Where will we be without good cinema?

I had to fall in love with cinema!

As a kid we were allowed to watch animation, Ray’s Feluda series and Hollywood family movies!

Dad loves classis – from My Fair Lady to Sound of Music, (a family Christmas favourite) from South Pacific to Gigi, from A Tale of two Cities to It Happened One Night, from Sabrina to Roman Holiday, from A Bridge on the River Kwai to Mutiny on the Bounty - as a kid I used watch these with wide eyed fascination – some of them made sense – some of them didn’t – but it was almost always a lot of fun!

My relationship with cinema was budding still!

From when I was about 12 years old Mom started dragging me to film festivals with her - I was her little lamb really... wherever she went I followed and as much as I may have grumbled then – I thank the Lord for all that I soaked in! World cinema made its presence felt!

Truffaut, Fellini, Goddard, Kurosawa, co-existed with Chaplin, Hitchcock, Ray, Mani Ratnam, Bimal Roy, Hrishikesh Mukherjee and before I realized films to me became the most enthralling adventure! I fell in love with Robert Redford, Naseeruddin Shah and Al Pacino, (is there a Freudian thing about older men here – I wonder!!!) was fascinated by Smita Patil, Audrey Hepburn and Meryl Streep.

Filled with kaleidoscopic enchantment where images from Nayakan, Rain Man, Kagemusha, Ran, Darsu Uzala, How Green Was My valley, Sparsh, Ek Pal, Masoom, Golmaal, Mili – old classics and new gems all swirled together in my mind’s palette! I was captivated 

And I simply couldn’t have enough! It was a full- blown affair now! My idea of 'me time' was locking myself in a room and watching films back to back through the day – eyes agog! (The max I have done is 10 films so far!)

When I moved to Bombay – saw what actually goes on behind the scenes, how things really work – the blood, the sweat, the toil – my fate was sealed! This dynamic mindboggling and complex art form, where each canvas has this humungous talent pool behind it – awe inspiring to say the least, captured my imagination completely!

My perspective has undergone many a paradigm shift, but cinema owns me now – it’s a life long relationship – here to stay!

Big film or small - the work that goes in, is pretty much the same  - for a smaller film its a little more actually, as they need to be cautious about budgets, but when you sit in the theatres, its not about the budgets its about the canvas unspooling in front of you capturing your imagination!

There’s a lot of money going in to moviemaking today – but what’s sad though is that content takes the back seat often – my heart sinks each time I see a vacuous vaunting piece on celluloid which is only about the monies spent and the stars who are in it, rather than the story – like a cold substandard piece of art that gets by, because its become a fad through hype created by the PR machinery while many a little gem falls by the way side due to the lack of it!

I love cinema and hope we find that middle path where in some cases quality and quantity make a happy marriage! Because, where will we be without good cinema?