At The Edge

A few pages from ' The music of India by Herbert A. Popley '. Published 1921 by Oxford University Press. -0-

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Movies I watched last year. Or 100 movies you need not watch before you die.  Collected these over the last year from a  '5-in-1' shop in a basti (now demolished) in Gurgaon.  -0-

This is not a post about how my content recently got leeched by The Man, instead this is about various ways in which my content, collected from various sources, recently got served and re-used, for various purposes, by other people. It is also about how I came to know about these usages and why I think Indian webspace is just too small and flat and almost too uncultivated. Instance 1: ludicrous A friend and a former colleague of mine who works for Hindustan Times Media group owned DesiMartini walks into his office one day and finds these giant hoardings of a collage of Hindi movie posters laying around. Something about the image strikes him as familiar. He thinks he has seen it somewhere. So after watching it for a couple of days, one fine evening he calls me up to tell me, 'This might interest you...' We had a good laugh when he told me the issue. The original  collage is based on the song  'mere jeevan saathi' from the movie Ek D...

Compiled from a couple of selected Indian Express issues from 70s/80s. 

Yes, I am still not over it [ in case you missed ]. I read an old reviewer praise her unbelievably 'elastic'  kamar  and bemoan her puffiness prone eyes. -0- -0-

A couple of weeks back I got an email from someone working on an online community driven project 'compiling South Asian colloqualisms, peculiar local english jargon, slang etc.' For the first release, the folks behind this fine project had chosen an old collage creation of mine, Face the Indian Heroine , as the background art. They wanted to know if I was okay with it. The collage was created using a collection of vintage hand-painted Indian movie posters available at  Picasa  gallery of Praful.  Given the nature of the project, I was more than happy to be part of it in someway.  More power to Creative Commons  motto: Share, Remix, Reuse. The  samosapedia.com  is now up and running, doing quite well if you consider that I am already seeing some of my friends sharing the link on Facebook. Do check it out for some serious pun. -0- Words of Wisdom at Daryaganj. 2011.

'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.

From a poster of Mani Kaul 's Uski Roti (1969) found in a scene from Kundan Shah's Jaane Bhi do Yaaro (1983).

The ad was sort of a cult back in the early 90s and had many takers, after all it dealt with some of the fundamental problems of man in a very imaginative way. It gave a new meaning to the thought - Man fighting his inner demons. Some believe it was ghost directed by David Lynch. Some even believe that the Baba ji in the Ad is David Lynch. I don't believe that. Not possible. There are no women in the ad. Anyway, I recently got to see the relieving old ad, aptly enough, on a Hindi News channel. A quick  search offered this - video link ( Uploaded to Youtube by tnadev1330 ) And enjoy some horny eye-candy -0- Previously: Marvel of Sat Isabgol

Shilpa Bindi Woman + Nirma Girl + Parle G girl + Chutki woman =

Created this collage of Heroines mostly using various Vintage Indian film posters (most of them hand painted) found in the incredible Picasa gallery of Praful. Update: Here's the link for this image in size 5120px × 3956px, 3504KB. Download now Enjoy!

Nargis-Raj Kapoor mosaic having 5218 tiles consisting of 5514 frames extracted from famous dream sequence song 'Ghar Aaya Mera Pardesi' (Awara,1951). [Click the above image to get a better view. For a still better view, download 4566×3424 pixels – 3.71 MB Image Here ] I created it using a wonderful piece of fee software called Andreamosaic that not only lets you create mosaic from simple images but also from movie clips by extracting images from them.

Images: Helen in 'Cha Cha Cha' (1964), song "Meethi Meethi Madhur Madhur".[ Youtube link ] At the end, she actually slaps the guy singing the Bhajan . Helen in 'Mayurpankh' (1954), song "Mohabbat Ki Dastan". She was about 15 at the time. One of her first credited appearances. [ Youtube link ] "Hazel Eyed-Chic-Sleek-gorgeously glamorous twinkled Toed Charmer of the Silver Screen" -  a part of 'publicity' caption for Helen from Ismail Merchant's 'Helen: Queen of the Nautch Girls' (1973) [ Youtube link ]

I was back where I had been when I was looking at the flowers-back in a world where everything shone with the Inner Light, and was infinite in its significance. The legs, for example, of that chair -- how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness! I spent several minutes -- or was it several centuries? -- not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them -- -or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for "I" was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were "they") being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair. - Aldous Huxley thought this up after ingesting psychedelic Mescaline and these words found their way to his 'The Doors of Perception' (1954) whose title comes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:  "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all thin...

Collage created using Picasa. Jane Russell in a promotional still from The Outlaw (1943) and a poster of Madhubala

  Although the name 'Mad Hatter' was undoubtedly inspired by the phrase "as mad as a hatter," there is some uncertainty as to the origins of this phrase. As mercury was used in the process of curing felt used in some hats, it was impossible for hatters to avoid inhaling the mercury fumes given off during the hat making process. Hatters and mill workers often suffered mercury poisoning as residual mercury vapor caused neurological damage including confused speech and distorted vision. It was not unusual then for hatters to appear disturbed or mentally confused, many died early as a result of mercury poisoning. Principal symptoms of mercury poisoning are excessive timidity, diffidence, increasing shyness, loss of self-confidence, anxiety, and a desire to remain unobserved and unobtrusive. However, the Mad Hatter does not exhibit the symptoms of mercury poisoning. [Wiki article on The Mad Hatter ]  About the photographs and their source(clockwise): Jawaharlal Nehr...

Caricatures of (clockwise) Mahatma Gandhi, Jinnah, Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan (this one really stands out), Sheikh Abdullah and Pandit Nehru. Found these in wonderful book called Faces, Through the Eyes of R.K. Laxman (Bennett Coleman & Co, 2000) ("Presented by BPL Mobile.")   The 155 page book has a collection of great R.K.Laxman's caricatures of not only those leaders and personalities who shaped recent Indian history but also of some famous international personalities ranging from Charlie Chaplin to Mao and to Bernard Russells.