Stories that linger long after the credits roll —
observations on the human mind, trust, and the darkness we rarely see coming.
On trauma, faith, and the terrifying fragility of human autonomy.
Watch · House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths · NetflixI recently watched the Burari case on Netflix, and even days later, it lingers in my mind. The story is so surreal, so almost unimaginable, that it challenges your very sense of reality. Yet it is real — a stark reminder of the complexity, fragility, and unpredictability of the human mind. For anyone intrigued by psychology, philosophy, or the intricacies of human behavior, this case is both fascinating and deeply unsettling.
At first glance, the family involved seemed like any other: educated, close-knit, and seemingly harmonious. They had all the markers of a successful, normal household. But as the story unfolds, layers of trauma, belief, and control begin to emerge, revealing a hidden world beneath their everyday lives. The patriarch of the family passes away, leaving a void, and the person next in line to guide the household experiences a traumatic incident that renders him mute for several years. When he returns to the family's daily life, he is no longer the same person — his experience has profoundly shaped him.
What follows is both disturbing and fascinating. He begins to subtly, and then overtly, exert control over his family. They are trained, disciplined, and conditioned to follow his instructions with unwavering faith, believing that doing so will lead to their success and protection. Over time, this dynamic becomes so intense that it evolves into a deadly ritual, ultimately claiming the lives of the entire family.
How could such devoted, intelligent individuals be convinced to act against their own survival instincts? How fragile is our sense of autonomy when faced with authority and belief, even from those we love and trust most?
The Burari case makes one reflect deeply — not just on the tragedy itself, but on the nature of human thought, influence, and obedience. It exposes how trauma, combined with faith, familial loyalty, and psychological conditioning, can create circumstances where ordinary people make incomprehensible choices. It forces us to confront uncomfortable questions: How much of what we do is truly our own decision? How susceptible are we to the influence of those we perceive as guiding figures?
Beyond the psychological perspective, the case also evokes a sense of awe about life itself. It makes me think about the vast intricacies of the human mind, the complexity of emotions, and the way people navigate belief, fear, and loyalty. It is a stark reminder that beneath the surface of everyday life lies an intricate web of thoughts, choices, and vulnerabilities.
Ultimately, the Burari case is haunting not just because of its tragic ending, but because it forces introspection. It is a reminder that even within the seemingly safe confines of a loving family, unseen forces can shape lives in ways that are almost impossible to imagine.
A gripping thriller about manipulation, murder, and one woman's fearless courage.
Watch · Dahaad · Amazon Prime VideoImagine discovering that the quiet man next door — the one everyone thinks is ordinary — could hide a darkness so terrifying it shatters your sense of safety. Dahaad takes you on that unsettling journey: a real-life inspired story of manipulation, murder, and the fearless courage of a woman determined to stop it. From the first scene, it grips your heart, challenges your assumptions, and keeps you on the edge of your seat, questioning how well we really know the people around us.
The story revolves around a seemingly ordinary man. On the surface, he has a normal life: a family, a reputation for being sensitive, and a façade of calmness. But behind closed doors, a horrifying truth lurks. Disliked by his father and marginalized within his family, he preys on women who are considered unimportant or neglected by their families. These women are manipulated into running away, leaving letters claiming they've eloped with a boyfriend. Because society pays little attention to them, their disappearances go unnoticed — until a missing person case finally brings his crimes to light.
Enter Sonakshi, who delivers a phenomenal performance as a young woman from a backward caste who defies societal odds to become a police officer. Her character is defined by bravery, resilience, and relentless hard work. She painstakingly pieces together clues and uncovers a chilling truth: this man has been systematically killing women using cyanide. Her portrayal adds depth, emotion, and realism, making the series much more than a standard crime thriller.
Dahaad is intense, suspenseful, and psychologically gripping. Each episode peels back layers of deception, fear, and societal neglect — showing not just the horror of the crimes but also the courage it takes to fight them.
