Ten Hindi films You Mustn’t Watch

Over the years I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve watched hundreds of films. Some I’ve praised, some I’ve dismissed. Some films I have found just too tedious to review; they’ve not necessarily been outright atrocious films, just not films I wanted to invest the time and effort in reviewing.

Every now and then, though, especially when I’ve reviewed a film with the aim of warning people off it, someone or the other has asked me to make a list of films I wouldn’t want people to watch.

This is it. My list of ten films that I found so painful, I wouldn’t wish them on my worst enemy (well, perhaps not). They’re all, of course, from before the 1970s.

I must explain here that I have not listed films that were merely boring or predictable (as a lot of films actually end up being); even fairly mundane, humdrum stuff like the B- and C-grade action/thriller films of Dara Singh or NA Ansari may have been rather shoddy cinema, but I’ve found them mostly only a little monotonous, or at the most, unintentionally hilarious. Those are not the films I list here. In this list are not those which I merely found tedious, or not worth watching again: the films on this list are the films I actively hated.  

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Suhaagan (1964)

I’ve had this film on my radar for a long time. I first came across a mention of it online about ten years ago, and since Guru Dutt had acted in so few films, I was curious about this one (which, incidentally, was also his last film). Back then, I used to subscribe to a video rental service, and having found Suhaagan on that, ordered it—and what I got was the absolutely execrable, horribly regressive Suhaagan that starred Geeta Bali [if ever I decide to draw up a list of Hindi films you must not watch, that Suhaagan will be on it].

The Guru Dutt-Mala Sinha Suhaagan, which several people on my blog have mentioned in the past (including fairly recently), and which I’d searched for on Youtube now and then, finally cropped up in Youtube’s recommendations for me. So I bookmarked it.

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People with Books in Hindi Cinema

Happy World Book Day!

For a bibliophile like me, this is a very special day, because it celebrates books. I can’t imagine life without books (I read an average of about 80-90 books every year, and would probably read double that number if I didn’t watch films or Korean dramas). I love reading, I thrive on reading, I get restless if I don’t have something to read.

So, in celebration of books, a post on people with books in Hindi cinema. More specifically, about ten scenes in Hindi cinema where a character is shown with a book.

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