At The Edge

Adult Apple

2011-10-06T13:53:00.001+05:30

Came across this at ebay. Year 1979. Country India.

Please take note of the Apple Logo at bottom right corner.

R.I.P. Steve Jobs.

Gulzar's Raavi Paar and Other Stories

2011-10-09T15:24:00.001+05:30

A man gets thrown off a moving train by a man who is afraid that he will be killed by the other. A yesteryear starlet dies of heart attack after she realizes she mistakenly unburdened her heart to Property Broker. Last wish of a Muslim man to be burned after death leaves an entire qasbah in flames. A poor woman is at edge thinking Maharaj is after her izzat, Maharaj's old father does not figure in her worries till the end. A poor farmer thinks of saving land from Zamidars, he tries, but in the end gauges his courage, or lack of it, to be of a level somewhere in between that of Communists and Dacoits. A subject asks his writer what did all his well-written stories change when the subject still finds himself the same. A dead baby gets breastfed while a living one mistakenly gets thrown off a train and into a river. A man spends years observing night skies seeking the star of Galib's fate. Her son too is cruel to her, just like her husband and all the other men in her life. In a biographical story, a family mistakenly claims Gulzar as its own, a child they lost in Partition. A woman remembering her youth, its unhappy love story, treats her young daughter just the way her mother treated her, cruelly. Michelangelo finds face of Judas in old Jesus. Bimal Roy plans a movie on man's quest for Amrit, immortality and perhaps an undefinable more, dies of cancer after smoking his last cigarette. A man who braved people crying over his fate all the time commits suicide on the day of his marriage because he couldn't handle people laughing at him. A man meets a ghost who admires U.G. Krishnamurti. A woman's marriage turns out to be a process for acquiring cheap labour. A little girl's heart is broken by Dilip Kumar. A midget adopts baby of a dead woman of 'dubious reputation'. A boy boards a train running away from his wrinkly old dadi only to realize how much he loved her. A woman leaves her husband and then learns to leave him. A village idiot is missed only after he is made to disappear. A pre-historic boy discovers fire and creates mythologies. A patriarchal tree and life around it gets destroyed during partition, and so it happens to a county and its way of life. A man is cruel to his childhood sweetheart. Animals finally wage a war against man, just when man wages a war to protect wildlife.

These in short are the sad tales from Gulzar's Raavi Paar and Other Stories.

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There was a time when I wanted to ask him, 'Why did you pick Sunil Shetty for that role?' I have given up on the question. I don't want a sad answer.

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The Past and Prejudice by Romila Thapar, 1972

2011-10-09T21:46:00.000+05:30

"It is a strange paradox that the historian, who is concerned professionally with the past, plays a crucial role, in the future of the society which he is studying. The historian's interest lies in trying to understand the emergence and the evolution of a society in a historical perspective, where the term society includes every aspect of a people's life. As a result of his investigations, the historian creates a picture of the society. In his handling of the evidence from the past, he is often influenced by his own contemporary setting. Historical interpretation can therefore become a two-way process - where, the needs of the present are read into the past, and where the image of the past is sought to be imposed upon the present. The image of the past is the historian's contribution to the future. For, this image can be used by his contemporaries for political myth-making. Such political projections of a society seek intellectual justification from the theories of historians and other social scientists. to mention two recent and rather obvious examples, the theory of the superior Aryan race came in very useful to Hitler and the Fascists; and that of the Hindus and Muslims constituting two separate nations was used to justify the creation of Pakistan - a theory which has been recently exploded by events in Bangla Desh. Such supposed justification impose the present on to the past and a generation is fed with distorted images.
But over the years, with changing methods of investigation, the discipline of history has been made more precise and more analytical. New evidence and fresh interpretation enable us to reassess the past in more realistic terms and proceed in new directions. Historians, too have become, as it were, self-conscious, both about the nature of the evidence and about the social and political function which historical writing has played in the past. Now, more than ever, the historian, without compromising his scholarly integrity, has much to contribute to society. "

Romila Thapar starting off her Patel Memorial Lecture on January 12, 1972.