The series is particularly compelling for women, as it highlights female strength, intelligence, and resilience in the face of danger. This isn't just a thriller — it's a story that makes you reflect on empathy, vigilance, and the unseen struggles of women in society. If you love series that are suspenseful, thought-provoking, and emotionally powerful, Dahaad is an absolute must-watch.
On love, betrayal, and the darkness that can hide beneath even the most charming façades.
Watch · Dancing on the Grave · Amazon Prime VideoThe story of Shakereh Khaleeli is haunting, tragic, and a stark reminder of how love can sometimes blind even the strongest of personalities. Shakereh was a powerful, vibrant woman — someone with her own voice, influence, and presence. Yet she allowed her heart to guide her toward a man, leaving the security of her family behind to live with him. She had a deep desire to give birth to a son, and perhaps that longing shaped some of her choices. Even as she left her family, she maintained her bond with her daughter — a connection that proved vital when the unthinkable began to unfold.
When her daughter could no longer reach her, concern quickly turned into fear, and investigation led to the shocking truth. The betrayal was unimaginable. A life so full of promise and strength was ended in the cruelest way: Shakereh was buried alive, and her grave lay hidden beneath her own home. The horror of the crime is compounded by the intimacy of the betrayal — the danger came from someone she trusted, someone she chose to love, someone who should have protected her but instead took her life.
Watching and reflecting on this story fills me with sorrow and disbelief. It is a chilling lesson that love, when mixed with manipulation, greed, or hidden intentions, can become dangerous. Trust is not a guarantee, even when we give our hearts fully.
Shakereh's story is a painful reminder that power, personality, and desire are not shields against the darkness others can harbor. It is heartbreaking that her daughter had to uncover the truth, piece by piece, and that justice only came after such an unimaginable loss.
Shakereh Khaleeli's life, choices, and untimely death are a haunting testament to the fragility of human connections and the darkness that can lie beneath even the most charming façades — a warning about being cautious, about understanding the intentions of those we allow into our lives.
On courage, conscience, and the quiet devastation of a system that punishes the very people it should protect.
Director · Tapan Sinha · Cast · Pankaj Kapur · Shabana AzmiThere are films you watch and then there are films that stay in your chest long after the screen goes dark. Ek Doctor Ki Maut (1990) is that kind of film. Directed by the remarkable Tapan Sinha and starring two of the most gifted actors Indian cinema has ever produced — Pankaj Kapur and Shabana Azmi — this is a film that I return to in my mind again and again, not because it is easy to watch, but because it is deeply, devastatingly true.
The film is inspired by the real story of a physician — Dr. Subhash Mukhopadhyay — a Bengali doctor who quietly achieved something extraordinary: he developed one of the earliest methods of in-vitro fertilisation in India, bringing the world's second test-tube baby to life, entirely on his own, with barely any resources, recognition, or support. And what did the system do with this man? It crushed him. It disbelieved him, investigated him, transferred him, isolated him, and systematically destroyed everything he had built — until he could bear it no longer.
Tapan Sinha's direction is extraordinary. He is a filmmaker of rare restraint — he never over-explains, never manipulates, never reaches for melodrama when the truth is already devastating enough on its own. Every frame of this film is deliberate. The pacing is unhurried, almost quiet, which makes the building pressure all the more suffocating. You feel the walls closing in on the doctor not through dramatic music or rushed editing, but through the slow, relentless accumulation of institutional indifference. This is masterful filmmaking — the kind that trusts its audience completely.
Pankaj Kapur is one of those actors I watch with something close to reverence. He does not perform — he inhabits. There is a stillness in him that holds enormous depth, and in this film that stillness carries everything: the pride of a man who knows what he has done, the bewilderment of someone who cannot understand why truth is not enough, and finally, the quiet collapse of a spirit that has simply run out of the strength to keep fighting.
