Category Archives: Odds and Ends

Just what did you have in mind…?

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Back in 2014, just for kicks (and to share some fun with blog readers), I published this post. It’s a collection of a few choice behind-the-scenes statistics from my blog. What search terms bring blog readers to Dustedoff. Many had enjoyed this first edition, and just the other day, blog reader kayyessee reminded me of it. It was time for some more humour of that sort, kayyessee said; time for a second edition.

I agreed, completely. The world is so bleak these days, I could certainly do with some hilarity. So here goes. These are actually several years old, search terms which ended up bringing people to my blog.

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In Memory: Bollyviewer

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In the years since I first began this blog in 2008, I have written many tributes to many film personalities. A few, a mere handful, saddened me enough to make me feel I had lost someone especially dear to me personally.

Never had I thought a day would come when I would need to (yes, I do need to, for my own self) write a tribute to a fellow blogger. Bollyviewer, who meant much more to me than just a fellow blogger.

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So Long, Farewell

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(In somewhat belated tribute to the inimitable Christopher Plummer, who passed away on February 5, 2021).

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The Food and Food Movie Project, Part 2

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(This is a sequel to Part 1, where I introduced this challenge I set myself. It’s about five months, May-September 2018, during which I watched sixty-odd films and cooked 30-odd dishes or meals to go with those films. In Part … Continue reading →

The Food and Food Movie Project, Part 1

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Do you like watching food movies?

I do. And, back in May this year, having been approached by a food magazine to contribute an article on food movies (in particular movies about chefs and professional cookery), I went on a food movie binge. I’d watched loads of food movies before—everything from relatively ‘arty’ movies like Eat Drink Man Woman to popular hits like Chocolat, Julie & Julia and even the animated Ratatouille. But since this time round I wanted to look at the details of every film, at the nuances, I had to sit and watch them more closely, more at leisure.

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Guest Post: The Guitar That Sang

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Today is the 80th birthday of my father, Andrew Verity Liddle. Papa has influenced me in many ways, but possibly the greatest influence on my life that I owe to him is my love for old Hindi cinema and its music. Ever since I was a toddler, I’ve been surrounded by the voices of the 50s and 60s—if it wasn’t our old record player and the LPs whirling on it, it was the radio, with Ameen Sayani’s voice announcing one song after another… and most of it courtesy my father, who loves the music of that period.

As I’ve mentioned on several other posts on this blog, my father had an elder brother who worked in the cinema industry. David Vernon ‘Verni’ Liddle (also known professionally as ‘David Kumar’, or ‘Kumar Sahib’), nine years older than my father, was a guitarist who played for some of the greatest hits of Hindi cinema (and yes, I have mentioned some of these before, but recent research done by my father has thrown up pleasant surprises far beyond what I’d expected).

David Vernon Liddle (1929-1982)

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At work and play in Vidyanagar

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I’ve received a couple of e-mails over the past ten days: am I well? Is everything all right? (These from fellow bloggers whose blogs I frequent). I had to tell them: I was travelling and the net connection was somewhat dodgy. Besides, I was very busy. I often got only about half an hour to check my e-mail and catch up with what was going on at my blog.

To explain: I was at a writer’s conclave. The JSW Group, in partnership with The Hindu, played host to nine writers, including yours truly, for ten days, for a conclave named The Spaces Between Words.

We stayed at JSW’s very own guest house, Hampi House, at Vidyanagar, one of the townships that JSW has built around its steel plant in Karnataka’s Bellary district. Most of our writing was done at the nearby Kaladham, a lovely space just five minutes’ leisurely stroll from Hampi House.

Kaladham.

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