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Indian Express
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Aanchal Shrivastava's music show ‘Yatra with Aanchal' comes to Pune
Qawwali has always been a space dominated by men. Even in modern performance circles, it's rare to find a woman leading a full Qawwali set. Aanchal Shrivastava is changing that. On May 24, she will perform her live show 'Yatra with Aanchal' at Monalisa Kalagram in Koregaon Park, Pune. The live acoustic set will feature a mix of Qawwali, Sufi, folk, and original compositions. Shrivastava's journey with music started when she was just two and a half. After noticing how often she banged on plates and spoons at home, her parents enrolled her in a local music class. The class was meant for older children, but her teacher allowed her in. By three and a half, she had already done her first public performance. Most of her early training came from 'gharanas,' not from music schools or formal certification courses. That kind of learning, she says, shaped how she sings today – especially in Qawwali, which demands power and control. For women, performing Qawwali is not easy. But Shrivastava says the deep, open, and full-breath singing Qawwali requires fits naturally with her training. 'When I was younger, I'd tell my dad my throat hurt after singing; I can't reach the correct notes. Guruji would say that if you truly want to sing, you must forget your organs. Sing from your stomach and forget about the pain. That stayed with me. You can sing from your throat for only 15 or 20 minutes. It won't sustain you. Singing from your stomach is the only way,' she explains. Growing up, she was often called the Lata Mangeshkar of the school or the Nightingale of her class. 'It was flattering,' she says. 'But I never really felt I sounded like her. If someone had told me I sounded like Abida Parveen ji, maybe I would've realised that I was meant to make powerful music earlier,' she explains. It took her years to see what direction her voice was taking her. She added, 'Even though I started young, I understood what I was made for only three or four years ago, when I left my job and committed to music full-time.' What made it clear to her was the audience. The response was strong every time she performed Sufi or folk songs, even if people hadn't heard them before. Her original track, Ishq Akela, is now a staple in her live sets. 'People sing along, even if they don't know the song. There's something raw in it. I think I've been blessed with a voice that helps people connect, not just with the music, but with themselves,' she explains. Her contributions to the music reflect that same depth and emotion as her performances. She has sung for Amazon Prime's Four More Shots Please and made her Bollywood debut in Mahesh Bhatt's Love Games. Her songs Kadi Aao Ni and Ishq Akela have made her a known name in India's indie and Sufi music scenes. At the Pune show, she will perform Qawwalis like Chaap Tilak, Tu Mane Ya Na Mane, Asaan Te Tainu Rabb Manneya, Punjabi folk like Nehar Wale Pul Te Bula Ke, and her own original compositions. The music will stay rooted, with harmonium, tabla, dholak, claps, and acoustic guitar, and won't feature any electronic sounds. The evening will open with a performance by poet and Kavita Café founder Garima Mishra. Shrivastava will be joined on stage by guitarist Mahi, who's worked on most of her originals, harmonium player Omkar, known for his work on several Bollywood tracks, and the rest of the band and backing vocalists. She calls this live show 'Yatra with Aanchal' because it's not just about travel; it's about taking the audience through the journey with her. 'This isn't a show where you sit and watch. I want people to sing, clap, and move. I want them to feel like they did when they were kids when they weren't scared to dance or feel something and didn't have boundaries.'
Indian Express
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Maa ke paas bhi desire hain: Why do we strip women of their sexuality when they become mothers?
