At The Edge

from a dead Geocities site from a previous post about Bees Saal Baad (1962)

Getting stabbed by Sanjuro Tsubaki (Toshiro Mifune) in iconic scene from Akira Kurosawa's 1962 film 'Sanjuro'. -0- Previously: Toshiro Mifune, Rashomon, Animals

'Romance of Kashmir' painted on the cover of a vinyl for Jab Jab Phool Khile (1965) Salvaged from a now dead Geocities site .

After the death of their poor mazdoor parents, young Bhola and Munni find themselves homeless, hungry and on the street. But then a kindly roadside gola (ice-candy) seller Kamla (Parveen Babi ) takes them in. A staple bollywood affair. But then, Mazdoor Zindabaad is a film from year 1976, the middle year of Emergency , and there is not one moment  in this magnus opus of sycophancy that lets the audience forget the great leader, her twenty points and her's son's five points. It was written directed and produced made by some guy named Naresh Kumar.He went on to make a film called Sone Ka Dil Lohe Ke Haath (1978) or 'Golden Heart-Iron Hand', a Chinese Kungfu film sounding title that some people would still use to describe Indira Gandhi. (Humble offering) 'Mazdoor Zindabaad' doesn't try to describe the great leader, it just sings praises of her great plans. And how? Kamla takes the bother-sister duo under her (and symbolically under Indira's) wi...

You might have heard about Yahoo shutting down Geocities . Yahoo acquired it in January 1999 and after 15 (10 of them under Yahoo) years of hosting  all kind of pages (a lot of them having funky .gif images hammering in 'Under construction' messages and in between they offered most arcane information about most obscure topics ) they finally shut down the service on 26th October 2009 .  Around 7+ million public web pages and 8+ million images (according to Google), gone leaving internet with lot of dead links and broken images (thanks to hotlinking) and 404s. On 26th I spent some time randomly browsing through (and saving ) some Geocities sites, stumbled across this 'sean connery on moon' image and remembered what a delight these pages used to be. In pre-blog days (and in some cases even in clatter of blogs) it obviously had some of the most labored upon user generated online content, labour not just of working with HTML and creating all those gif files. -0- P...

Once in a while I get an opportunity to rub the fact into the face of my Indian friends that I am a Kashmiri. The conversation usually ends with, 'Yeah Yeah so why didn't you seek asylum in Amreka while you had the chance?' Only a week ago we read about: "Chinese Embassy in Delhi is issuing separate visas to Indian passport holders from Indian-administered Kashmir. Instead of stamping the passport with a visa, as is the norm with Indian citizens, Kashmiri students and businessmen traveling to China have had their visas stamped on a separate paper stapled to the passport. [ News Link, Asia Times ] That make me wanna go, 'Only with a passport! Only with a passport!' like Chaplin's 'communist' boy. Rubs the fact into the face. Today was one such day. The front page of morning paper carried the news that 'Made in China' globes sold in India depict Ja...

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!