more Words of Wisdom

2011-10-09T22:38:00.001+05:30

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Dadamoni, 1937

2011-10-15T01:24:00.002+05:30

Ashok Kumar in Bombay Talkies' Savitri-1937

You Can't Please Everyone! by Kobita Sarkar

2011-10-16T22:14:00.002+05:30

Rita Ray (1924-1983) was a regular cinephile, someone who certainly understood the art of it, someone who could interpret the things she saw on screen, someone who had strong views on cinema and what it ought to stand for. But her views underwent some drastic changes after she agreed to be on the advisory Panel of Censor Board. All of a sudden she found herself on the evil side, a side much cursed and secretly envied. Rita began to see things from the other side, the other side of the argument. Now she too asked herself the question, the rallying cry of that side, ‘What about the average person? Would he/she be able to handle it?’ At the same time she did wonder how to go about defining the ‘average’. She did note the rather unintentionally comic manner in which the serious business of Censoring was conducted. She took note of her fellow panelists, bored middle-aged women who had never seen a film in life, pretentious intellectuals who only wanted to be bothered about ‘art’ films, professors of philosophy who seemed out of place, uneducated traders, an occasional ‘too’ liberal woman, mostly men to fumed at the thought that a woman was enjoying a kiss, all those who had nothing better to do on their afternoons, people who sometimes did realize that they were part of a great process that kept a part of the country safe, the cultural and most important part of county safe.

Rita noticed how, unlike most other members of the panel, plunging necklines didn’t bother her as much as the increasing level of violence unleashed by men on scene. She makes a direct link between an Indian hero’s inability to kiss his heroine and his wont to hit her, almost as a better substitute. She questions the duplicity of Censor board that gives Bhumika an ‘A’ certificate just because its heroine wanted to lead her own life. She tackles the question of other duplicity, Censor and its response to foreign films, censor and its response to ‘art’ films. To find an answer to these questions, out of her own curiosity, in around 1966 she travelled to Britain, the country which first gave birth to censorship code in India. There she got to meet John Trevelyan. John Trevelyan at that time was the Secretary of the British Board of Film Censors. In answer to her questions he offers, ‘You can’t please everyone!’

In her work she came to understand his point. There will always be people who won’t be happy with the way censors work, with the thought of censor. But it is needed, the key is simple, censor has to stay one step behind, not two steps, just one step and it must certainly never try to go one step ahead. Later when Trevelyan quit his post under pressure for passing films like Clockwork Orange and Straw Dogs, Ray concluded he, going against his own advice, perhaps was trying to go one step ahead of times.The other advice given by Trevelyan proved to be more helpful to Ray. He told her to go about the job with a sense of humour (apparently humour was one of the prerequisites for applying for censor job in Britain). It was humour that helped her when she had to deal with questionnaire that went like this:

‘If a film producer introduced a scene in which a man tried to seduce a woman and addressed her in the following ways would you consider it a misrepresentation of our culture?“How well-proportioned and rounded are your thighs and how charming your legs, resembling the tapering truck of an elephant; how round and plumb are your cheeks; how enchanting your bosom; how slender is your waist; glossy is your hair; your breast touching each other enhance their liveliness.”‘If in depicting this scene, the lens of the camera is focussed on the woman’s thighs, legs and breasts, would you object to the scene on the ground that it distorted our culture or our ancient heritage?’
For all I know this may be a quotation from some eminent source, but I am always reduced to laughter –and have never learnt to answer the question seriously. It must have been thought up by someone with a sense of humour.

In between, she tries to answer questions like why were works of Mirnal Sen, Satyajit Ray or Ritwik Ghatak almost never censored, even the ones that were proclaimed as ‘anti-establishment’. She writes, 'Our film-makers, despite their protestations, given the opportunity, are unlikely to produce more than a political allegory. ’ It is a serious allegation but one that certainly has some merit.

Through all her years in the Censor Panel she kept a log of the nature and motivations of her odd job. The odd situations, the odd characters, the odd films, the odd scenes and the odd cuts. The result was ‘You can’t please everyone’ Film Censorship: The Inside Story written under the pseudonym Kobita Sarkar and published in 1982. It remains a unique work on understanding the working and motivation of Censor in India. And it is all the more unique because it was written by a witty woman who obviously loved Cinema.