Mother's Day 2025: There is a lot that women lose when they become mothers — our hairlines, waistlines, a full night's sleep, and the ability to put ourselves first. But what I miss most is the permission to be wrong, mediocre, selfish, unhappy and imperfect in the way everyone else, fathers included, are allowed to be. The moment you become a mother; people start looking at you differently. You become a human unicorn; magical, special, and a beacon of all that is good and hopeful. Perhaps this forced reverence also impacts how women are presented in cinema and OTT content. As I thought more about how mothers are portrayed on screen, I realised that women who are mothers, especially older women who are mothers, are never shown as individuals with sexual desire, or as sexually desirable. More alarmingly, they are seldom shown getting physically intimate with their partners on screen. Women characters who are vocal about feeling amorous are either laughed at in comedies or bad TV shows (remember the erotically charged dadi in Kapil Sharma's show), portrayed as scary cougars, unfaithful wives who are cheating on their husbands, or are divorced and looking to move on. Kirti Kulhari's character Anjana in Four More Shots Please is one of the few examples of a mother getting intimate with multiple partners on screen. It helps that Anjana is in her early thirties, attractive, and single. But when Neena Gupta's character Priyamvada in Badhai Ho gets pregnant in her late forties or early fifties, their intimacy is merely hinted at with thunder, rain and physical proximity. Even in the short film Khujli, where Jackie Shroff and Neena Gupta's characters decide to add an element of kink to their sex life, the film ends with him clipping the handcuffs back on to her hands, leaving the rest for us to assume and imagine. Dimple Kapadia played an older woman who gets physically involved with a younger man in the film Leela. However, the scene where they make love is shot using the shadows of a man and a woman. So, why don't the words mother and sexy or mothers and sex coexist more often in the movies and content we watch? There are perhaps several reasons for this. One maybe that female and/or male actors over a certain age are uncomfortable or reluctant to perform physically intimate scenes while playing parents. Second, we don't think of older female bodies or bodies that aren't skinny after childbirth as sexy or desirable. Thirdly, it is very difficult for us to imagine our mothers, and by extension, mothers in general, having or enjoying sex like young women. We put our parents, especially our mothers, on a pedestal where they are isolated from the vices and weaknesses of regular folk, and sexual desire is definitely on that list. Some may argue that not everything needs to be explicitly shown on screen, and this is fair. But to separate mothers from their sexuality or portray mothers, especially older women who are mothers, as comical or abnormal if they express sexual desire, is doing a huge disservice to them. Another factor in the representation of a woman's sexuality in cinema and OTT content is that we largely see it from a male perspective. Given the limited number of women filmmakers even today, the decision about what kind of women and from which age group or stage of life can be considered sexy or interested in sex is still largely determined by men. Additionally, women seen from a male gaze are not perceived as beings with sexual agency. They are simply a means for the man to find sexual fulfilment or titillation. For decades, mothers wept over sewing machines and passed on a legacy of revenge or abandonment issues. Alternatively, they were class-conscious and narrow-minded, determined to control every aspect of their child's life. Then there were the sauteli ma's (step mothers), uniformly uncaring and self-centered, who furthered the evil stepmother stereotype from western fairytales. Long story short, a mother was only ever seen in the context of her children and how well she had done as a caregiver. Younger filmmakers, influencers and digital creators have taken a more empathetic perspective on parenting and given us realistic and varied portrayals of mothers on-screen and social media platforms. However, if you do a quick search of films that had mothers as protagonists, the stories are of moms being multitasking superheroes, mom next door turned vigilantes, or mothers who reclaim their identity after years of sacrifice and servitude. Even in a seemingly progressive film like Paa, where Vidya Balan played a proud single mom, she was never shown expressing a need for physical intimacy, which would be quite normal for a young woman in her thirties. She was a great mom, but the film had to unite her with the father of her child after twelve years apart to make it acceptable to us. There are a few exceptions that come to mind. Lust Stories 2, where Amruta Subhash's character Seema is seen having sex with her husband in her employer's home because the couple has kids and a small home with little privacy. Kalyug, directed by Shyam Benegal, showed Reema Lagoo and Kulbhushan Kharbanda's characters enjoy an active sex life even after becoming parents. Other examples are The Sky is Pink, where Priyanka Chopra and Farhan Akhtar's characters enjoy intimacy as parents of teenage kids, or the OTT series Married Woman, where Riddhi Dogra plays a married woman with kids who falls in love with a younger woman played by Monica Dogra. Motherhood is perhaps the most life-altering decision for any woman. It's deeply fulfilling, extremely exhausting and not for the faint-hearted. Perhaps the physical and emotional sacrifices it demands have led to mothers being venerated in stories and cinema. For years, women have been labelled Devki, Yashoda, Durga, Lakshmi, or Kali to deify their every dimension or emotional expression. But strangely, fathers have no divine or mythological points of comparison. They are allowed to remain regular, fallible human beings who get congratulated for doing the bare minimum. Perhaps it's time we replace reverence with realism and acknowledge that women don't stop being regular people with physical, emotional and sexual needs once they have children. We just forget to look at them that way.
