Aar-Paar (1954)

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I saw this on the big screen, on August 10, 2025.

Given that getting to see a Hindi film as old as this on the big screen, as a proper commercial release (re-release, in this case), is a very rare treat, it needs to be put up front.

To mark the birth centenary of Guru Dutt, the National Films Division Corporation of India (NFDC) and the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) collaborated to restore and re-release several of Guru Dutt’s films. These were shown at PVR and Cinépolis cinema halls across India on August 8th through to 10th. Left to myself, I would happily have seen all the films that were being screened; but duty calls. August 9th was rakshabandhan, and we had family coming over for lunch. I was busy all through the previous day cleaning and cooking and generally preparing, and then again through half of the next day. But, once our guests had eaten, I scurried off cinema-wards to watch Sahib Biwi aur Ghulam. The following day, I managed to watch Aar-Paar.

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Ten of my favourite ship songs

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Many years ago, on this blog, I’d posted a list of boat songs. Boats happen to be fairly popular ‘platforms’ (so to say) for songs. For philosophical songs, for romantic songs, for songs of everything from despair to hope. There are songs on motorboats, on rafts, on rowboats and shikaras and whatnot. Many of Hindi cinema’s most famous songs from before the 70s were boat songs.

Much rarer, though, have been ship songs. Ships, after all, aren’t usually a part of most narratives (they’re less easily accessible, plus of course require a greater outlay on the part of whoever’s financing the film). Shipboard songs, I’ve realized, fall into a few fairly specific brackets. Either the singer(s) is/are employed on board a ship (as naval officers, deck hands, even pirates), or they are wealthy people travelling overseas. The latter, especially, became a more common theme in the late 1960s, when several films had a cruise as an important part of the storyline, invariably as a setting for a blossoming romance.

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Book Review: Lata Jagtiani’s ‘Thank You, Guru Dutt!’

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Lata Jagtiani’s Thank You, Guru Dutt! was released a few months back, to mark Guru Dutt’s birth centenary year. This is a book that follows on the heels of several other (well-acclaimed) books about Guru Dutt, his life and cinema: Nasreen Munni Kabir’s Guru Dutt: A Life in Cinema; Yasser Usman’s Guru Dutt: An Unfinished Story; and Ten Years with Guru Dutt: Abrar Alvi’s Journey, by Sathya Saran, among others. I will admit that I haven’t read any of the aforementioned books, so for me Jagtiani’s book was a first, in that sense.

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Travels in Karnataka, Part 3: Nagarhole

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This is the third and final part of a three-part travelogue, about our recent travels in Karnataka. The first part, about Mangalore, is here, and the second part, about Coorg (specifically Madikeri) is here.

From Coorg, we were to drive down to Nagarhole, an approximately three-hour journey. While researching Coorg, I had marked a couple of places that seemed to be extremely popular tourist attractions, and had been wondering if either of these might be visited while we were in Coorg or midway to Nagarhole. One of these we did manage to see on a day trip from Gateway Coorg: the Dubare Elephant Camp.

Entrance to Dubare
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Where the Boys Are (1960)

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RIP, Connie Francis, the voice of my teenage years.

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Travels in Karnataka, Part 2: Coorg

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(The first part of this three-part travelogue, about our sojourn in Mangalore, can be found here).

The district headquarters of the hill region of Kodagu (or Coorg, as the British dubbed it) is Madikeri, and this was to be our second halt on our trip through this part of Karnataka. Strictly speaking, we weren’t going to be staying within the town of Madikeri, but just about 15- or 20-minutes’ drive from there, at the Gateway Coorg, a Taj Hotels property. It’s a resort, spreading across 45 acres of land, which—besides the usual buildings, swimming pool, gardens, children’s play area, etc—also included a coffee plantation. And much more, as we soon discovered.

