At The Edge

Got these distress messages from the brotherhood in a free booklet stuffed inside the morning paper. >

- stole from my mother's Pooja Thali for tonight. Bham!

from my Grandfather's collection of Yoga booklets.

24/2/2011 -0- A fun activity. Requirements: Firefox with Firebug  (or even Chrome with Dev mode) and some basic understanding of 'calls' and related things. Go to Facebook. Enter your username (which in facebook's case is your email id) and next do not enter your password. Instead enter a wrong password. Now Facebook Facebook will send you to a 'login_attempt' page. Now enter you actual password. In the 'Post' call to 'login.php', in parameters you will see your dear password getting 'pass 'ed nakedly. Isn't that fun.

Zaheeda  Zaheera (credited as Zara) in her debut film 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' (1969). She played the role of Indian 'Angel of Death' in this Bond flick. Later went on to work opposite Dev Anand in a movies like 'Prem Pujari' and 'Gambler' but missed the top spot probably because she refused to play Dev Anand's sister in 'Hare Rama Hare Krishna'.

Sometime back internet got flooded with these stunning and candid photographs of Madhubala (search the net in case you didn't get them somehow). If earlier one thought Madhubala was a beautiful actress of yesteryears, everyone said it, you believed it, and now suddenly, even without asking for it you had this maddening proof of her beauty. Madhubala looks brimming with life in these images, enchanting, yet human and not a screen goddess, a beauty more basic and all the more powerful. Who captured this beauty on camera? When? Which year? Everyone was clueless even as these shared and uploaded and emailed and liked it on social networks. Queries were raised but no answer. This was another quest. The photographs were shot in November 1941 by famous photographer James Burke for Life Magazine. The answer is so obvious that I now believe that whoever first shared these photographs, deliberately, just for fun, left out the name of the photographer. How I arrived at t

Love and Horror, 'Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche' Evil wife: ' Kaha le ja rahe hai app inhe. ' Husband's doctor friend: ' Hospital. ' Evil wife: ' Yeh kya zulm kar rahe ho aap. Main nahi lejanay doongi.' Husband's doctor friend: ' Aagar inhe sahi treatment nahi mila toh inkay pair hamesha ke liye kharaab ho jayengay. ' Evil wife: ' Wahan jayengay toh ilaaj nahi ho sakayga. Main janti hu waha kya hota hai . Opration karkay inki zindigi kharab kar denga.' A scene from Ramsay Brothers' trend-setting cult classic horror film 'Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche' (1972). It takes place after the husband accidentally poisons himself while researching on death defying abilities of people of 'Zombie Kabila ' (Ramsay were always good at researching a topic before making a film on it). The scene provides an oblique reference to Indira Gandhi's infamous family planing program. Under the program Doctors were given incentives for

'tea ' from Ek Duje Ke Liye (1981) Families are not okay with this bad love - between South and North. They have the love-birds separated as a test of their love - to prove that it is not vasna .  For one whole year, the boy and the girl cannot meet or even talk or even write to each other. But the girl still has a photograph of her lover that keeps her mojo going. Girl's mother would have none of it, she takes that photograph and in front of the girl, burns it on the flames of a wax candle. Tears. Girls tastes her own tears. She picks the ashes of that photograph, sprinkles the dark remains on a cup of tea. Gulps it all down. Aah! The all consuming love. -0- A weekend conversation about the film with a cousin revealed that Ek Duje Ke Liye was a surprise hit in Srinagar and started a trend that saw people writing down name of their lover on a piece of paper, burning it and then drinking the ashes of that paper with tea. Lucky few even tried it with photographs.

Noticed at Guru Dronacharya Metro Station and posted only after getting convinced that the word is not an electrical engineering term. Would have been funnier if a heritage site was to say that back to the Metro.

 'The children suffer. The parents suffer. The nation suffers.' A 'message to the nation' from Morarji Desai on family planning. 1978. In Twilight zone they would play this message ad infinitum to the huddled masses travelling in Metros. Population decreases, at first only in cities. Every time the masses even think about passing on their genes to form  a Guddu, their mind conjures up face of the great leader, and they end up counting the wrinkles on this most benevolent face. With negative population growth in cities, fresh masses are huddled from villages to cities. Population in villages stabilizes. Perceptible share of the fruits of development become available to all.

Still of 'The Scene' Choti Bahu (Meena Kumari) summons Bhootnath (Guru Dutt), he must accompany her to a nearby shrine, she wants to pray for her paralytic husband who has now asked her to give up drinking. There might still be some hope. They get into a buggy and are on their way into the night. The camera focuses on two and in the background a song plays in the voice of  Hemant Kumar. Somewhere in the song a desolant Choti Bahu gently  puts her head in Bhootnath's lap, the audience suddenly goes ecstatic, there is much hooting, whistling, and catcalls. Minutes later, Choti Bahu is again murdered, this time by goons of her husband's elder brother. Scenes of  pandemonium are repeated by audiences in theaters all across the country while watching that scene in Sahib Bibi Aur Gulam (1962). They see something explicit in this scene from a film full of subtleties. An embarrassed director of the film, Abrar Alvi cuts the particular scene from the film. In the process, th

A quick recall: Some months back I hear from Devi Pictures ,  they were looking for  print advertisements for old old gramophones/radio/VCR /cassette players/spool players and such, they were working on a film on  intellectual property rights, copyrights, piracy, technology and stuff like that, advertisements are for a sequence in the film. And thanks to  Memsaab  I was able to offer them  print advertisements for old old gramophones and radios from 1930-1947 . For more I send them over to Soumyadip  who offers them some more incredible material.  Now: I hear from them that the film is ready. It's called 'Partners in Crime' by Paromita Vohra and hits the screen at  Persistence/Resistance film festival, Max Mueller Bhavan on 7th Feb 2011, 6:30 PM . -0- Update June 8, 2011 Trailer of the film video link

Vidya Sinha, the real poster girl for Saris in Hindi films from the 70s

For the anonymous who wanted the radio jingle from 70s that went ad nauseum: "Tinopal Tinopal, Ranipal Ranipal. Tinopal Tinopal, Ranipal Ranipal", I can't help. But I do have this print ad from 1978 showcasing the successful change-over from multinational brand name to Indian brand name.

When I stared posting these ads, it was just for fun. Then when I started getting serious requests, mostly from people writing various papers and doing whatnot on the subject, it became all the more fun. The following ad of HMT from year 1978 is for one such request from a reader. HMT 'Timekeepers to the Nation' ad 1970s. From Star & Style magazine. Isn't the watch supposed to be worn by her in such manner that the dial in on the inner wrist? -0- One of my aunts used to work in HMT factory at Srinagar. After 1990, given the situation in Kashmir, the factory closed down. Her family moved to Karnataka so that she could work at HMT factory at a place called Tumkur. Sometime years later when they returned to finally settle in Jammu, the family came back with a vocabulary that included words like ' Niroolilla' -0-