Sudipta's Life

When I was in my school till class 10, singing any Hindi song was blasphemy. Within the little world we had, we were convinced that every form of Hindi music outside was out there to corrupt our minds, and therefore not listening to them was the best way of keeping the outside influence out. You know, no garbage in and hence no garbage out. We had our own set of songs to sing: Rabindrasangeet, Bhakti-geeti, Ramprasadi, Nazrul-geeti, etc. I believe that we learned a great deal from these songs at that time -- my love for these genres of songs and music stems from the time I spent there reading, singing and assimilating them. However, whenever I went home and listened to good Hindi music I secretly liked it, although I never admitted that. You gotta practice what you preach, y'know. After leaving this school, I started listening to Hindi music. This was part rebellion, and part realization that among the many good things taught there, some crap came through as well. So I started humm...

I am sure all of us have our own classic movie favourites. Or at least, movies that we consider to be good movies, can-watch-again-sometime movies. How many times have you taken home the subtle message embedded in the movies? The inevitable summary of these messages is to tell you abour the good, the bad and the ugly. Just after the Second World War, Germany became the bad guys on all movies. The Dirty Dozen, the Bridge over the River Kwai, The Longest Day, The Guns of Navarone: some of the best movies I've seen. You have to see them to experience the passion, fear and the joys of those times. Even at home, we had the attrocities of the British on our movies, books and plays for a long time before and after our independence. I'm not talking about the more recent movies though. Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line or Schindler's List: they were a different class of movies. These were re-takes of the horrors of the wars, because better technology permitted bringing them to ...