Remembering Sahir Ludhianvi on his birth centenary: The man who chose to challenge
Sahir Ludhianvi may not have given his songs feminist voices often enough, but when he did, these voices were loud, proud and challenging.
The first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of Sahir Ludhianviâs writing is his progressive writing, his socialist spirit and of course his romantic shayari.
This year Sahir sahabâs birth centenary and International Womenâs Day come together on the eighth of March, and today my thoughts turn towards his advocacy for womenâs rights, through popular film music.
The general drift of classical Urdu poetry dictated that a manâs feelings about a woman take centre stage. The poet would praise his belovedâs beauty, chide her âbewafayiâ and romanticise their relationship. But Sahirâs narrative of relationships was often equal, where the lover and beloved conversed (through lyric) on equal terms. And sometimes one even
The changing face of hindi film entrepreneurs
A still from Band Baaja Baaraat
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Scam 1992 (on Sony Liv), which told the story of
Harshad Mehta in granular detail, was the breakthrough series. It followed his rise from a lowly stockbroker to a messiah who controlled the fate of the market, painting Mehta as simultaneously arrogant and ambitious, irrepressible and charismatic, leaping from risk to risk without a care for failure. It was the most compelling portrait yet of an entrepreneur on Indian screens.
In the black-and-white era, as well as the first two decades of colour cinema in India, film characters with an entrepreneurial spirit were rare. There were practical reasons for this. In the post-independence years, it was difficult for young people to strike out on their own. When the hero in a 1950s or 60s film ran a business or ran from it, like Shammi Kapoor in