My Filmy Connection

All of a sudden two film related events popped into my life last week. One was that I was getting a chance to meet a young and famous director of Telugu movies and the other was the advertisement I saw somewhere yesterday about a weeklong 'Film Appreciation Course' at Bangalore next month. I had been for years trying to do this course because I want to know something more about films and film making though I don't watch many movies. I am wondering if I can make it to the course this year because it is in Bangalore and not at Pune which was where it is usually conducted at the FTII campus.



Sometime back, three or four years ago, I along with Hari wrote stories for a couple of episodes for a popular Telugu weekly humor show- 'Amrutham' that was telecast on Sunday night on Gemini TV. Nowadays it seems to have become a daily serial on a different channel. We had a lot of fun doing those few episodes apart from earning a few thousand rupees. The serial was the brainchild of Gunnam Ganga Raju who produced several popular films, the latest being 'Anukokunda Oka Roju' and 'Amma Cheppindi' in Telugu. So it was the nearest I ever came to meet a film personality though I would have loved to meet an actress.



But this week I will be meeting Indraganti Mohana Krishna, director of the award winning film in Telugu, 'Grahanam' and the more recent 'Maya Bazar' starring Bhumika. I had once dreamt of writing scripts and still do so it will be a wonderful chance to learn more about films from him. His new film 'Ashta Chemma' is ready for release in the next few weeks. The interesting thing about it is that it is produced by Hari's brother Rammohan, an IIM alumni. Watch this space for the post about the meeting with Indraganti. I have to watch his movies before I meet him so I can ask him some intelligent sounding questions

Monday Musings

Saturday being a holiday for me and too hot to go out, I picked up a whole bunch of newspapers on the way back from home. I had planned to read all of them thoroughly but my attention span being what it is I could only skim the headlines. One thing I noticed was that the Saturday supplements of all the papers- The New Indian Express with its ‘Expresso’, ‘TV and Cinema’ of Deccan Chronicle and ‘Weekend’ of The Hindu have all gone tabloid. The latest to change was The Hindu.

There was news of two book readings in the city in the papers. One was by Anju Poddar on Saturday at the ITC Kakatiya and the reading on Sunday evening at Taj Deccan was by Shobhaa De. I haven’t read any of De’s books but enjoy some of her columns in the TOI. I did not attend either of the book readings and stayed put at home. The ‘Outlook’ magazine’s latest issue carried a rather interesting review of Shobhaa De’s latest book by Bhaichand Patel.

The constituency I live in is going to the bye polls at the end of the month and the election fever has already started. It began with a massive traffic jam on Saturday due to a procession taken out by one of the candidates. Yesterday evening one of my neighbours kept popping into all the houses in our lane to inform excitedly that a candidate he supports was visiting our lane. I have never faced a candidate on a house-to-house visit so was a bit nervous what to say. But in the end, the candidate didn’t turn up and my neighbor was not to be seen for the rest of the evening.

In the run up to election day the clamour is only going to increase so much that one will be upto the neck in posters, leaflets and banners. One happy side effect of the bye-election that it would be a holiday on election day, that is 29th of May. There are no holidays until the end of July so it comes as a welcome break.