Nehru with Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand and Raj Kapoor

Sometime back, an interesting query from someone:

Ritu Nanda's book about her father, 'Raj Kapoor: speaks' has (above given) photograph of Nehru with Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand and Raj Kapoor. It mentions the year as 1968, which is definitely wrong since Nehru died in 1964. The image is missing in 2nd edition of the book. When was the photograph taken and who took it?

I get all kinds of queries and requests, most of them next to impossible. This one too was impossible.

Figuring out the date turned out to be easy. Google image search (that now lets you search the web for images using as reference an image that may be sitting on your system) lead to this fine gallery where the image had a name ending with 1958 (I try to follow the same convention while uploading images).

So the year was 1958. But the real difficult part was finding the name of the photographer. In a case like this finding the culprit is next to impossible. I kept the case as unsolved.

Then recently a friend sent in photoshots of March 8, 1963 issue of Filmfare. As I looked at the grainy images celebrating 50 years of Indian cinema, in a corner of the last image I came across this line:

"The photographs of Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand and Raj Kapoor with Mr. Nehru in our February 22 issue are by Kewal Mehra."

Another case closed.

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Famous Old Faces of Doordarshan

Some people recall the faces and some people recall the names. Here are images of some of the famous readers and presenters of Doordarshan down the years. If you recognize any of them, leave a comment. [ Update 1 : Most of the faces now have names thanks to helpful comments by olio-gallimaufry ] [ Update 2 : Included image of one of the earliest presenters, Gopal Kaul. Send in generously from personal collection by son, Ashutosh Kaul. Sept, 2010.] [ Major Update 3: Got a tip-off about a documentary about the famous faces of Doordarshan from the makers of “The Golden Trail , DD@50 :Special feature on Golden Jubilee of Doordarshan ” from which these caps were taken. I managed to catch the incredible documentary and am adding some more faces/name and part of the docu here. New ones can be found after the image of Narotam Puri. 30th Oct, 2010] Pratima Puri. Believed to be the first Doordarshan reader.

Indian Cigarette Vintage Ads

He put a cigarette in his mouth and, as a matter of silent routine, offered one to Gwyn, who said ‘No thanks.”Richard looked at him.”I packed it in.”"You what?”"I stopped. Three days ago. Cold. That’s it. You just make the life choice.” Richard looked up and inhaled needfully. He gazed at his cigarette. He didn’t really want to smoke it. He wanted to eat it. Almost the only thing that he still liked about Gwyn was that he still smoked…Paradoxically, he no longer wanted to give up smoking: what he wanted to do was take up smoking. Not so much to fill the little gaps between cigarettes with cigarettes (there wouldn’t be time, anyway) or to smoke two cigarettes at once. It was more that he felt the desire to smoke a cigarette even when he was smoking a cigarette. The need was and wasn’t being met… While it would always be true and fair to say that Richard felt like a cigarette, it would now be doubly true and fair to say it. He felt like a cigarette. And he felt like a cig...

Kishore Kumar, Yodel-ay-ee-oooo Songs, A List

*Updated with corrections pointed out by Bart Plantenga , author of some incredible book on Yodeling including Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World. -0- Kishore Kumar 's brother Anoop Kumar, who we basically know for the line ' O manu tera toh hua ab mera kya hoga ', used to own lots of Austrian music records. And from these records, Kishore Kumar picked up the art of Yodel singing, an art perfected in bathroom and then introduced by him to the world of Hindi film music. According to his biography 'Kishore Kumar: method in madness‎ ' by Derek Bose, "Kishore was a fan of the Swiss singer Tex Norton [* Tex Morton, an Australian cowboy born in New Zealand who sang in the gene autry / Jimmie Rodgers style ] and the Australian Jimmy Rogers [* Jimmie Rodgers , perhaps the most American and one of the most famous yodelers in the world, famous for his blue yodels ] as well." Although most of these songs by Kishore Kumar are t...

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