets and F.R.I.E.N.D.S. That’s all you need to know about Parina for now. Let her in and she will tell you more.
A celebration of life, death and everything in between.
The story is set in modern-day Varanasi. Five lives intersect along the Ganges: a low caste boy, Deepak (Vicky Kaushal) in hopeless love, a young woman named Devi (Richa Chadda),ridden with guilt of a sexual encounter ending in a tragedy, a helpless father with fading morality, Vidyadhar (Sanjay Mishra), a spirited child yearning for a family, a spirited and sweet girl, Shalu (Shweta Tripathi) all longing to escape the moral constructs of a small-town. A series of unprecedented events find these lives, to reflect and explore their desires through each other.
Masaan means ‘crematorium’. People say that souls are liberated in Varanasi. The movie depicts Varanasi’s wonderful mix of life and death since centuries. No one can see the future, but it is there, stretching right in front of the conflicted Devi and the dealing-with-heartbreak-and-loss Deepak. Which makes ‘Masaan’, for all its underlying grimness, a film about hope and redemption, underlined by the fine writing.Simple scenes make for engaging viewing. The crematorium scenes on the ghats of Benaras and the Dom family are well picturized. Life among the dead, an irony no one can escape. The caste divide is levelled in one telling blow. The romantic moments are real and poignant. Every character leaves his or her mark on the screen including Jhonta (Nikhil Sahani), the little orphan who works with Pathak.
The end leaves you craving for more. MASAAN is worth going miles to see!
From
‘Long birthday wish posts.’
To
‘Happy birthday, man. Party hard’
We all grew up.
I am standing on the street with a friend, waiting for my bus to arrive. That is when, I see her. She’s wearing a red dress, my favourite colour on her. She’s got a black bag hanging off her shoulder. She’s looking prettier than ever. “Is she her?”, my friend asked. “She looks a bit different from the pictures you’ve showed me”, he continues. I don’t know what to reply as I stand there staring at her. There’s something different about her, maybe she changed her hairstyle. “She really loved you right?”, he asks again. I ignore him yet again staring at my beautiful past and wonder how her life is right now. I wonder who listens to her crib about everything, who laughs with her favourite comedy movies, who carries her home when she’s drunk at 2 am. She then opens her eyes a little wide, grins and gives me a big wave. There isn’t much time for talking cause my bus arrives and I board the bus. I can’t help but watch her as the bus strides off.
Five years ago, she had told me she loves me. Today I almost say it back.
She doesn’t know what love is but she thinks it’s hearing him say ‘hey pretty girl’ every time he sees her. It’s getting to hear his laugh, her favourite sound. It’s blushing like an idiot when he teases her or pulls her leg. It’s listening to him ramble about his favourite sport. She thinks love is blurting out exactly how she feels about him when he asks her “why are you looking at me like that?” It’s unplanned, imperfect and sloppy; the exact opposite of how she wants it to be. As she sees him lying next to her, she realises that she doesn’t know what love is, but it might just be magic.
WHERE TO BUY- https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Splendid-Suns-Khaled-Hosseini/dp/159448385X
A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS
by Khaled Hosseini, 2007
A Woman’s Lot In Kabul, Lower than A House’s Cat.
It isn’t that hard to fathom why A Thousand Splendid Suns was such a bestseller. It gives a great insight to the culture of Afghanistan and the difficulties they faced there. The book focuses on the lives of mothers, daughters and most importantly on the friendships of women. It is an ambitious novel that has a wide historical and cultural view of the last three decades of the Afghan history. The story includes civil war, coups, Taliban and even the conflict after 9/11. Khaled Hosseini has given the readers an intense plot, melodramatic situations and black and white depiction of characters.
It is the story of two women, living in Afghanistan who are introduced separately but are brought together by tragedy. The first women, Mariam, is an illegitimate child of a rich man and a house maid. She is exiled by her father who lives separately with her mother in a make shift house outside town. Mariam, at the age of 15 is quickly married off to an old man named Rasheed by her father and her three wives after her mother commits suicide. As a girl Mariam is told by her mother: “Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.” Mariam’s life with Rasheed was tough. She was ridiculed by him with punches, slaps and kicks, sometimes followed by an apology. The other woman in the story, Laila is the second wife of Rasheed who is a young teenager from Kabul. Laila’s father is a scholarly professor and her lover is a childhood friend named Tariq. Certain tragic events take place which leads her to get married to Rasheed. Amidst the Soviets and Taliban, Hosseini depicts the tranny and losses of women. As Mariam and Laila face extreme difficulties both at home and due to the war,they come to form a bond which makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other.
Hosseini shows how a woman’s love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.The story of these two women, which reaches its climax in an act of extraordinary generosity and self-sacrifice,There is much more to be learned from A Thousand Splendid Suns. It is, for all its shortcomings, a brave, honorable, big-hearted book.
‘There’s nothing wrong with you. Theres’s a lot of wrong with the world.” – Chris Colfer
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex (LGBTQI) people in India face extreme social difficulties. Section 377 of the Indian constitution is an archaic law from the past which describes homosexual acts as “unnatural”. India being the largest democracy in the world considers gay sex illegal and unethical. The status of homosexuals in our country have now been considered equal to that of criminals. Same- sex marriages are not legally exercised in India,nor are these couples offered limited rights.
Why is it that the sight of two men holding hands or two women kissing is a terrifying thing? A dangerous thing. A thing that inspires fear, fury and yes, violence among all. It’s 2017 and still the thought of transgenders brings shame in the eyes of people. Maybe in the future India may pass all laws to to secure equal rights and still, none of it would matter because fundamentally the queer community is seen sick, deviant, twisted, immoral and evil. Even after the visibility of same-sex relationships in movies and other forms of media is present, in reality these people are still misunderstood, hated and criminalised for being themselves, for who they love and for how they live their lives.
It is high time for us to decriminalise homosexuality in our society between two consenting adults as our society is always in a state of flux, then why can’t our legal system not change?
Site Title 