Whatsinasetting

In Crazy Rich Asians, I found my only vacation during a raging pandemic

The setting of Crazy Rich Asians is inextricably tethered to its characters. Their material possessions — generational wealth, plump diamonds, rolling estates, gleaming luxury cars, and multi-million-dollar businesses — make them who they are. It's right there in the title!

How Amit V Masurkar's Newton draws from the geography of Ramayana to tell the story of India's tribal heartland

The jungle depicted in Newton happens to be Dandakaranya – the Forest of Punishment – where Ram, Lakshman, and Sita spent their days in exile, before their paths crossed with Soorpanakha and Ravan, kicking off the fabled war in the Ramayana.

What's in a Setting? Ask a budding stand-up comedy curator — Zoom fatigue and fall in open mic culture

It’s interesting to me that an art form as dependent on the setting as stand-up comedy is, chooses to dismiss the setting while judging performance.

With Chloe Zhao's Nomadland, meditations on grief, rootlessness and belonging, and carrying the home within

They say home is where the heart is. For some, it can be a person, a canine or feline companion. For others, it can be the vast nothingness. And in the nothingness of Nomadland, I felt I belonged.

The world of Sonchiriya: Arid, claustrophobic ravines hold a mirror to a land of anarchy, injustice, and inequities

What’s more menacing and sinister than the Chambal ravines is the discriminations and prejudices, inequities, and injustices they harbour, the caste divides, toxic masculinity and patriarchal codes that they run by and are shaped from.

In Get Out, Jordan Peele constructed a world deceptively devoid of racism gradually closing in on the Black 'outsider'

Get Out’s silent viciousness resonated with a deep-rooted sense of vulnerability in me that being ostracized for something as inconsequential as skin colour was not only a commonality, but an accepted one at that.

Mall Content: Hindi cinema's manufactured depiction of Shimla is hopelessly limited to postcards and land of refuge

The average Indian filmmaker’s chauvinistic view of Shimla depicts it as a place so un-Indian, it can only be mined through the elitism of the tourist rather than the consciousness of the resident.

Schitt’s Creek, the town 'where everyone fits in' and LGBT-phobia does not

Open minds, large hearts and small towns are not mutually exclusive. Over and above everything else that this fantastic series does, it echoes this lesson I learnt as a child from my mother.

In Sai Paranjpye's Chashme Baddoor, a love letter to the Delhi of my memories

Chashme Baddoor (1981) was the last film I saw before moving to New York City. The memory of the film carried the smell of Delhi with me, as I arrived in the city that would become my home for the next three-and-a-half decades.

In The Good Place on Netflix, a life full of contradictions and search for an afterlife well earned

The Good Place concerns itself with the philosophical query of what it means to be a good person vis a vis the setting of the afterlife.