Gateway Coorg: lots of greenery.
At Gateway Coorg, a giant outdoor chessboard.
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Baaz (1953)

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Today, July 9, 2025, marks the 100th birth anniversary of one of Hindi cinema’s best-known film directors. Born in Mysore on this day in 1925 as Vasant Kumar Shivshankar Padukone, Guru Dutt studied in Calcutta before joining Uday Shankar’s India Culture Centre (in Almora, present-day Uttarakhand) to train in dance. By the time he turned 19, he had moved to Pune, where he began working as a choreographer for Prabhat Studios. By the time Prabhat Studios folded up (in the early 1950s), Guru Dutt had formed a close friendship with Dev Anand, because of whom he received his first break as a director: in 1951, he directed Navketan’s Baazi, starring Dev Anand, Geeta Bali and Kalpana Karthik in a noir thriller that was to become a defining film for Navketan: edgy, stylish, dark, very urban.

Guru Dutt is today revered more for the hard-hitting, cynical cinema he made: films like Pyaasa, Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam and Kaagaz ke Phool hold up the mirror to a world that is selfish, cruel and opportunistic. These are bitter films, films that plumb the depths of human nature; films that—despite following most of the standard tropes of commercial Hindi cinema (a romance between the lead couple; a fair number of songs; a comic character invariably played by Johnny Walker)—were quite different from other Hindi films.

These, too, are the films for which Guru Dutt is mostly remembered today. Is that because over the decades, people have seen how the tragedy and turmoil of Guru Dutt’s personal life was probably reflected in films like these? Is there a voyeuristic tendency to try and spot the man behind the director?

But Guru Dutt also made other films, on other subjects. This one, for instance, an adventure/patriotic film set on the high seas, with Geeta Bali starring as the eponymous ‘Baaz’ (falcon), a woman who becomes a pirate to free her land of a colonial tyrant.

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Travels in Karnataka, Part 1: Mangalore

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A few years ago, I decided that every year we would visit at least one Indian national park (or wildlife sanctuary). We began with Corbett; then Kaziranga, Little Rann of Kutch, Sariska… and earlier this year, my daughter suggested Nagarhole. The genesis of this suggestion lay in a book, Sutapa Basu’s Murder in the Jungle, which I had gifted the LO (‘Little One’, though we all agree that at 11, she’s no longer little). I had met Sutapa at the book event where I bought this book, and chatting with the author, was told that Nagarhole is one of her favourite wildlife parks in the country. A snippet I passed on to the LO, who was even more enthused after she’d read the book, which is set in Nagarhole.

So Nagarhole it was. But to go halfway across the country just to see a national park, especially when it’s in a part of the country the LO has never been to, seemed pointless. A longer trip, a more detailed itinerary, seemed logical.

I will not waste time and space describing the many iterations our itinerary went through, the many options that we considered before finally settling on a doable journey. We would fly from Delhi to Mangalore, and after staying a day there, we’d drive down to Madikeri (the district headquarters of Coorg). A couple of days would be spent exploring Madikeri and around, and then we’d go to Nagarhole, to spend three days there before heading back to Mangalore to catch the flight back home.

I will admit I knew next to nothing about Mangalore before I began planning this trip. Thanks to some research I’d done some years back on Christmas traditions and Christmas foods (for this book), I knew that Mangalore had been occupied by the Portuguese, who—as in Goa, further down the west coast—had left their mark, in the vibrant Catholic community of Mangalore. I knew, too, that Mangalore has some pretty mouthwatering food.

Mangalore buns, served with coconut chutney.
Mutton sukka, a delicious dish at Mangalore’s Shetty Lunch Home.
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Udan Khatola (1955)    

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Does Udan Khatola hold some sort of record for largest number of love/lust triangles?

Here’s a rough count:

There’s the unnamed aviator, the pardesi (played by Dilip Kumar) who is in love with the local peshwa’s daughter Soni. Who, in turn, loves him back.

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Beyond This Place (1959)

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Given that I reviewed Raj Khosla’s 1958 film Kaala Paani—based on AJ Cronin’s novel Beyond This Place—last month, I thought it appropriate to also watch and review an English-language adaptation of the same book. And, as always happens when I do something of the sort, to compare the two, see what they do with the same source material. Here, I must point out that that I haven’t read Cronin’s novel, so I cannot say how much Beyond This Place (directed by Jack Cardiff and with a screenplay by Ken Taylor) resembled Cronin’s book.

But, to begin at the beginning.

As the credits roll, we see a man, Patrick Mathry (Bernard Lee) and a boy, Patrick’s son Paul (Vincent Winter) running through the woods, laughing and obviously happy in each other’s company.

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