Monthly Archives: February 2018

A Night to Remember (1942)

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Last May, my husband, my daughter and I shifted house. We’ve shifted house before (though never with a toddler in tow), but this time was rather more harrowing than every previous experience. The movers and packers we’d hired turned out to be a thoroughly inefficient and poorly trained lot, requiring constant supervision. They left debris—newspaper, scraps of cardboard and more—littered all across our new home, and the dumped al my books, each one of my precious books, in one untidy pile on the floor.

Then, on the second day in the new house, an insect flew into my eye and caused an infection that didn’t go for a month. Within the first week, the RO conked out; the kitchen tap suddenly started spewing black water; and we discovered that one of the pipes was so badly choked with plaster left behind by the repair-and-renovation gang that it had to be torn up and redone.

But at least we didn’t have people getting murdered in our backyard.

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Around the World in Ten Songs

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This song post has been on my to-do list for a long time. Then, when AK (over at Songs of Yore) did his brilliant twin posts on Bharat Darshan—small-town India, and metropolis India, through songs—I decided it was high time I did get this done. Songs about towns and cities abroad.

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Yasmin (1955)

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Fellow blogger and soul sister Anu, at Conversations Over Chai, watched Bahaar for two reasons: one, that it starred Vyjyanthimala; two, that it featured the delightful Saiyyaan dil mein aana re. As it happened (and both Anu and I agreed this was nothing new) she—as I have been, countless times—found herself a victim of the somewhat irrational logic that good music + an actor we like = good film.

But, to get down to this week’s post. A film I watched because, one, it stars Vyjyanthimala; and two, because it has great music. I had steeled myself for something pretty irritating, so perhaps the fact that I began this film with low expectations had much to do with my eventual enjoyment of it. Yasmin isn’t  a masterpiece, but I still liked it, predictability and all.

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Patanga (1949)

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Of Mere piya gaye Rangoon fame.

Mere piya gaye Rangoon—and some of the other songs of Patanga—were the main reason I began watching this film. Then, when the credits started to roll and I discovered this film also starred Shyam, I sat up a bit and began watching with a bit more interest. Shyam (1920-51, born Shyam Sundar Chadha) grew up in Rawalpindi and, when he was just 22 years old, debuted in a Punjabi film named Gawandi. He went on to work in several films, including Samadhi, Dillagi, and Shabistan—the last-named was also to be Shyam’s last film: in the course of the shooting, he fell off a horse and died.

I’ve seen precious little of Shyam (Samadhi is the only film of his I remember watching), but he intrigues me in the same way that his older contemporary Chandramohan does: they make me wonder if the honour roll of Hindi cinema would have been somewhat different if these men had lived. Shyam, with that handsome face and that impressive height and build, was definite star material. Plus, he was not a bad actor, either. Had he lived well into the 50s, would his presence have perhaps altered the careers of actors like Dev Anand and Shammi Kapoor?

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