There are love stories and then there are love stories. In 1930, a young Romanian came to the doorstep of an Indian philosopher to learn about Hindu mysticism and spirituality. Unexpectedly, he fell knee-deep in love with his teacher’s demure daughter. They led a clandestine […]
At least a year before Amitabh Bachchan in Zanjeer, little Sridevi witnessed her family getting killed by a bandit wearing a distinctive locket (this time, a skeleton instead of a horse). The film was Rani Mera Naam (1972), the Bollywood launch vehicle of Vijayalalitha, ‘female James Bond’ […]
“I spoke to Vinod and Vinod said, “Have you got anything portable which I can take to Bangalore with me? If you got any portable spare parts, put them in my bag and I’ll take them for him.” So I said, “Yes, I’ve got a […]
An Evening in Coney Island, 1918 It was 1918. The ‘War to End All Wars‘ was in its final leg, American President Woodrow Wilson made his famous ‘Fourteen Points‘ speech and in India the luminous mystic Sai Baba of Shirdi breathed his last. This was […]
It was the mid-90s. “Skin-tight jeans” were a thing, and audio cassettes were prized possessions. Forget social media, even the Internet was unheard of, while cyber cafes were still a couple of years away. I was slowly warming up to college life and the liberation […]
A sinister man in a black suit flips open his revolver and inserts bullets. As he aims the gun and fires, the letters slowly form on the screen: “Gudachari 116”. Thus begins one of India’s earliest secret agent films, made in Telugu. It was […]
(Two Triumvirates, separated by four decades – give or take – hold sway over the Bollywood jungle. The parallels between the two are uncanny.) In Peshawar, British India, two young men played football together. One of them, Yusuf, was lean, athletic, with bright eyes and […]
Khandwa, early 1930s Kumudlal Ganguly was a misfit, a square peg in a round hole. Born in a family where every male member was either a practicing lawyer or harbouring dreams of becoming one, he was not really interested in the trade. At the insistence […]
Geoffrey Brag was known among his friends to be an eccentric, obsessive man. I mean, whoever heard of a middle-class Englishman travel the length and breadth of India in Third-class train compartments, only to stage Shakespeare’s Plays? Brag had long discarded his family name and […]
Utpal Dutt. The name brings to mind a pot-bellied, bald man in his late fifties or early sixties who laughed funny and had impeccable comic timing. But a nice man nonetheless – whether it’s Bhavani Shankar from Gol Maal or Bhavani Shankar Bajpai from Naram Garam, Dhurandhar […]