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Thanks to this book I now know that 'Satyam Shivam Sundaram' lead to obscenity charges on Raj Kapoor and Zeenat Aman in Kashmir. This bit to information now adds new meaning to the fact that when the film was released in Kashmir, a revolutionary school named Walden took its students to a special screening of the film.

this is how they got it

2011-10-20T01:09:00.000+05:30

The hair. Flip through some old family album.

Code 10 Tonic for Hair Dressing, 1978
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Exultations of Biryani

2011-10-21T00:31:00.001+05:30

Biryani Breakfast in Gurgaon,

Letters for Khushwant Singh, 1985

2011-10-23T01:43:00.002+05:30

These letters were in response to Pritish Nandy's piece on Khushwant Singh turning 70 published in April 21 issue of The Illustrated Weekly of India in 1985.

Red-bottomed monkeys, malice, imagining naked women, pungency, dick and other regular things associated with 'man in the bulb'.

The news of him putting down his pen was greeted with same words and thoughts. [‘I May Die Any Day Now’, Outlook].

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Swadeshi Smoke, 1972

2011-10-24T23:25:00.000+05:30

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Pyaasa Guru Dutt

2011-10-24T23:40:00.000+05:30

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What are two Muslim Girls doing with Diyas?

2011-10-25T00:02:00.000+05:30

Zaheera and Shabana are asked in Star & Syle, October 22, 1976

Nazi Pataka

2011-10-27T20:44:00.001+05:30

Pick from Diwali trash this year. Nazi Fireworks!

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Bonus: Nagin Pataka

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mufat may toh koi gaali bhi nahi deta!

2011-11-04T23:59:00.001+05:30

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 Duje Ke Liye. I made that collage just for fun way back in 2007 collecting the posters using simple google image search and putting them together using Picasa (I originally intended to sequence the posters in the order in which they appear in the song, but back then Picasa offered limited capability). It must have taken me a day to put it together.

I have no idea what the HT guys used it for but in its giant printed avatar it certainly looks impressive. I just wish I could see the complete hoarding.

Instance 2: brazen

Kashmir was probably one of the most photographed 'exotic' places in the world in 18th and 19th century (probably still is). and yet until a few years ago most people hadn't seen these old images of Kashmir. The few that were circulating online were mostly available thanks to British Library. I got tired of them and curious.

For last three years I have been collecting vintage photographs of Kashmir and posting them to my Kashmir Blog. I have been adding notes about the places, people, photographers, years in which they were taken and also about how they were used in various books. I have been collecting them from various sources but primarily from various rare books available for free on archives.org. I have also been posting rare documents and photographs of various artifacts from private collection of a couple of generous readers. At the start of this year I finally started seeing those images appear on wall posts of Facebook people and I saw people discussing them with a deep sense of nostalgia. People offered more information about the images and updated the posts accordingly. All the night spend in the exercise: worth it. I think I will keep on going.

A couple of months back thanks to Facebook I realized that most of these photographs (including the stuff from private collections) have been recently used by an online Kashmiri News portal called Kashmir Dispatch to create a 'one-top' gallery [ http://www.kashmirdispatch.com/gallery.html ] for vintage Kashmir images which they claim to have gathered from 'various sources'. Not a word of thank, not a single descriptive note about the photographs. Pointless.

My pointed response: a pointless late night post titled 'Politics of Information'.

Instance 3: subtle

A couple of weeks back I got an email from Gulshan Books [gulshanbooks.net], a publisher based in Srinagar, Kashmir. They wanted to send me their catalogue. I told them I would be more than happy to share it around with my readers. In the next mail they ask me for my address and praising my Kashmir blog promise to send me two books as a token of appreciation. I was more than happy.

This week, in office, I received a package addressed to 'Chairman Search Kashmir'. People in office had a good laugh about it. 'What's the Deal Bhai! Bum hai Kya! Kaha ka chief hai bhai!'Later at my place as I go through their catalogue I am pleasantly surprised to see the pages embellished with photographs of Kashmir (at least one of them, my own click) that I have been posting to my blog. Worth it.

from my review of First Kashmiri Film Mainz Raat (1964).
The actress is Krishna Wali.