And then there is Shabana Azmi. I do not know how to write about Shabana without running out of words. She plays the doctor's wife — and in her hands, the wife is not a supporting role. She is the film's emotional backbone. Every scene she is in carries a different kind of weight: the weight of a woman watching someone she loves be slowly destroyed, trying to hold him together while quietly falling apart herself. The scene where she breaks — really breaks — is one of the most honest pieces of acting I have ever witnessed.
And then there is Irrfan. A small role. A few scenes. But even then — even in those brief moments — you could feel it. That quality he had of making you believe he was not acting at all, that you were simply watching a real person exist on screen. I always feel a particular ache when I think of Irrfan Khan. I wanted to meet him. Not for an autograph or a photograph — just to sit across from him and ask him how he saw the world, because the way he translated the world on screen was unlike anyone else. He left too soon. Far too soon.
There is one thing about this film that I am deeply, genuinely grateful for — it does not show the suicide. The real Dr. Mukhopadhyay took his own life, broken by a system that refused to see him. The film knows what happened. The audience knows what happened. But Tapan Sinha chooses not to show it, and in that choice there is a profound dignity. He honours the man's life rather than his death. He asks us to grieve not the moment of collapse but the entirety of what led there — and that feels right. It feels humane.
Ek Doctor Ki Maut is not a comfortable film. It is not meant to be. It is a film about what happens to people who dare to be exceptional in a world that is not yet ready for them. It is about the loneliness of integrity, the cost of conscience, and the particular cruelty of a system that destroys what it cannot understand.
If you are someone who feels deeply — who watches films not just for entertainment but for the experience of being truly moved — this is a must watch. Watch it for Pankaj Kapur. Watch it for Shabana Azmi. Watch it for Tapan Sinha's steady, unsparing honesty. Watch it for Dr. Subhash Mukhopadhyay, who deserved so much more than the world gave him. And watch it because some stories need to be carried forward, and the only way to carry them is to know them.
On love, loss, and the strange tenderness of two people meeting in the ruins of a life they once shared.
Director · Gulzar · Cast · Naseeruddin Shah · Rekha · Anuradha PatelGulzar made Ijaazat in 1987 and I genuinely believe it is one of the most quietly extraordinary films ever made in Hindi cinema. It is not a film that announces itself. It does not arrive with drama or spectacle. It simply places two people in a railway station waiting room in the middle of the night, and then it unfolds — slowly, gently, heartbreakingly — like a letter you were not sure you wanted to read but cannot stop once you've started.
The entire film lives inside that waiting room. A man and a woman — once married, now strangers in the most painful sense of the word, people who know each other completely and yet can no longer reach each other — are stranded together by a delayed train. And in that accidental pocket of time, they begin to speak. And through that speaking, the film tells you everything. Their marriage. The other woman. The love that never quite fit the life it was placed in. The love that fit too well and destroyed everything anyway.
The waiting room became, for me, a character in itself. There is something about that setting — the lateness of the hour, the suspension between departure and arrival, the sense of being temporarily outside of ordinary life — that gives the whole film a dreamlike quality. I found myself wanting to be there. To sit quietly in that room and be a friend to these people. Not to intervene. Just to witness.
And then there is Rekha. I do not know how to say this without it sounding like worship — but watching Rekha in a film like this is one of the great pleasures of cinema. She is effortlessly beautiful in a way that is almost beside the point, because what she brings to this role is something far deeper than beauty. There is a quality she has — a stillness that contains multitudes — and Gulzar knew exactly how to use it. The way she occupies a scene, the way silence works differently when she is in it, the way her eyes do the work that lesser actors would need pages of dialogue for. She is extraordinary. She has always been extraordinary. And in Ijaazat, she is at her most quietly devastating.
