We’ve all heard of Javed Khan, the rickshaw driver who sold his wife’s jewellery to convert his vehicle into a mobile ambulance. Though heartening, these tales of sacrifices make me gloomy. Each one of these positive stories come with the unsaid failure by the state or those in a better position to help.

As the second wave of the pandemic hit us, our timelines were flooded with SOS calls. We were all filled with despair but then a few among us decided to do something about it. This is the story of those men and women, who started by making one phone call, running one errand, verifying one source, and haven’t stopped since.

As the second wave continues to batter India, “woke” media organisations and ad agencies are all about well-being and mental health. The problem arises when this performance of empathy does not extend to their employees. Stories of bosses expecting you to work beyond office hours and making one demand after another on WhatsApp groups are all too common.

It doesn’t matter if we are in the middle of a deadly second wave. Some things don’t change, dear women. If you share your number on social media, even if it’s an SOS for oxygen or an ICU, it’s nothing but an invitation for creepy men to slide into your DMs and say “nice bobs”.

Chaitanya Tamhane’s The Disciple, now out on Netflix, is set in the world of Hindustani classical music. The setting is incidental. It just as well could have been a story of athletes, painters, or poets. In this festival hit, Tamhane tells us the story of a young talent who realises with painful slowness that some people are simply not meant for greatness of any kind.

These days when I hear someone say oxygen, I promptly direct them to Kangana Ranaut’s tweet and suggest they plant a few trees instead.

Sickness and death come to everyone, but the undiluted fear that overcame me after my sister got infected was nothing that I had experienced before. I had never felt the helplessness of looking for hospital beds that didn’t exist, of spending hours making calls to procure a life-giving canister of oxygen. I was prepared to beg, borrow, or steal medicines, not even knowing if they would work.

For so long, our anxieties had been at an all-time high. Some of us are clamouring for hospital beds while the rest of us are trying to safeguard our jobs. Earlier this month, I was infected with the coronavirus. Now, cooped up inside taking laboured breaths, my only respite was to write poetry.

She’s turning 40 and has turned temperamental, refusing to cooperate. I give her all the TLC and all this isn’t just a ruse to make her mushy. I reminisce about the good ole days when all it took was a kiss on the neck in a dark nightclub to get her going. She is amused but does not change her stance.

Ramzan in isolation doesn’t make the acts of fasting and worshiping difficult. Those are deeds deeply personal in nature. But what takes a hit is working for the greater good together. When you are looking to usher in change or fight the good fight, the support of a community only strengthens your resolve.

In the era of physical isolation, does a sporting event that brings people together need to mentally isolate itself from the devastation caused by the pandemic? As the country gasps for breath, it is too much to expect our cricketing heroes to amplify an SOS tweet or do something that shows they care – anything that’ll tone down the tone-deafness of the tournament.

Where is Rajneeshpuram’s enigmatic Ma Anand Sheela? In Netflix’s Searching for Sheela, we meet a polite grandmother who is visiting her country after decades abroad.

In the tradition of Captain America, Sam Wilson is pure and optimistic. Unlike Steve Rogers, however, his hopefulness is not borne of a rose-tinted view of a better time, when right was right and wrong was wrong. People are complex, he acknowledges, and flawed. But they are also equal.

As COVID-19 hits home for lakhs of families, complaints on Twitter about having to work from bedrooms and Zoom fatigue have slowly made way for urgent pleas for hospital beds, Oxygen cylinders, and medicines. And the Twitterverse has stepped up, providing details of beds available, preparing a list of oxygen suppliers, compiling Google docs with information on where to find the life-saving Remdesivir and more.

I was once randomly dumped after six rounds of interviews, which included writing an elaborate test, over a generic text message. Even by modern dating standards that was cruel. Dear hiring executives, how about putting the human in Human Resource management?

I knew my grandma for 15 years but there is so much I didn’t know about her. I realised this after reading her favourite novel, Anna Karenina. Why did my very traditional grandma love a book about unfaithfulness, extra-marital affairs, and fractured families? It made me realise that one way to really understand a person is to discuss their favourite books.

After two decades of trying to tame my curly hair, I let it breathe. With time, the comfort of not having hickey-looking burn marks on my neck and forehead from the straightening iron became something I looked forward to. Embracing my curly hair has been synonymous with embracing my person.

It’s been 10 years since the first episode of Game of Thrones aired. It was like nothing anyone had ever seen on TV. Yet the series has not lived up to its initial promise of joining the glorious pantheon of enduring fantasy franchises like The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. Somehow you don’t want to keep going back to it.

For the longest of time, my family has tried to cajole me into living closer to home. But I’ve always wanted “freedom”, a life away from my parents. Now as the second wave surges and I battle a fever, I long for their care and their reassuring voice, something my social networks just can’t provide.

While the idea of struggle is relative, I believe there’s a socially dictated equation for the logic of success. It goes something like: Struggle + Sacrifice + Ambition = Money + Security + Yay I’ve made it in life-wala feeling. Contentment and joy may or may not turn up in the answer, but that’s not part of the problem we’re told to solve, is it?

Netflix’s anthology series Ajeeb Daastaans is an effective commentary on caste, class, and gender, which offers new perspectives to complexities that surround us. The toast of the series, however, is Neeraj Ghaywan’s “Geeli Pucchi”, starring Konkona Sen Sharma and Aditi Rao Hydari, a story about two women who find refuge in each other’s company, only to discover their differences.

Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari is a poignant portrait of a Korean immigrant family trying to live the American dream in the Reagan years. It is a tapestry of tender and touching vignettes, drawn from the filmmaker’s memories of his childhood spent in Arkansas, where the film has also been shot. These vignettes work not just as a portal to a different time, but also a different way of life.

In my early 20s, I did the “cool” thing – quit my stable banking job to study film writing. Like many millennials and Gen Z, I just wanted to “follow my passion”. I wish someone had told me the hard truth about chasing dreams.

In The Crown, a generation, which might otherwise have written Prince Philip off as an out-of-touch old man, gets to see a different and more complex reality. He is biased, opinionated, bombastic, and therefore far more human than the Queen is allowed to be.

Hello Charlie is a hysteric comedy about Charlie who must drive a scamster businessman on the run across the Diu border. The film is replete with rib-tickling performances by Aadar Jain, Jackie Shroff, and the crew, and witty punchlines.

Since his debut in 2009, Tamil comedian Yogi Babu has built for himself a filmography most of which relied disproportionately on jibes about his appearance. This is why 2021 is an important year for him. In Mandela and Karnan, he explores roles he’s never done before and seals his place as an actor who can do a lot more than make jokes.

I had no choice but to take the vaccine. Unfortunately, I don’t live in West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu, or Kerala, where there will be no COVID-19 surge until elections are over. I didn’t even book tickets to the Kumbh, where one holy dip could take care of it all.

Christopher Nolan has become the master of defying the practical and plausible. He choreographs and executes bewildering action sequences that defy both reason and, perhaps, even caution. Here are five scenes from Tenet, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, that will leave you gasping for air.

The Serpent, now streaming on Netflix, is a long-due storied portrayal of the enigmatic yet seductive Charles Sobhraj that has eluded Indians for decades. But the series somehow fails to unmask the serial killer beyond the performative aspects of his crimes.