The catalogue now offers me names of some more rare and interesting books on Kashmir to hunt for. Also the two books (having a combined hefty price of $50 that had me wondering how would a common man afford them) that they sent me - 'Kashmiriyat through the ages' Edited by Prof. Fida Mohammad Hassanain and 'Srinagar: My City My Dream' by Zahid G. Muhammad - are turning out to be engrossing reads that are going to provide ideas for my blog. Certainly worth it.

I wrote back to thank them and to tell them that I am no chairman of anything. I told them that I am just a log keeper and that I was eight years old when my family had to move out of Kashmir.

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Dancing Gandhi

2011-11-10T23:06:00.001+05:30

I design games for social networks. The statement basically means I spend an indecent amount of time on Facebook. To be able to work I haven't added too many people as friend and as a precaution I have blocked a lot of incoming distractions that are often likely to appear on one's Wall in form of timepass like this :

Mahatama Steps Out of character of Gandhi

This supposed image of Gandhi dancing with some white woman travelled from hate groups (Anti-Gandhi to Anti-India) with comments about 'Mastikhor Ayyash Gandhi' to liberal groups with 'O! he could dance!' remarks. The basically ended up going viral. If it managed to reach my high wall, it must be really viral, that's my rule.
It took me one google image search query to find that the image is actually of an Australian artist impersonating Gandhi for some charity event held in Sydney for India back in those days.

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Happy Birthday, Mr. Prime Minister

2011-11-13T23:49:00.001+05:30

Pandit Nehru on his Birthday in U.S.A. , 1961

At a children's gathering in Bombay, 1954

Showing his skill with cane at a performance by traditional swordsmen

Carrying a Samurai Sword. Visit to a Japanese Film Studio, 1957

Squatting on the threshold to the Banteay Srei temple in Indo-China, 1954

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Epic

2011-11-16T22:49:00.001+05:30

from 1970

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Dev Anand (1923 - 2011)

2011-12-04T13:50:00.001+05:30

Goodbye, Last Jedi of Indian Cinema.
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Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!

2011-12-07T00:56:00.001+05:30

An ad from filmindia July, 1943.
Came across above image in 'Wanted cultured ladies only!: female stardom and cinema in India, 1930s-1950s'
by By Neepa Majumdar (Google Books)

Leela Chitnis and Master Vinayak in ''Better Half'
from filmindia, January 1940

The above image (minus the caption) was recently shared on twitter by Pavan Jha. He posted it as a quiz. Quite a few comments raised the issue of 'Smoking in Indian Cinema'. I came to know about the image via Facebook where someone asked me if I knew the answer. I recalled coming across it in filmindia collection shared with me by Greta. I was able to recall it because of the appealing caption: kiss

The Kiss. Devika Rani and Himanshu Rai in Karma (1933)

Speaking of Captions...

From Filmfare, November 1989

Speaking of Ads...

June 1982

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Smita Patil

2011-12-13T22:37:00.002+05:30

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Sex in Cinema: A History of Female Sexuality in Indian Films by Fareed Kazmi

2011-12-30T21:56:00.000+05:30

Rupa Publications
Pages 375
Rs 395

'Isak ki baat to besua jaane/ hum bahu beti hain, hum ka jaanein'

(The art of making love is known only to the prostitute/ we women of the household, what do we know of it.)