I will be honest — Naseeruddin Shah was not always an actor I fully appreciated. In his earlier work I sometimes found him difficult to settle into, a little too internal, a little too still in ways I couldn't yet read. But as the years passed and I watched him grow older and I paid attention to the films he chose — I began to understand something. His choices are unlike anyone else's. He has never chased the obvious. He has always chosen the strange, the uncomfortable, the morally complex, the things that require you to sit with difficulty rather than resolve it. And now I treasure him. I treasure him enormously. In Ijaazat he is heartbreaking — not because he performs heartbreak, but because he simply is this man, lost in the space between two loves, unable to fully inhabit either.
Gulzar's storytelling in this film is built like a book — with chapters and silences and the sense that each scene is a page you turn carefully. The narrative moves between present and past with an ease that never confuses, only deepens. You understand more and more as the film progresses, and what you understand makes you sadder, but also strangely grateful — grateful to be allowed into something this intimate.
The music by R.D. Burman with Asha Bhosle's voice is — I do not have adequate words. Mera kuch saaman is one of the most achingly beautiful songs in the entire history of Hindi film music. It is a song about reclaiming the small pieces of yourself that you left behind in another person's life. A rubber ball. A monsoon. The sound of a voice. It is the most precise description of loss I have ever heard set to music.
Ijaazat is a must watch — not for everyone, but for the right person it is essential. It is for people who believe that love is not simple, that people are not simply good or bad, and that some stories do not end so much as they simply stop. If you have ever sat in a quiet place and thought about a life you did not live, a person you once were, a love that simply could not find the shape it needed to survive — this film will feel like it was made for you.
I keep coming back to that waiting room. Two people. One night. A whole life between them. And Gulzar — sitting somewhere behind the camera — understanding every word of it.
On a woman no one noticed in life — and the web of people whose lives quietly connected to her death.
Director · Saeed Mirza · Cast · Pankaj Kapur · Roopa Ganguly · Irrfan KhanThere are films that begin with a death and end with a question. Kamla Ki Maut is one of those films — and it is one I have not been able to shake since I first watched it. Directed by Saeed Mirza, it is the kind of cinema that moves quietly, almost without warning, and then leaves you sitting with something heavy and true that you cannot quite put into words.
The film begins with Kamla's death. But Kamla is not the kind of woman the world stops for. She is ordinary, unnoticed, unremarkable by the world's cold accounting — and that is precisely the point. Her death, in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, might have been the end of her story. Here, it is only the beginning. What Saeed Mirza does with extraordinary craft is trace the invisible threads that connect each person around her to what happened. Not through a police investigation. Not through dramatic revelation. But through the slow, honest unpeeling of everyday lives — and the ways in which ordinary human failure, indifference, and need can converge into something that looks, from a distance, like fate.
Pankaj Kapur is, once again, astonishing. I find myself running out of new ways to describe what he does on screen — because what he does is simply be. There is no performance in the showy sense. There is only a man, fully inhabited, fully present, whose every small gesture and silence tells you something. He brings to this film the same quality he brought to Ek Doctor Ki Maut — a kind of interior honesty that makes you feel you are watching real life rather than a reconstruction of it.
Roopa Ganguly is a revelation. There is an intensity she brings that never tips into excess — she holds everything tightly, and precisely because she holds it so tightly, when something finally breaks through, it breaks you too. She is an actor of enormous intelligence and I wish she had been given more films worthy of what she is capable of.
And then there is Irrfan. Again. I keep writing about Irrfan in these pages and I suspect I always will, because he keeps appearing in the films I love most — and his presence in each of them is never accidental. He had an extraordinary instinct for choosing stories that mattered. That is not a small thing. Many gifted actors spend their careers in vehicles that diminish them. Irrfan consistently chose films that were worthy of his ability — films that asked real questions, that trusted their audience, that were made by filmmakers who cared about something beyond spectacle. Kamla Ki Maut is exactly that kind of film, and he is exactly that kind of presence in it. Surprising, precise, completely alive.
