Congratulations to the RRR team for bringing home the Oscar for the Best Original Song/ Naatu Naatu.
Everyone is celebrating tiis victory across the globe.
A few days before the ceremony, NTR Junior bumped into Lucien Lavisran of Emily in Paris at a café in Beverly Hills and the two were delighted to chat about cinema. Lucien couldn’t stop raving about NTR’s tiger sequence in the film and was curious to know how it was shot.
Their enthusiasm about each other’s work reconfirms that actors all around the world are the same.

Not show business fortunately, especially reality shows. They are all the time improvising and evolving to retain the audience’s interest. Season 2 of Shark Tank India had a surprise for the viewers when Kaushik Mukherjee, Co-founder and COO, SUGAR Cosmetics came on the show to pitch the brand alongside Vineeta Singh, Cofounder & CEO, SUGAR. Something like this has never happened before on the show where the shark steps down from her position to be on the other side and pitch her product but then there is always the first time.

Mani Ratnam’s Tamil film Dal-Pati retold the story of Kunti and Karna in modern times. A 13-year-old suffering labour pangs delivers a baby hiding in a cowshed. At a distance, the villagers are prancing around bonfire burning fallen branches. The unmarried girl has no choice but to abandon her new-born on a moving train. For 30 years, the guilty mother tours temples and every holi night, Srividya is hounded by ghosts of the past till she meets Rajnikant/ Karna who forgives her.

Often, the festival was a dramatic moment to build or break a relationship as in the case of Phagun where Waheeda Rehman is obliged to humiliate her husband / Dharmendra to pacify her angry father. Dharmendra walks out on his pregnant wife to return 20 years later, after he has collected a shop full of saris for his wife. Naseerudin Shah in Shyam Benegal’s Bhumika played a filmmaker who disapprovescelebrations but his heroine, Smita Patil ignores all warnings and colours him. The moment becomes the beginning of a new relationship for both.

The stigma of a widow participating in festivities was challenged by Shakti Samanta in Kati Patang whenRajesh Khanna applied shagun ka tikka to Asha Parekh, a young widow. Exploring unfamiliar nuances was Ketan Mehta’s Holi about ragging in college campus, a tragic tale of a young boy destroyed by peer pressure!

Concluded

It is said that our deities in the Dwapar Yug sprinkled kesuda (red flower) mixed with water to calm the ravage of fire. Over the centuries, the kings and the queens replaced the red leaf paste with red powder (gulal) and as years passed by, our generations added multiple colours to the ritual but the message remained the same – it was a festival of joy!

In cinema the festival is even more magical because different filmmakers lend different perspectives to it, so if ‘Ari jaani natkhat, mat chuna mera ghunghat…’ picturised on dancer Gopi Krishna and Sandhya in Navrang is a celebration of music and dance for V Shantaram, for Yash Chopra, ‘Rang barse…’ is revival of romance in Silsila and ‘Aang se aang lagana…’ to evoke conflict in Shah Rukh starrer Darr.

For Subhash Ghai, it was a moment of confrontation between Shammi Kapoor and Jackie Shroff in Hero and reconciliation between warring friends in Saudagar. For Rajkumar Santoshi it was a reason to play truant in Damini and for Ramesh Sippy, a moment of celebration in Sholay. The director combines the happy and the sad moment, where a young Jaya Bhaduri chases Sanjeev Kumar’s Tonga threatening to colour him juxtaposed with Jaya as a widow watching the gaiety from a temple perched on the top of a hill.

To be continued…

Festivals like fashion, recycle in our films and stories. So, while in the good old days no Hindi film was complete without a holi song, there also came a time when the critics described such sequences as clichés. After a long gap, filmmaker Vipul Shah redefined the festival into a dance item ‘Do me a favour let’s play holi …’ in his movie Waqt – the Race against Time and revived the fad. Soon we had hero Dhanush splash a range of colors on his beloved Sonam Kapooor in Ranjhanaa followed by Ranbir Kapoor- Deepika Padukone drenching each other with champagne for ‘Balam pichkari…’ in Ye Jawani hai Deewani and an energetic Deepika -Ranveer Singh living it to the fullest in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Ramleela: Goliyon ki Raasleela.