A book that starts with a quote like that plucked from the back of a truck has to be great. First 100 pages are filled with quotes after quotes after quotes after quotes from every 'thinking' man or woman (but mostly man) ever born, right from Xenophon to our own Tarun Tejpal, with Derridas, Foucaults, Sartres, Mae Wests, Enslers thrown somewhere in between and even our own Gandhi ji drops in a line or two. Basically anyone who ever thought about sex and wrote about it, pictured it and then wrote about it, is present in this book all to make a case for 'A History of Female Sexuality in Indian Films'. So by page 103 you tell yourself it would have been just as fine if the writer (a professor of Political Science at Allahabad University) had written a one page short note about Misraji of Bhojpur who thinks Madhubala was an angel and that all these new girls dancing on screen are gustakh laundiyas polluting the screen and the naujawaan nasal. He could have claimed Misraji is being simple, that the truth of women on Indian screen is more complex, and then to drive home his point he could have posted 99 photographs of Helen (this book on cinema has only 9 disappointing photographs, including just one of Helen). All this would have been fine because all this time based on the cover of the book and its title a beguiled reader is expecting a (long over due) short concise Indian version of MrSkins in print. Ah the subtle art of selling a book on female sexuality using female sexuality. Judge a book by its acknowledgement:
"From Mehtab to Madhuri, Dimple to Zeenat, Madhubala to Aishwarya, this book owes its genesis, to all those divas whom we have ogled at, lusted for, 'slept with'. however, if it lacks the lustre and the passion these names evoke, the fault is entirely mine."

Wasting ink is a crime if the subject is drawn from Indian Cinema because even if one writes with all the expediency in the world something substantial is bound to get left behind because of the sheer size of Indian silver screen. The fallout of the writer's crime becomes obvious after page 100 when one realizes that the writer has tried to cover the 'The History' by sorting his subject matter by decades starting 1950s and ending somewhere into 2000s. For each decade he picks a few obvious films and dissects them to offer a picture of woman as was carved (intentionally or unintentionally) on the screen in these decade. For 50s we have analysis of word games played by Nargis and Raj Kapoor in 'Awara' and 'Shree 420'. Then we have a truly brutal and brilliant denouncement of 'Mother India' in which son Briju seems to be the real rebel and Mother India just another Pavitra Nari. For 1960s, we are offered 'Mughal-e-Azam' , 'Sahib, Biwi, Aur Gulam', 'Guide', 'Aradhana' and 'Bandini'. The analysis of choices made by Kalyani in Bandni makes for an engrossing read, we see the woman become a mix of rebel and a conformist. The book is worth the money if only for the essay on 'Mother India' and 'Bandini'. Because Fareed Kazmi does his dissection with a deftness, a reader does wish he had written some more on some more films. How can just 'Mera Naam Joker', 'Bobby', 'Hare Rama Hare Krishna', 'Julie' and 'Kabhi Kabhi' be used to define a decade of movies, a decade in which more and more woman, like never before were seen on screen? When you see the line-up for 80s: 'Insaf Ka Tarazu', 'Pratighat' and 'Arth', you know which direction the writer is driving you, the changing image of woman he is crafting? You know 'Hum Aap Kay Hai Kaun' is up, soon followed by 'Murder'. You know how it will end. You know writer has taken an easy route. You feel like a disappointed Misraji from Bilaspur. You put down the book wishing that the writer had written a word or two about Saudagar (1973), the film based on a story by Narendranath Mitra, which could have been a brilliant topic for enquiry into politics of female sexuality. Next you wish to see Padma Khanna burn some gur. Then you watch her and notice the delighted young peeping tom woman in the song. Then you are reminded of those fancy Indian art painting drawn by ancient men. And then a sudden laugh drops on your face as you think about all the mad men who made cinema in India. And then you wait for a fsad ancy post-modern interpretation of the song and how it was charged with overt female homoeroticism and how it was a path-breaking event in Indian Cinema.

video link

Basohli Art

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Tripping on Asimov

2012-01-02T22:36:00.000+05:30

"In 2002, a survey carried out by the Nobel Institute on 100 of the world’s best authors from 54 countries led to Don Quixote being declared the best book of all time. Newspapers trumpeted the news. But how does one arrive at the “best book of all time”? A year later, Salman Rushdie, one of the writers who took part in the survey, claimed the writers who took part in the survey were asked to list, in no particular order, 10 of their favourite books, then this list was fed into a computer. In the end, the computer declared Don Quixote to be the greatest and most meaningful book of all time. Only decades ago, the fact that a machine was deciding matters of art may have raised some eyebrows and maybe given rise to some interesting critique of the methodology. But not a whisper was heard.

