The Unforgettable Desire

My top three reasons for watching Shonali Bose’s The Sky Is Pink were: the title, Gulzar, and mainstream actors in a non-masala film. This Priyanka Chopra-Farhan Akhtar starrer film along with Rohit Saraf is based on the life of Aisha Chaudhary (played by Zaira Wasim). Despite being the story of Aisha, the film was promoted as a love story which added more curiosity to an expected inspiring story. The narrator of the film is Aisha Chaudhary who is dead and this, she clearly states in the beginning, is not a spoiler. Her voice is that of quirky teenager who has had enough time to understand the circumstances of her birth and death. She is quick-witted, constantly uses Delhi-based puns and jokes, and is really concerned about her parents’ sex life which by the way isn’t okay to talk about even when one is dead. Aisha is born with SCID – Severe Combined Immunodeficiency. She dies of pulmonary firbrosis. In case you have heard Aisha Chaudhary before, this information is not a s...

Source - Indiewire On January 1, 2019, I sat down to watch Michael Curtiz's  Casablanca (1942). It had been on my to-watch list since I watched Damien Chazelle's  La La Land (2016) for the nth time in June 2018 while pausing the film to make notes. When I paid attention to Mia speaking about Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca while pointing at the studio-window in the Warner Brothers lot — and sleeping under a giant Ingrid Bergman wallpaper — I was reminded of a conversation I had had with a friend from my college theatre days. I had not taken his suggestion of watching Ingrid Bergman films seriously back in 2017 because I was busy feeling validated by “Fools who dream”. I was hooked to my laptop screen while watching Casablanca . When the film ended, all I could think was that the film doesn’t merely has a wow- factor or THE-factor, but it has the ‘What a beauty!’-factor.   Mostly, I was impressed by the idea of everything that’s happening during the second Worl...