India.com
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- India.com
This actor lost his mother at an early age, father turned his back on him, people used to…, he is…
In Bollywood, star kids are often compared to their parents. Many times, new actors get so burdened by the comparison with their star parents that their careers end before they even begin. Prateik Babbar is one such name. The actor often remains in the headlines due to the rift in their relationship with his father, Raj Babbar. Recently, Prateik Babbar married actress Priya Banerjee, but he did not include any family members in such a big day of his life. The actor and his wife had made it clear in the interview given after the marriage that all the important people in their lives were present in their marriage, and they did not need anyone else. After Prateik Babbar's marriage, his stepbrother Arya Babbar and sister Juhi Babbar expressed their disappointment by reacting to this. They said that Prateik's decision has hurt their father Raj Babbar a lot. Now, the Four More Shots Please fame actor has spoken openly about the rift and sour relationship with his father, Raj Babbar. Raj Babbar and Smita Patil's son Prateik Babbar spoke to Bollywood Bubble about his personal life and relationship with his parents. The actor says that he started hating his father, Raj Babbar, and mother, Smita Patil. He says that he did not consider himself Smita Patil's son, and for a long time, he was struggling for his identity. He was not able to accept himself, but now he has accepted his identity and he is happy as Pratik Smita Patil. The actor says that in his childhood, he was very confused about who he was, but now everything is very clear. According to Prateik, it was natural for him to feel like this because he never spent time with his parents. Prateik Babbar's mother, Smita Patil, died while giving birth to him. The actor never got the love of a mother. Raj Babbar was shocked by Smita Patil's death and he left his newborn son with his grandparents. The actor says, 'Both my parents were not with me and because of this, I started hating both my mother and father. Because of them people used to treat me differently. They used to love me out of pity. That means people used to do everything with me differently. That's why I started hating them and did not want to connect with my father.' Prateik Babbar further said that people used to compare him with his mother Smita Patil, and because of this, he used to get very irritated. Regarding this, the actor further says that now he has accepted this fact. He knows that people's feelings for his mother depend on their relationship and experience.
India Today
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- India Today
Why Netflix is betting big on ‘The Royals'
India's OTT space has been starved of love stories, with good ones a particularly rare sighting. It's why at the trailer launch day of The Royals that Tanya Bami, series head of Netflix India, remarked: 'We aren't seeing many love stories these days. We had to really bring a love story to the platform.'Enter Netflix's 'modern day royal romcom' The Royals—created by Ishita and Rangita Pritish Nandy, written by Neha Veena Sharma and directed by Nupur Asthana and Priyanka Ghosh—which seeks to fill the void by evoking desi Bridgerton vibes albeit in a contemporary Royals sticks to the classic 'opposites attract' formula of the genre. Aviraaj Singh (Ishaan Khatter) is the prince charming of Morpur while Bhumi Pednekar is the commoner who enters the royal turf as a feisty entrepreneur. Expectedly, sparks fly, egos clash and banter ensues. 'Remember how you never want the good one but always chase after the one you know is trouble; that's The Royals for you,' said the in Rajasthan and with an ensemble that includes Zeenat Aman, Sakshi Tanwar, Dino Morea, Vihaan Samat, Sumukhi Suresh, Lisa Mishra, Kavya Trehan, Udit Arora, Nora Fatehi and Chunky Panday, Netflix and Nandy sisters, at first glance, are aiming to woo the romcom-loving crowd. Think Jane Austen worshippers. 'I got very greedy when it came to the actors, and it didn't hurt that Netflix pushed my greed not with deep pockets but just by wanting this fabulous cast as much as I wanted itNetflix allowed us to run and have fun,' said Rangita Nandy, whose banner Pritish Nandy Communications collaborates with the streaming giant for the first time after delivering a hit with Amazon Prime in Four More Shots Please. 'I have always been a girl obsessed with romance, so when we had this opportunity to work together, we thought of a romance,' she it a subversion of the genre by looking 'at fading royalty', the makers have thrown in all the tropes—dapper men dressed in regal gear and women adorned in jewels, choicest of saris and gowns and lavish setting. At least one cast member admitted at being in awe of the extravagance on display.'For the longest time, I've played characters on the other side of the royal table,' said Sakshi Tanwar, the royal matriarch best known for TV dramas Kahaani Ghar Ghar Ki and Bade Achhe Lagte Hain. 'I've always been an Aamkumari (term used in show for commoner)—grounded, relatable, just like the life I come from. So stepping into the shoes of Rani Maa felt unreal at first.'In terms of splendour and scale, Heeramandi is still the Netflix original to beat, but The Royals comes close with its palatial backdrop and savvy sartorial quotient. 'The most beautiful thing about The Royals is that it takes classic royalty and intersects with modern-day royalty,' says further promised that the show has all the essential ingredients of the genre, namely 'charm, humour, heart, chemistry'. The Nandy sisters added there'd also be 'a whole lot of fire'.Whether The Royals will click will be known only after May 9, but for now at least, the streaming audience gets a breather from the crime dramas with a frothy-light-romcom to look forward to India Today MagazineMust Watch
