KV Ramesh |kvr4060@gmail.com Many directors went through tough times before they tasted success. For Raj Khosla, it was no different. Born May 31, 1925, Raj Khosla came to Bombay (now Mumbai) to be a playback singer. Guru Dutt - Dev Anand pair "discovered" Raj Khosla. There is an apocryphal story that the trio promised each...
Suhas Kirloskar | suhass.kirloskar@gmail.com The Voyage of Colorfilm In 1901, the first color movie was created. As time went by, the production of color films in the year 1905 started using six colors. Later on, the introduction of Technicolor in 1915 was seen as a turning point for color movies. Dadasaheb Torane created a 22-minute film called...
Arun Puranik | arun.puranik@gmail.com One still thinks of the Parsi riots that happened roughly 75 years ago while discussing Imperial Cinema. The first Bombay Talkies film, "Jawani ki Hawa", by Himanshu Roy, was released on September 16th, 1935, at Imperial. Devika Rani, the movie's main character, is a pretty young woman who doesn't want to...
K V Ramesh | kvr4060@gmail.com If one were to look at the sheer volume of work of Shakti Samanta, we would be astounded by the high quality of songs in his films. And what songs they were; memorable is an understatement to describe the sheer high quality of output, leave alone the commercial successes. Shakti...
Bipin R Pandit | panditbipin@yahoo.com Shamsherraj Kapoor was the second son of the legendary Prithviraj Kapoor. While his father was a hugely respected theatre and film actor, his elder brother, Raj Kapoor, was an established superstar. But as luck would have it, almost all of Shammi Kapoor’s initial movies flopped—there must have been seven to...
K V Ramesh | kvr4060@gmail.com Mainstream Hindi cinema, popularly called Bollywood, always has its stereotyped larger-than-life characters. The “hero” and heroine were usually “whiter than white”, while the villains were blacker than black. Nothing in between. The stories were largely formulaic with occasional flashes of innovation. That changed mainly in the late 1960s and through...
Some years ago, I was lamenting the general "lack of interest in today's younger generation in old classic Hindi film music" to a friend. She countered, "no; my children listen to the music of the 70s and so on". I said, "that's because you are a singer yourself ". She countered", no. They called me up...
by Anisha Nandan | anisha.45687@gmail.com Your voice is a part of you as opposed to an outer instrument and consequently, it is imperative to keep yourself healthy to consistently use your voice at your best. Assuming you are a singer, your vocal lines are your valued belongings, or you simply have a career that includes publicly...
"Shakti Samanta had come to me with a need for a film. I asked what is the story? So he started saying that you should make songs, we will build the story around them. OK, how many songs do you need? Said that at least make 10. I said ok but there are 2 conditions....
