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For a long time, cinema was a world I wasn’t allowed to enter.
I grew up in a home where movies were banned. No television, no glimpses of silver screens, and no songs echoing from old classics. For nearly a decade, cinema was a forbidden word like a secret behind a closed door.
And yet, like all things that carry truth and longing, it found its way to me.
Stories have a way of finding you, slipping through cracks, whispered between pages, caught in melodies.
Sometimes through the corners of borrowed books, sometimes through whispered summaries from classmates, sometimes just through the magnetic pull of posters and songs I wasn’t supposed to hear.
I didn’t always understand what I was reaching for. I just knew it felt like oxygen. After books and music, it was cinema that gave me language for things I couldn’t yet name...grief, joy, desire, resistance, belonging.
What was once forbidden eventually became essential.
This stack and so many more books that didn’t make it into the frame (space is cruel to passion) represents the quiet, persistent hunger to understand cinema not just as entertainment, but as history, memory, craft, politics, and soul.
These books represent a journey that’s been years in the making, a deep dive into the world that once felt out of reach.
The lens through which a country dreams, resists, escapes, and remembers. My focus is largely on Indian cinema, its making, its scripts, its cultural weight, its biographies, and lived truths.
And now, after years of absorbing, I am beginning to write about them too.
There’s something poetic about studying the very thing you were once denied. It feels like reclaiming something. Like stitching back a missing part of yourself.
Maybe the bigger question is this: what are the stories we’re told not to listen to? And what happens when we dare to listen anyway?