Nostalgia

While going through some old videos on You tube, I found these fascinating videos of old Indian TV commercials. Anybody who has grown up in India during mid-80’s through early-90’s will remember these commercials. These videos are listed in no particular order of my liking them.

1. Gold Spot: Till date, no soft drink has tasted better to me than what Gold Spot had tasted long back. And, this commercial looked so hip then.

Notes from a film shoot

They say that no book or a lecture on film making can teach you what a real shoot will teach you. I agree. My first real foray into the world of film making happened recently. One of my friend, Paul Landriau, a young filmmaker, shot his ten minute short French film, PROLOGUE, last weekend. He had asked me more than a month back if I would like to play a role in the film and, even though I first panicked and balked at this idea of me being in front of the camera, I still agreed to act; I thought that what better way to build network for my own future film projects & also to learn from the whole experience for free. This is Paul’s third short narrative film & the film is shot with a digital video camera (Panasonic AG-DVX100). Paul is making this film primarily to sharpen his directing skills further & to build his repertoire. In terms of its target audience, the film will be sent to some film festivals and Paul also intends to hold some free public screenings. The story of Prologue, from whatever I understood, is about a surreal dream of a budding actress. In the dream, actress is auditioning for a role in a film & I’m playing the director who is auditioning her. We first discussed about this role more than a month back, followed by rehearsals with the full cast before the final shoot with the camera happened. The following are my notes and observations from the shoot of my part which happened last Saturday.

Luck By Chance (2009)

As if it was not enough for Farhan Akhtar, the director, to charm us with his cool films, he has now also donned a role of an actor with films such as Rock On and Luck By Chance. I didnt like Rock On much; I thought that even though the film was well made, it was quite predictable and safe in the end. Luck by Chance, however, I found very rich and well crafted. The mind behind Luck By Chance, Zoya Akhtar, goes introspective by turning the cameras on the industry she has grown up in (Zoya is the daughter of legendary writer/lyricist Javed Akhtar & the talented screenwriter Honey Irani & she is also the sister of Farhan Akhtar) and in the process tells us a story set in a world where destiny, talent, egos and little chances all converge to make or break people.

The New Sardars of Bollywood

Since early days, Bollywood or Hindi film industry has been dominated by Punjabis. Many producers, directors, writers and especially heroes of the past were Punjabis. Quite a few among those Punjabis were either Sikhs or came from mixed Hindu-Sikh Punjabi families. But still the Sikh characters in Hindi films during those days were mostly reduced to stereotypes. Either they were there to provide a comic angle or to play an over the top super nice/super brave character. I guess the reason that in spite of the presence of many Punjabis at the helm of affairs during those days, we still didnt ever see a full Sardar as a hero was that both producers and the directors thought that a turbaned Sikh with a beard wont find much takers among the masses. Also, remember that those were the times when even some Muslim actors and actresses changed their names to more North Indian sounding Hindu names. I guess most people wanted to play safe in the still nascent Bombay film industry of the 50’s and the 60’s.