Shubhra Gupta

The Karkarias of Delhi are a family who, like all of us, are desperate to project that everything is perfect. Somanth Karkaria (Manoj Pahwa) owns a mithaai-ki-dukaan which is struggling to stay afloat in a time when people are cutting on sugar, and veering towards videshi sweets. A paterfamilias in the old mould, he carries a comfortable paunch, and a sneering attitude of daddy-knows-best whether it comes to his own wife Kamla (Seema Pahwa), son Vishnu (Gulshan Devaiah), daughter Pooja (Kaveri Seth), daughter-in-law Neeti (Girija Oak Godbole) and their two grandchildren, Daani and Daksh.

The pleasure of listening to Naseeruddin Shah say ‘ool julool’, a phrase nearly impossible to translate, the closest being ‘aisa-waisa’, silly, stupid, but not quite. The pleasure of watching Vijay Varma as a lover of Urdu shairi, using his head and heart to woo an old poet and his lovely daughter. And to have all of this wrapped in a film which privileges a love of language, flowery shairi and broken-hearted shayars, mouldering old Delhi printing presses and broke publishers, should have resulted in a film which makes you ache and sigh in the best way possible.

In the 2013 film Raanjhana, Dhanush played a Hindu lad from Varanasi who falls in love with a Muslim girl. That was a time when filmmakers could still — just about — carry off an inter-religious love story without the moral police threatening to burn theatres down. In 2025, Aanand L Rai and writers Himanshu Yadav and Neeraj Yadav return with Raanjhana’s spiritual sequel, and this time around it isn’t religion but class—rich girl, poor boy—which becomes the point of conflict. And just in case that isn’t enough, the writers throw the entire kitchen sink at us – college love story, parental opposition, patriotic flag waving, even a war — in a film which ends up being a totally outdated, confused, heavy-on-melodrama-and-glycerine mish-mash of genres.

Truth be told, the only reason why I was interested in Kaisi Yeh Paheli is because I wanted to see what Sukant Goel was up to this time, as I had enjoyed his turn in the sadly-truncated Netflix series Kaala Pani. In Kaisi Yeh Paheli, he plays a son who dislikes his mother intensely, sustaining the emotion even when he is tasked with cracking the case of a young woman’s murder.

It was 120 against 3000, and on that fateful November day in 1962, the one hundred and twenty Indian soldiers led by Major Shaitan Singh Bhati kept the much larger Chinese contingent at bay, giving up their lives to save the crucial Chushul valley in Ladakh. It came to be known as the Battle of Rezang La, and in the continuous onslaught of the Chinese army, only six soldiers of the Charlie Company, 13 Kumaon Regiment, almost all of them Ahirs, survived. Farhan Akhtar plays Bhati with brio, leading his men into a ‘jung’ from where there was no coming back, and the result is a war film which brims with the action-and-emotion necessary for a Bollywood drama, but refuses to go under because of it.

The Family Man Season 3 starts from where Season 2 had left off, with top TASC agent Srikant (Manoj Bajpayee) finding himself embroiled in a snowballing crisis in Nagaland. The stakes are higher than ever. Serial bombs have claimed lives. A major casualty can be the high-profile ‘Project Sahakar’, which we are told is on the verge of being signed by ‘all rebel leaders’ in the North East: it is an initiative close to pro-active PM Basu’s (Seema Biswas) heart, meant to address long-standing grievances, and hold out promise of lasting peace and prosperity.

n Stephen King’s novella ‘The Running Man’, which came out in 1982, the dystopia felt unreal. King conjured up a staggeringly unequal world, whose rich live in guarded enclaves, the poor are corralled into slums, and a child could easily die of the common flu if her parents cannot afford the drugs.

If there’s one director who has taken a deep dive into the unlovely world created by toxic masculinity, it is Kanu Behl. His debut feature Titli, which remains his best work, gave us a corner of Delhi most of us had no idea about– a father and three brothers whose family business is car-jacking and violent disposal of bodies, if the need so arises. And if a paternal figure is anything like the one in Titli (played by the director’s own father), it stands to reason that the sons will be like him.