Nazi Pataka

Pick from Diwali trash this year. Nazi Fireworks!

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Bonus: Nagin Pataka

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What are two Muslim Girls doing with Diyas?

Zaheera and Shabana are asked in Star & Syle, October 22, 1976

Pyaasa Guru Dutt

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Swadeshi Smoke, 1972

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Letters for Khushwant Singh, 1985

These letters were in response to Pritish Nandy's piece on Khushwant Singh turning 70 published in April 21 issue of The Illustrated Weekly of India in 1985.

Red-bottomed monkeys, malice, imagining naked women, pungency, dick and other regular things associated with 'man in the bulb'.

The news of him putting down his pen was greeted with same words and thoughts. [‘I May Die Any Day Now’, Outlook].

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Exultations of Biryani

Biryani Breakfast in Gurgaon, 

this is how they got it

The hair. Flip through some old family album.

Code 10 Tonic for Hair Dressing, 1978
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You Can't Please Everyone! by Kobita Sarkar

Rita Ray (1924-1983) was a regular cinephile, someone who certainly understood the art of it, someone who could interpret the things she saw on screen, someone who had strong views on cinema and what it ought to stand for. But her views underwent some drastic changes after she agreed to be on the advisory Panel of Censor Board. All of a sudden she found herself on the evil side, a side much cursed and secretly envied. Rita began to see things from the other side, the other side of the argument. Now she too asked herself the question, the rallying cry of that side, ‘What about the average person? Would he/she be able to handle it?’ At the same time she did wonder how to go about defining the ‘average’. She did note the rather unintentionally comic manner in which the serious business of Censoring was conducted. She took note of her fellow panelists, bored middle-aged women who had never seen a film in life, pretentious intellectuals who only wanted to be bothered about ‘art’ films, professors of philosophy who seemed out of place, uneducated traders, an occasional ‘too’ liberal woman, mostly men to fumed at the thought that a woman was enjoying a kiss, all those who had nothing better to do on their afternoons, people who sometimes did realize that they were part of a great process that kept a part of the country safe, the cultural and most important part of county safe.

Rita noticed how, unlike most other members of the panel, plunging necklines didn’t bother her as much as the increasing level of violence unleashed by men on scene. She makes a direct link between an Indian hero’s inability to kiss his heroine and his wont to hit her, almost as a better substitute. She questions the duplicity of Censor board that gives Bhumika an ‘A’ certificate just because its heroine wanted to lead her own life. She tackles the question of other duplicity, Censor and its response to foreign films, censor and its response to ‘art’ films. To find an answer to these questions, out of her own curiosity, in around 1966 she travelled to Britain, the country which first gave birth to censorship code in India. There she got to meet John Trevelyan. John Trevelyan at that time was the Secretary of the British Board of Film Censors. In answer to her questions he offers, ‘You can’t please everyone!’

In her work she came to understand his point. There will always be people who won’t be happy with the way censors work, with the thought of censor. But it is needed, the key is simple, censor has to stay one step behind, not two steps, just one step and it must certainly never try to go one step ahead. Later when Trevelyan quit his post under pressure for passing films like Clockwork Orange and Straw Dogs, Ray concluded he, going against his own advice, perhaps was trying to go one step ahead of times. The other advice given by Trevelyan proved to be more helpful to Ray. He told her to go about the job with a sense of humour (apparently humour was one of the prerequisites for applying for censor job in Britain). It was humour that helped her when she had to deal with questionnaire that went like this:

 ‘If a film producer introduced a scene in which a man tried to seduce a woman and addressed her in the following ways would you consider it a misrepresentation of our culture? “How well-proportioned and rounded are your thighs and how charming your legs, resembling the tapering truck of an elephant; how round and plumb are your cheeks; how enchanting your bosom; how slender is your waist; glossy is your hair; your breast touching each other enhance their liveliness.” ‘If in depicting this scene, the lens of the camera is focussed on the woman’s thighs, legs and breasts, would you object to the scene on the ground that it distorted our culture or our ancient heritage?’
For all I know this may be a quotation from some eminent source, but I am always reduced to laughter –and have never learnt to answer the question seriously. It must have been thought up by someone with a sense of humour. 

 In between, she tries to answer questions like why were works of Mirnal Sen, Satyajit Ray or Ritwik Ghatak almost never censored, even the ones that were proclaimed as ‘anti-establishment’. She writes, 'Our film-makers, despite their protestations, given the opportunity, are unlikely to produce more than a political allegory. ’ It is a serious allegation but one that certainly has some merit.

