westland ltd
Kitnay Aadmi Thay?
Diptakirti Chaudhuri has been a salesman for more than twelve years nowhaving sold soaps, soft drinks, oils and newspapers all over India.
His obsessive love for movies is a hereditary disease, which was nurtured during his engineering and MBA college days.
When not watching or reading about movies, he writes about them on his blog, Calcutta Chromosome (http://diptakirti.blogspot.com) or discusses them on Twitter (@diptakirti).
He has published a book for children on the 2011 cricket World Cup. This is his second book.
He lives in Gurgaon with his wife, a son and a daughter. None of them shares his obsessive love for the movies. Yet.
Kitnay Aadmi Thay?
Completely Useless Bollywood Trivia
D IPTAKIRTI C HAUDHURI
westland
westland ltd
Venkat Towers, 165, P.H. Road, Maduravoyal, Chennai 600 095
No. 38/10 (New No.5), Raghava Nagar, New Timber Yard Layout Banglore 560 026
Survery No. A - 9, II Floor, Moula Ali Industrial Area, Moula Ali Hyderabad 500 040
23/181 Anand Nagar, Nehru Road, Santacruz East, Mumbai 400055
4322/3 Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110 002
Published by Westland ltd 2012
Copyright Diptakirti Chaudhuri, 2012
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-93-81626-19-1
Typeset by Four Words Inc.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, circulated, and no reproduction in any form, in whole or in part (except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews) may be made without written permission of the publishers.
Acknowledgements
Without IMDb and YouTube, this book couldnt have been written. Those diligent souls who enrich these sites with meticulously tagged info and videos are mankinds gift to God.
The readers of Calcutta Chromosome were generous with their encouragement, exhortations and embellishments. Even the name of the book was crowd-sourced from the readers of the blog.
A special word of thanks to Brajesh Bajpai, who was convinced that I had to write this book. More than I was myself.
Udayan Chakrabarti read the very first draft of this book and loved it enough to criticise it mercilessly.
Pavan Jha shared his amazing knowledge and perspective of Hindi films and improved the book with his suggestions.
Arnab Ray (a.k.a. Greatbong) was a senior with his sage advice about book-writing and book-marketing.
Akanksha Sharma, Abhishek Kanodia and Rahul Fernandes jo Hindi ka bahut gyan rakhte HAIN corrected most of the dialogues in the book.
With his glowing recommendation, Bishwanath Ghosh found this book a home in Westland.
Prita Maitra of Westland was the calming oasis of reason and expertise in the chaotic madness of this book.
Aradhana Bisht of Westland was most helpful in putting the finishing touches.
Dyujoy and Drishti Chaudhuri made me realise there are fun things beside movies. Writing this book with them around me was the most fun Ive ever had.
I owe the last decade of my life to Trishna Chaudhuri for suffering me patiently (and sometimes, not-sopatiently). Maybe one day, she will learn to suffer bad Hindi movies too.
Kurt Vonnegut said that every book should be written to please just one person. I wrote this book to please two. Nilendu Misra and Shivaramakrishnan Krishnamurthy have been my sounding-boards, doppelgangers and co-authors for many years now.
And finally, this book is dedicated to the biggest Bollywood fan I know, someone who has not lost track from Rishi to Ranbir, from Stardust to Zoom .
Her name is Reeta Chaudhuri jo khush kismati se meri maa hai
Introduction
This book is for Bollywood fans.
If you love Disco Dancer , if you feel choked (or even better, cry) when Amitabh dies in Deewaar , if you know when Hrithik met Suzanne, if you have film magazines from a decade back this book is for you.
This book is about the favourite pastime of Bollywood fans.
Which are the ten best death scenes? Seven best sequels? Anupam Khers eight best performances? The twelve best comedies of all times? The whole parlour game of making listsand fighting endlessly over themis what this book is all about. Currently, blood is being shed in college canteens, on internet discussion forums, over a drink, to decide the ten best Gulzar-RD partnerships. This book is not intended to stop those battles but to fuel them.
(BTW, none of the above lists appears in this book.)
This book is about getting more people to join in the game.
This book is incomplete. But before you ask for your money back, I can assure you it is more fun this way. It presents you with names on a list and you are supposed to come up with more. Scribble in the extra names on the margins. Call up your childhood buddy in Alwar and ask him how many films he remembers in which Amitabh played a Sikh. Feel superior if an obvious title is missing.
Enjoy!
O PENING C REDITS
Movies should have a beginning, a middle and an end. G EORGES F RANJU
But not necessarily in that order. J EAN -L UC G ODARD
Lights, Popcorn, Action:
10 Opening Credits
A s you struggle to open the slightly oily packet of chips, the lights go off, making the already difficult job of locating the seal impossible. You also stop tugging at the polythene and concentrate on the list of people who are going to fill your next three hoursand maybe the rest of your lifewith meaning.
No amount of pre-release hype or music-channel song promos can bring about a surge of adrenaline as a rocking opening credits sequence does. And while some do it with mirrors, Bollywood does it with a mix of cool devices.
Pre-credit Backstory Compression
One of the most popular devicestill the 1980swas an attempt to knock off the socio-historical context of the film, motivation of the hero and the emergence of the key characters before the titles so that the real story can begin. It took economy of expression to a completely new level and said more in these 22 minutes than in the next 222!
There were many filmmakers who employed this device but nobody did it better than Manmohan Desai.
In his biggest hit, he separated a family of five in a matter of eight minutes. The father got into a gun-battle with a smuggler and escaped with a crate of gold biscuits. The mother was rendered blind by the falling branch of a tree. Their three sons were picked up by a Hindu police officer, a Muslim tailor and a Christian priest but not before all of them had left tons of identifiers to pick up years later.
Years passed and we came to an accident site where a blind flower-lady was hit badly and urgently needed blood.
A Christian do-gooder took her to the hospital. A Hindu police inspector was at the hospital to lodge the case. A Muslim qawwali singer was also there, flirting with a lady doctor. All of them were found to be the same blood group as the blind lady and they were all co-opted to donate some blood.
As the transfusion started, a doctor asked them their names. And as the titles came on, they told us. Amar Akbar Anthony .
Hit song
One of the most popular previews of a Hindi film is always the music. And no better way to promote it than to put it right upfront when the audience is settling down and the stars of the film are being announced.