What moves me most about this film is the way it builds its connections. Each character arrives with their own life, their own pressures, their own small selfishnesses and quiet guilts — and the film is patient enough to show you all of it. You understand, by the end, not just how Kamla died but how she was allowed to die. How the accumulation of ordinary human looking-away can become something with consequences as final as death. It is not a comfortable film. It is not meant to be.
Kamla Ki Maut is for people who believe cinema can be more than entertainment — that it can be a mirror held up steadily to the world as it actually is, not as we would prefer it to be. Watch it for Pankaj Kapur. Watch it for Roopa Ganguly. Watch it for Irrfan, whose every film choice now feels, in hindsight, like a gift he was quietly leaving behind. And watch it for Kamla — the woman no one noticed — because some stories deserve to finally be seen.
Twelve men. One room. One vote that refuses to fall the way everyone expects.
Director · Basu Chatterjee · Cast · K.K. Raina · S.M. Zaheer · Pankaj KapurI wish I had been a part of this project. I mean that with my whole heart — not as a fantasy, but as the deepest possible expression of what this film made me feel as a viewer. To have been in that room. To have spoken those words. To have been one of those twelve people slowly, painfully, honestly reckoning with what truth actually requires of a person. Ek Ruka Hua Faisla is one of the finest films ever made in Hindi cinema, and I will not qualify that.
Basu Chatterjee adapted Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men — one of the great films of world cinema — and set it entirely in the Indian context, with an Indian cast, inside a single sweltering room. And here is what astonishes me: it does not feel like an adaptation at all. It feels like it could only have been made here, in this country, with these people, about these particular pressures and prejudices and class divides and personal agendas. The translation is so complete, so inhabited, that the American original almost ceases to be relevant. This film stands entirely on its own.
The setting is suffocating — deliberately, brilliantly so. One room. Twelve men who would all rather be somewhere else. The heat is not just physical; it is the heat of discomfort, of being asked to care about something you had already decided. And within that compression, Basu Chatterjee builds an entire world.
What the film does so masterfully is show you each man before it shows you what he believes. You understand, very quickly, that not a single person in that room has arrived purely in the service of justice. They have arrived with their afternoon plans, their impatience, their class assumptions, their personal wounds that have nothing to do with the boy on trial. One man wants to leave early. Another has his own unresolved anger with a son that colours every judgment he makes. Another cannot see past the boy's background. The film gives each of them enough space to be a full human being — flawed, distracted, real — and then watches what happens when one person refuses to let the easy answer stand.
That one dissenting voice — the single not-guilty vote that begins the whole unraveling — is the film's beating heart. And what amazes me, every single time, is watching that number shift. Eleven to one. Then ten. Then nine. Then fewer. The guilty verdict that seemed immovable at the start begins, vote by vote, argument by argument, to crumble — not because anyone is heroic, but because honesty, when it is persistent enough, has a way of reaching people even when they are determined not to be reached. That movement — from certainty to doubt, from eleven to one — is one of the most satisfying progressions in all of Hindi cinema.
The performances across the board are extraordinary. There is not a weak link in this ensemble — every single actor is fully present, fully committed, and the chemistry between them is the chemistry of people who genuinely understand what they are making. This is a film that required every actor to carry equal weight, and every actor does.
And Pankaj Kapur — of course Pankaj Kapur is here too. At this point in these pages I have written about him so many times that I wonder if I am simply documenting the fact that the best Hindi films of a certain era all seem to have found their way to him. Perhaps that is not a coincidence. Perhaps that is simply what it looks like when an actor of uncommon gifts meets filmmakers of uncommon seriousness — they keep finding each other, because they are all looking for the same thing.
Ek Ruka Hua Faisla is a must watch — not just for film lovers, but for anyone who has ever sat in a room and gone along with a decision they were not sure was right, because it was easier than speaking. This film is about the cost of that silence and the extraordinary, uncomfortable, necessary work of refusing it. Watch it once and it will change how you think about judgment. Watch it twice and it will change how you think about yourself.
I wish I had been a part of this project. I still do.