Compare this to the plot of Asimov’s 1955 story Franchise and the debut of Multivac. The story is about the US election in 2008. The election was a simple affair. Computer selected a man, a representative of the electorate, and asked him a few questions. Based on this one man’s answers, a President was elected. With all that computational power at hand, it probably was not hard for Asimov to guess which route humanity will take. At the start of this story, the protagonist is weary of the computer-driven election process but by the time the process is over, and after he has exercised his vote, he feels: “In this imperfect world, the sovereign citizens of the first and greatest Electronic Democracy had, through Norman Muller (through him!) exercised once again its free, untrammeled franchise.”

DownToEarth magazine's Science Fiction special issue (Jan 1-15, 2012) has a piece by me on Isaac Asimov's visions of future. Here's me tripping on Asimov: From cache.

If you are a science fiction buff or even fiction buff, you might as well check out these brilliant articles from the issue:
Arvind Mishra and Harish Goyal on origin of Science Fiction in Hindi.
Debjani Sengupta on Industrialisation, modernity and science fiction in Bengal.

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Rushdie Interview, 1982

2012-01-12T12:38:00.001+05:30

"I do long to go back to India. To live? I just don't know if that's possible. It might be...I'll tell you when I go back there. You see, I haven't lived in India since I was a child, since I was fourteen, because from then my parents were in Pakistan where they still are. I visit them there all the time
and I now really know Pakistan more than I know India, although I like it less, ad the more I know it the less I like it. So India is a sort of country of my
imagination for me, rather than anywhere that I have actual, concrete day-to-day connections with any more. Although one of the pleasant things that's happened through Midnight's Children is that my contact with India has increased enormously.
[---]
People endlessly ask me whether I think of myself as British or Indian. I don't really think of myself as either. I think of myself as me. I never really have particularly defined myself against nations. I don't see why one has to make that definition. I'm somebody who lives in Britain and has his roots in India. That seems to me to be enough, really. Why does one have to be more precise than that?"

~ A recent Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie talking to co-producer of 'Gandhi', Rani Dube for Debonair Magazine June 1982.

Download the complete interview here

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Absolute Bollywood Zeher

2012-01-15T23:21:00.000+05:30

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.

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Maneka Gandhi DCM towel Ad, 1974

2012-01-22T16:24:00.001+05:30

It seems I and Mr. Bawaseer Kumar from Aonla are the only two people interested in this - Maneka Gandhi's Towel Ad. Bawaseer Kumar's interest is driven by curiosity about the colorful history of his Parliamentary representative (But I suspect his is a closet Nehru-Gandhi Clan hater just looking for ammunition - the proof, the 'dekha mainay kaha tha these Nehru/Gandhi's are sickular people' kind of proof). My interest, I am just vella. It is either all that or that nobody reads or rather cares for India Today anymore. The infamous 'deleted from history' ad was recently re-published in December 26, 2011, 'Makers & Breakers of Modern India' special issue of the magazine.

Maneka Gandhi in DCM's 'Towels so good you want to wear them' campaign, 1973.

Note with the ad reads: "This was justly Maneka Gandhi's, 22, first claim to fame. As an aspiring model, she had signed up with DCM to model for their entire campaign of towels that were launched in 1973. But her success on the modelling scene was short-lived. When she became engaged to Sanjay, the advertising agency MCM was summarily commanded to withdraw the campaign and clam up all possible remaining records of it."

The story is told by Vinod Mehta in 'The Sanjay story: from Anand Bhavan to Amethi' (1978).

"Beginning in 1974 Miss Anand was plasterred all over Delhi. 'A lanky, vivacious college beauty queen' (crowned 'Miss Sri Ram College' in '73). she had recently taken to modelling with great sucess. Dressed scantily in a towel she was seen on billboards and press ads promoting Delhi Cloth Mills."

On July 28, 1974, MCM, the agency behind the ad campaign, was called up by Maneka's father Lt. Col. Tarlochan Singh Anand who demanded all pictures and transparencies of her daughter be returned. The press was told not to run the Ad anymore. On July 29, a press release declared Sanjay's engagement to an 18 year old girl named Maneka who was learning German at JNU and working as a journalist for a weekly called 'Delhi Dateline'.

The image barely seems as scandalous as one's imagination would have you believe. It was censored and cleaned up after all. Well, that indeed is the true nature of censorship. It lets the imagination run wild.

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