Moon Songs, Part 1: Ten songs addressed to the moon

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Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the momentous occasion of the first moon landing: on July 20, 1969, two American astronauts—Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin—set foot on the moon, the first human beings to do so. “One small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind”, Armstrong’s words about his epic first step on Earth’s natural satellite, became the stuff of legend, quoted and misquoted thousands of times in as many contexts.

In the fifty years since then, only a further ten astronauts—in all, twelve people—have set foot on the moon. An interesting reflection of just how much effort goes into putting a human being on the moon (or perhaps how unnecessary it is, in today’s age of AI, to actually put a human being through all this trouble? I don’t know).

But, to come to the point. To celebrate 50 years of this landmark event, a post. I had initially toyed with the idea of reviewing the Dara Singh-starrer Trip to Moon, but the memory of my last attempt at watching that film (I gave up after five minutes) made me abandon that idea. Instead, I thought of a song list. A moon songs list.

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Aurat (1940)

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In 1957, Mehboob Khan produced and directed a film that has achieved almost iconic status in the history of Indian cinema. Mother India was the first Indian film to receive a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and won several Filmfare Awards, including Best Film and Best Actress.

Mother India is a fine example of the importance of perseverance. If you don’t get it right the first time, try again. Sometime along the way, somewhere and somehow, you will get to your goal. Also, if you did something well once, chances are you’ll do it better the next time round. Practice makes perfect.

I’m not talking about how Radha, the female lead character of Mother India (and of Aurat) manages to surmount all the obstacles in her path and emerge strong. I’m talking about Mehboob Khan himself, who was the director not just of Mother India, but of the film, Aurat, of which Mother India was a remake. Based on a story by Babubhai Mehta (and supposedly partly inspired too by Pearl S Buck’s The Good Earth) and with dialogue by Wajahat Mirza, Aurat was a film Mehboob Khan only directed. Seventeen years later, now a producer in his own right, he remade the film, both producing and directing it. And how well he proved that if you do something well the first time round, there’s a good chance you’ll do it well, and even better, the second time round.

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Kangra Travels, Part 3: Dharamshala and McLeodganj

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(To read the first part—Sirhind and Pragpur—of this travelogue, click here. To read the second part, Kangra and Palampur, click here).

In 2005, my husband and I went on a road trip through Himachal Pradesh. It was perhaps not the best time to visit: the monsoon had already arrived, and it was raining all across the hills. We were much younger and more adventurous, though, so we didn’t let that faze us. We went merrily on, umbrellas at the ready, driving slowly past a landslide near Baijnath, walking carefully down the slippery stone steps leading down from the Tashijong Monastery…

But not, obviously, carefully enough everywhere. Because, a few minutes after we checked into our hotel in Dharamshala and were walking to our cottage, I slipped on an algae-covered path and fractured my ankle. Our Dharamshala trip ended even before it had begun: the only sites we saw were an X-ray centre, a doctor’s clinic, and the hospital.

This time, therefore, we decided we had to see Dharamshala. Properly.

Deodars soaring up into the sky in McLeodganj.

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Kangra Travels, Part 2: Kangra Fort and Palampur

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(To read the first part of this travelogue, Sirhind and Pragpur, click here).

After all the fun she had in Pragpur, the LO was not keen to leave. So, after a quick post-breakfast round of the premises, during which she collected a little green feather and sundry other treasures, the LO reluctantly consented to being bundled into the car.

Pragpur is less than two hours’ drive from Palampur, but one route lies through the historic town of Kangra, which is the district centre and also home to one of India’s most interesting forts.

Approaching the first of Kangra Fort’s many gates.

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Kangra Travels, Part 1: Sirhind and Pragpur

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Yes, I do know that Sirhind is not part of Kangra, but bear with me. Because Sirhind, once a very important town of Northern India, featured in our itinerary for our summer vacation.

Back in March this year, I had to go to Dehradun for a literary event, and we decided to make it a family trip. A weekend in Dehradun, and our five year old daughter (the Little One, or LO, as she’s referred to here on this blog) didn’t want to return from the mountains. Not, of course, that Dehradun is, strictly speaking, in the mountains, but still. At least you could see the mountains, you could look up at those pine-forested heights and imagine a walk through that.

Therefore, we decided our summer trip would be a road trip to the mountains.

The mountains: these are the Dhauladhar ranges, seen from McLeodganj.

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Samskara (1970)

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RIP Girish Karnad.

Yes, this is a belated tribute, but since I was about to leave on a summer vacation when the veteran actor, playwright and director passed away, I decided I would wait. Because, though the bulk of Girish Karnad’s career was after the timeline of this blog—his first film was in 1970, which pretty much marks the outer extent of Dustedoff—I had to pay my respects.