All our festivals are entrenched in mythology and the story of holi is that that king Hiranyakashapu disapproved of his son Prahlad worshipping Lord Vishnu and when he could not convert him, the emperor father tried to slay his so but every time Prahlad was miraculously saved by Lord Vishnu. Exasperated, Hiranyakashapu sent for his sister Holika blessed with a boon to remain unscathed by fire. Hiranyakashapu ordered Holika to sit on the pyre with little Prahlad in her lap and to everyone’s surprise, Holika was reduced to ashes and Prahlad was unscathed. Ever since, the festival of Holi is celebrated to mark the end of evil, while dhudeti, the ritual of spreading colour, the following day is an exercise to soothe the angry flames!

To be continued…

Aye Mohabbat is a concert dedicated to the legendary singer Begum Akhtar (1914-1974) curated and presented by maestro Tushar Bhatia. He has researched extensively and produced a number of albums of Begum Akhtar for HMV, Music India & Sony music and now brings a live concert with singers, Sraboni Chaudhuri, Shivani Vaswani and Aditi Banerjee. On 03 March at NCPA the evening will showcase some of Akhtar’s popular ghazals, dadras and thumris in Urdu, Bhojpuri, Bangla and Awadhi. The show will include memorable songs like ‘Aye mohabbat’, ‘Diwana banana hai toh’, ‘Koyaliya mat kar pukar’, ‘Mere humnafas’ and Tushar Bhatia will share his interactions with people close to her.

The concert is part of the bigger festival at NCPA that includes film screenings like Astitva, Hindustani Classical Music with Harish Tiwari of Kirana Gharana and Living Traditions featuring Festival of Madhya Pradesh, Kabir songs by Jagdish Boriala group, Bundelkhandi Folk Drama, Gangaur Folk Dance and Bagheli Folk Drama. No festival is complete without a play and the most promising seems to be Bombay Flower Girl, the untold story of Ruttie – Ratanbai Petit, an affluent Parsi girl who married Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the most controversial leader of his time. A story of regret, revolt and ruin written by Gita Manek, directed by Manoj Shah, and performed by Bhamini Oza Gandhi. 

Vivaan Shah is at it again. In just a few years’ time, the younger son of Naseerudin Shah has written his third novel, Ranibaug—a treacherous peak situated at the bridge between the lesser and the greater Himalayas that has never been scaled by a mountaineering party; comparable in mystery to K2, Nanga Parbat, and Mount Kailash. Only the bare feet of sadhus and ascetics are said to have trod upon its rocks. A topographical survey team had embarked on a journey in the spring of 1971, never to return.

It is unusual for an actor to simultaneously pursue his skill as a writer but Vivan wrote a short story Entombed very young and never looked back ever since. He acted in films like 7 Khoon Maaf, Happy New Year, Bombay Velvet, and A Suitable Boy and has been onstage from the time he can remember. He adapted the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce into a play called Comedy of Horrors years ago and is undisputedly the new voice in the genre of crime fiction. His earlier books are Living Hell and Midnight Freeway. 

Actor Boman Irani’s son Kayoze is all set to venture into Bollywood as a director with his first feature film and Boman and his wife Zenobia have not stopped beaming. Boman has time and again said that he made a late entry into films and he  is determined to stay here as long as he can. He is the greatest film buff one can ever know and enjoyed hosting a talk show on the subject many years ago. Acting is not Boman’s only passion. He is India’s highest paid motivational speaker and loves traveling all around the world. Most of the time children of renowned fathers don’t make it as big but not all beneath the banyan tree fade away either.
Not Kayoze for certain and Boman is making sure that Kayoze takes the right leap.

It has become a trend to celebrate milestone years of films because it is one more opportunity to make a splash on social media. Shantanu Maheshwari who was deliberately left out of the publicity of Gangubai Kathiawadi when the film was released is finally provided with an occasion to share his experience of the film. Maheshwari attributes the entire credit of his performance to his director, Sanjay Leela Bhansali and says his experience of working on the film cannot be described in words.

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Shantanu is not the only one feeling indebted to his director, ace musician Amit Trivedi attributes the magic of the Kai Po Che music album to his director Abhishek Kapoor. On the tenth anniversary of the film, Trivedi reveals that after so many years, the album evokes the same joy as when it was released ten years ago.  He says collaborating with Abhishek Kapoor was effortless, because both worked from our hearts and “When you give your heart the music lives with you forever”.