If you’re a movie buff and in Delhi on October 31, please mark your calendars. Penguin India is organising a screening of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Guddi at the India Habitat Centre’s amphitheatre at 7 pm. (Update: the screening will be at the Stein Auditorium.) I’ll be doing a very short introduction, and we can have a brief discussion after the film if there are enough interested people around. Copies of the book will, of course, be available at the venue.
For those of you who don’t know, or need a memory-jog, Guddi was Jaya Bhaduri’s first Hindi film: she plays Kusum, a school-girl besotted with Dharmendra, and she gets a glimpse into the inner workings of the Dream Factory when her uncle (played by Utpal Dutt) partners with Dharmendra himself to lift the scales from Kusum’s eyes. For reasons covered in the book, this is one of the Hrishi-da films that is very close to my heart, and I find it intriguing that he made it at a point in his career (just after the uncompromising Satyakam, just before the warmer, more audience-friendly films like Anand, Bawarchi and Chupke Chupke) when he was introspecting a great deal about his own place in the film industry; about the position he occupied on the art-commerce spectrum; about how to realise personal visions while keeping producers and viewers happy.
Please spread the word about the screening. And if you have Halloween parties to attend afterwards, feel free to bring your masks and costumes. The film is about naatak-baazi anyway…
For those of you who don’t know, or need a memory-jog, Guddi was Jaya Bhaduri’s first Hindi film: she plays Kusum, a school-girl besotted with Dharmendra, and she gets a glimpse into the inner workings of the Dream Factory when her uncle (played by Utpal Dutt) partners with Dharmendra himself to lift the scales from Kusum’s eyes. For reasons covered in the book, this is one of the Hrishi-da films that is very close to my heart, and I find it intriguing that he made it at a point in his career (just after the uncompromising Satyakam, just before the warmer, more audience-friendly films like Anand, Bawarchi and Chupke Chupke) when he was introspecting a great deal about his own place in the film industry; about the position he occupied on the art-commerce spectrum; about how to realise personal visions while keeping producers and viewers happy.
Please spread the word about the screening. And if you have Halloween parties to attend afterwards, feel free to bring your masks and costumes. The film is about naatak-baazi anyway…
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