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Ten of my favourite tree songs

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Two years ago, in May 2017, my husband, I, and our daughter—then three years old—shifted from Delhi to Noida. We had a lot of teething troubles, and even after we had more or less settled down, I kept missing (I still miss) the trees of Delhi. Not that Noida doesn’t have trees; it does. It’s just that the area we live in lacks the great big giants, many decades old, that are so much a part of Delhi.

But we do have a lovely little park in the middle of our housing society, and one day in June 2017, I took our child along there for a little picnic. We read a couple of books, she had a jam sandwich and some lemonade. We looked up at a stunning cabbage palm above the bench we were sitting on. I took a photo of that palm from our point of view, and later that day, I posted that on Facebook. I tagged it #LookingUpAtTrees. That photo became a landmark photo for me: it made me want to post more photos of looking up at trees. So I did. Over the next two years, I’ve become obsessed with trees (among the various other things I’m obsessed with). I photograph them, I want to know more about them, every time I travel, I keep an eye out for species not seen in and around the NCR. And, every week, I post a #LookingUpAtTrees photo (all of these posts are public, so if you’re on Facebook , you can see them even if you’re not on my friends network – just look for my personal page, Madhulika Liddle).

Yesterday I posted the hundredth photo in the series (of a landmark tree: a sal tree at the Forest Research Institute in Dehradun; it was planted in 1956 by the first President of India, Rajendra Prasad). With it, as always, was a brief write-up about the tree.

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Ten of my favourite Rajendra Krishan songs

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2019 marks the birth centenary of two major lyricists of Hindi cinema: Kaifi Azmi and Rajendra Krishan. While they may have shared the same birth year, Krishan and Azmi appear to have been very different personalities. Unlike the ardently socialistic Azmi, Rajendra Krishan seems to have pretty much embraced the capitalist side of life (interestingly, he is said to have been the ‘richest lyricist in Hindi cinema’—not as a result of his earnings as a song writer, but because he won 46 lakhs at the races).

Also, unlike Azmi, who wrote songs for less than fifty films (up to 1998, when he wrote for Tamanna), Rajendra Krishan was much more prolific. Though he died in 1987, by then he had already written songs for more than a hundred films.

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The Perfect Furlough (1958)

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There was a time, some years back, when I watched a lot of Tony Curtis films (I didn’t get around to reviewing all that I watched, though I did some, such as Some Like it Hot, The Vikings, and Who Was That Lady?).  I haven’t watched a Tony Curtis film in years, but when blog reader Hurdy Gurdy Man sent me a mail informing me of a bunch of old classics that he’d discovered—good prints, too—on Youtube, I found that one of them was a Tony Curtis-Janet Leigh rom-com named The Perfect Furlough.

So I decided it was time to return from that furlough away from Curtis. And with a film that had him opposite Janet Leigh too! That seemed to bode well.

The Perfect Furlough begins in the Pentagon office of Col Leland (Les Tremayne), where a group of military psychologists have been summoned by the general to address a very specific and very troubling problem the US Army’s facing.

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Do Dooni Chaar (1968)

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Mention Shakespeare and Hindi cinema, and most eyes light up. Vishal Bhardwaj’s tragedy trilogy—Omkara, Maqbool, and Haider—come immediately to mind for those who cannot think back further than the 1990s, if that. Those who belong to a certain generation (my own) will probably remember fondly the delightful comedy, Angoor, based on A Comedy of Errors.

Fewer, perhaps, will know that Hindi cinema’s tryst with Shakespeare is much older than Angoor. In 1928, a Hamlet adaptation called Khoon-e-Nahak was released; the same play was adapted for screen again in 1935, this time as Khoon ka Khoon, starring Sohrab Modi in the title role opposite Naseem Banu as Ophelia. In 1941, The Merchant of Venice was adapted as a film named Zaalim Saudagar. And in 1954, Kishore Sahu produced, directed and acted in Hamlet, an interesting and unusual film for Hindi audiences since it was a fairly faithful enactment of the play—down to the costumes, the names, etc.

Along with Hamlet (which seems to win hands down when it comes to popularity among Hindi film makers), another popular play for adaptation seems to be A Comedy of Errors. In 1969, it had been made (though with many departures from the original plot, and with no twin servants) as Gustakhi Maaf, with Tanuja in the double role, opposite Sanjeev Kumar. It’s interesting to note that while Sanjeev Kumar would go on to act in another adaptation of the play (Angoor), Tanuja had already acted in yet another version. Do Dooni Chaar, released in 1968 and quite clearly the inspiration for Angoor.

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