Talking movies (and other things) on Amit Varma's podcast

Did a long, free-flowing chat – mainly about movie love – with Amit Varma for his excellent podcast The Seen and the Unseen; the link is here.

 

Amit is a super curator, and the conversation was very stimulating as it happened (we recorded between roughly 9 pm and 1 AM a few days ago), but as is usually the case with any such talk I wasn’t too happy with myself – felt like I ended up articulating only a fraction of what I would have liked to say. Later I looked through the rough notes I had made on a word-file and wanted to smack myself on the head with a blunt instrument for all the stuff I had left out and the things I had just blanked out on. Given that Amit had encouraged me to make this as personal as possible, there was much else I might have said about the early years of my journey as a film buff (things that I am currently also trying to write about in my personal essays about the late 80s and early 90s, a couple of which have been published on this blog in the past 2-3 months).

Still, we’ll do a follow-up conversation at some point. And there should be some things of interest in this one too, for those of you who have the time/patience to listen to a long chat between two people who first met during the heady, pre-social-media days when blogs were the most exciting things on the internet.

 

P.S. the recording itself was done as a video chat so that we would have visual cues, allowing the conversation to proceed smoothly. Early on, as Amit and I were filling our coffee cups, we realised the cups had a weirdly similar colour scheme - so Amit took this screenshot for posterity.

(On the other hand, our tastes in cinema sometimes differ drastically, as you can tell from parts of the conversation. Poor Amit must be traumatised by how many of his recent guests have turned out to be Sanjay Leela Bhansali defenders!)