Pacifist’s Ek Gaon Ki Kahani (A village story)

Dear Pacifist has agreed once again to honour this blog with a post of hers. Thank you, Pacifist!

10 beautiful village songs

Poos ki sard raat thi…, chilchilati dhoop mein nange paon…, (it was a freezing winter night…, bare feet in the blistering heat…,) are phrases I associate Munshi Premchand with. Though we used the term chilchilati dhoop , poos ki raat was new. Village life in the north, as depicted in his novels, was very harsh as these two terms indicate. My interest in his novels branched into reading some of his short stories too, so when Harvey asked me to write a post I thought of Munshi Premchand and villages.

Now we all know that the village life as depicted in our films is nothing like the real thing, but some of the older films did manage to get some sort of realism, simplicity, though in some cases burdensome (Mother India). Whatever the case they always give me a feeling of being purified. Blame it on the pollution inducing contemporary films. Dilip Kumar, Balraj Sahni, even Raj Kumar made convincing villagers. The heroines all looked good enough. Not only that, but the folksy songs were great.

 

Deewar [1975]

Thoughts on a wall on Mother’s Day

Growing up in Bombay as a small kid in the 1970s meant knowing your Sholay [1975] and Deewar. I had allegedly seen Sholay, but I couldn’t remember a single frame of it. It is quite possible that this was again a trick by my siblings to console me since they often went to films without me. After all who would like a eight years younger brother tagging along. I never had a chance to see Deewar. All the same I think I knew all the dialogues of both the films. One just couldn’t escape them. One thing all the same always rankled me that I hadn’t seen Deewar, this fact was remedied by the post on Parveen Babi, where in the comment section, pacifist provided me with the link to the movie (bless her!).

In this post, I will just write down some thoughts to this landmark film and not write much about the story, I think many of my readers know it. If some don’t, Anu has given an excellent (nearly frame to frame) narration of the plot on her blog. Good insight in the film has also been provided by Philip Lutgendorf and at Upperstall. All three articles make good reading.

Possible Spoilers Ahead

 

My ten favourite Hindi film loris (lullabies) and Merry X’mas!

For Christmas, I was thinking of doing a Christmas song list. But I could come up only with aao tumhe chand pe le jaaye from Zakhmee [1975]. But then I thought Mother Mary and Joseph must have also sung some lullabies to baby Jesus, so why not a list of my ten favourite loris (lullabies).

Lullabies have not always been my favourite songs. Once when a 6 year old child at a friends place asked me to sing an Indian lullaby to him, I realized that I knew only few authentic lullabies in my mother tongue and soon I ended up singing filmi loris!  The child must have been pretty deaf or a great fan of off-tune singing. More evenings followed and made me realize how sweet basically loris are.

Some rules, which I followed for my list:
a) The person singing must be singing it to a child and not to a grown-up person
b) Only one song pro film

Well here they are! Try not to fall asleep while reading it! Yawn! 😉