Through all her years in the Censor Panel she kept a log of the nature and motivations of her odd job. The odd situations, the odd characters, the odd films, the odd scenes and the odd cuts. The result was ‘You can’t please everyone’ Film Censorship: The Inside Story written under the pseudonym Kobita Sarkar and published in 1982. It remains a unique work on understanding the working and motivation of Censor in India. And it is all the more unique because it was written by a witty woman who obviously loved Cinema.

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Thanks to this book I now know that 'Satyam Shivam Sundaram' lead to obscenity charges on Raj Kapoor and Zeenat Aman in Kashmir. This bit to information now adds new meaning to the fact that when the film was released in Kashmir, a revolutionary school named Walden took its students to a special screening of the film.  

Dadamoni, 1937

Ashok Kumar in Bombay Talkies' Savitri-1937

more Words of Wisdom

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The Past and Prejudice by Romila Thapar, 1972

"It is a strange paradox that the historian, who is concerned professionally with the past, plays a crucial role, in the future of the society which he is studying. The historian's interest lies in trying to understand the emergence and the evolution of a society in a historical perspective, where the term society includes every aspect of a people's life. As a result of his investigations, the historian creates a picture of the society. In his handling of the evidence from the past, he is often influenced by his own contemporary setting. Historical interpretation can therefore become a two-way process - where, the needs of the present are read into the past, and where the image of the past is sought to be imposed upon the present. The image of the past is the historian's contribution to the future. For, this image can be used by his contemporaries for political myth-making. Such political projections of a society seek intellectual justification from the theories of historians and other social scientists. to mention two recent and rather obvious examples, the theory of the superior Aryan race came in very useful to Hitler and the Fascists; and that of the Hindus and Muslims constituting two separate nations was used to justify the creation of Pakistan - a theory which has been recently exploded by events in Bangla Desh. Such supposed justification impose the present on to the past and a generation is fed with distorted images.
But over the years, with changing methods of investigation, the discipline of history has been made more precise and more analytical. New evidence and fresh interpretation enable us to reassess the past in more realistic terms and proceed in new directions. Historians, too have become, as it were, self-conscious, both about the nature of the evidence and about the social and political function which historical writing has played in the past. Now, more than ever, the historian, without compromising his scholarly integrity, has much to contribute to society. "

Romila Thapar starting off her Patel Memorial Lecture on January 12, 1972.

Gulzar's Raavi Paar and Other Stories

A man gets thrown off a moving train by a man who is afraid that he will be killed by the other. A yesteryear starlet dies of heart attack after she realizes she mistakenly unburdened her heart to Property Broker. Last wish of a Muslim man to be burned after death leaves an entire qasbah in flames. A poor woman is at edge thinking Maharaj is after her izzat, Maharaj's old father does not figure in her worries till the end. A poor farmer thinks of saving land from Zamidars, he tries, but in the end gauges his courage, or lack of it, to be of a level somewhere in between that of Communists and Dacoits. A subject asks his writer what did all his well-written stories change when the subject still finds himself the same. A dead baby gets breastfed while a living one mistakenly gets thrown off a train and into a river. A man spends years observing night skies seeking the star of Galib's fate. Her son too is cruel to her, just like her husband and all the other men in her life. In a biographical story, a family mistakenly claims Gulzar as its own, a child they lost in Partition. A woman remembering her youth, its unhappy love story, treats her young daughter just the way her mother treated her, cruelly. Michelangelo finds face of Judas in old Jesus. Bimal Roy plans a movie on man's quest for Amrit, immortality and perhaps an undefinable more, dies of cancer after smoking his last cigarette. A man who braved people crying over his fate all the time commits suicide on the day of his marriage because he couldn't handle people laughing at him. A man meets a ghost who admires U.G. Krishnamurti. A woman's marriage turns out to be a process for acquiring cheap labour. A little girl's heart is broken by Dilip Kumar.  A midget adopts baby of a dead woman of 'dubious reputation'. A boy boards a train running away from his wrinkly old dadi only to realize how much he loved her. A woman leaves her husband and then learns to leave him. A village idiot is missed only after he is made to disappear. A pre-historic boy discovers fire and creates mythologies. A patriarchal tree and life around it gets destroyed during partition, and so it happens to a county and its way of life. A man is cruel to his childhood sweetheart. Animals finally wage a war against man, just when man wages a war to protect wildlife.

These in short are the sad tales from Gulzar's Raavi Paar and Other Stories.

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There was a time when I wanted to ask him, 'Why did you pick Sunil Shetty for that role?' I have given up on the question. I don't want a sad answer.

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Adult Apple

Came across this at ebay. Year 1979. Country India.

Please take note of the Apple Logo at bottom right corner.

R.I.P. Steve Jobs.