At The Edge

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 re...

The exact chronology of events isn't clear. What is known  is that by the end of October 1972, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of British rock band Led Zeppelin, who were not yet the legends that they were eventually going to be, along with their manager Richard Cole had one night walked into a small pub named  'Slip Disc' in Bombay  and before a dazed Indian audience gave an impromptu performance with support from local musicians. The re-telling by these local rock musicians was going to become the primary source of  this lesser known, lesser documented story involving one of the greatest rock band ever. [Check ' One Muggy Night in Mumbai ... '( Published in Times of India Pune, on 7th July, 2001 ) by Nandu Bhende, one of the musicians who performed with the band.] All evidence suggests that this was in fact their third visit to the city. But for Indian fans of the band, it proved to be the most memorab...

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 o...

All sort of books on Indian Cinema, news pieces about Parveen Babi sad death, glossy film magazines, blog posts about her, all are replete with references to Parveen Babi making it to the cover of Time Magazine, a first for any Indian actress. Few were sure about the date of the issue, fewer could claim to have actually seem the cover. Many were on the trail of the elusive cover. I first tried to find it around two years ago, since then I would look for it whenever I was reminded of that 'will someone find it' cover. Last night, while watching her in Kala Sona (1975) I decided to give the old quest one more try. And today when I finally found it, I was ecstatically delighted. Actually bouncing on my chair. Matter of date. The year was 1976, it was an almost established fact even though a lot of folks even got the year wrong. But the Time magazine archive available at their site, the easiest and the first logical place to look, offered no such cover. She must have b...