RAJESH KHANNA'S GREAT GIG IN THE SKY

Post by: Narendra Kusnur

The Hindi Cinema Blog would like to thank Narendra Kusnur for accepting to have his article, celebrating Rajesh Khanna's life, talent and career, featured in our blog. Narendra is passionate about music and has turned his passion into his activity through music journalism and handling music projects for important labels in India. He writes informative and clever musings on Indian and international music at Kaansen Kalling and we music buffs at HCB continuously learn from him. It is a true pleasure to feature your thoughtful tribute to Rajesh Khanna, Narendra!
 

Ten days after leaving Mother Earth, Rajesh Khanna is wondering how he will settle in Paradise, when he is escorted to a door marked ‘Hindi Film Superstars’. It is one of many rooms given to newcomers based on their achievements in life. There, residents are allowed to spend exactly a year, before they move to a larger place called ‘Super Heaven’.

Before knocking the door, Khanna is very keen to visit the neighbouring room called ‘Musicians’, where Mehdi Hassan, Bhupen Hazarika and Jagjit Singh are rehearsing a song, composed by Ravi and featuring Sultan Khan on sarangi. But the director-general of Paradise insists that he can only enter the ‘Hindi Film Superstars’ room.

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TERI MERI KAHAANI Film Review

Guest post by Amer Shoib from The Cinema Journal

Amer Shoib has been a huge fan of cinema from childhood and has always been a huge Amitabh Bachchan fan. Amer works in London and has made his dream of becoming a part time entertainment correspondent come true. As such, Amer has interviewed some of the biggest figures in entertainment, the media and major celebrities and is an avid cinema watcher and reviewer.

  

The trailers of Kunal Kohli's Teri Meri Kahaani made us all think that the film was a reincarnation drama. Seeing the three different looks of the lead pair Shahid Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra over three different eras, there were speculations that the film might have the lead pair reborn again and again. However, "Teri Meri Kahaani" is not a reincarnation film. It's a love story of three different pairs spread over three generations". Can Kunal Kohli strike gold with this hatke love story?

Can we truly luv one person throughout our life and hope that fate makes us meet with the same person in every life of ours? 

The story of the film takes us through a journey of eternal love between a couple who have vowed to love each other not only in this life but in every life to follow. Their love is so strong that destiny wants to bring them together. The story starts in 1969 Bombay with Govind and Ruksar, then moves ahead to present times, 2012 England with Radha and Krish and then goes back in time to Punjab, 1910 with Aradhana and Javed.

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GROW UP, BOLLYWOOD GIRLS!

Guest post by Dolce from the Dolce and Namak Talk Indian Movies blog

Dolce (Italian for “sweet”) is an Eastern European movie addict (Indian movies to be precise) who has made Toronto, Canada her home over the past few years. She has an endless infectious enthusiasm for movies, songs, settings, dances, badassness and everything else that makes Indian movies a world of their own. You may visit Dolce's blog by clicking here..
 

One of the biggest disadvantages of having a group of friends where everyone is 3-5 years younger than you is that you're always waiting for people to grow up. You keep making excuses for them and keep saying: they'll grow up when they get a real job, they'll grow up when they find a steady girlfriend/boyfriend, they'll grow up when they move out, etc. And there is some truth to that because that is usually how people learn responsibility and maturity. In fact, on the opposite end, the most telling sign that someone is refusing to grow up is that they will do anything (and I mean ANYthing) to not get a full-time job, or what we call a "real" job.

In a way, Bollywood is like these friends of mine: it keeps refusing to let its heroines (and heroes sometimes) grow up. In real life, if someone is responsible enough to keep a real job and live on their own, we also expect them to be emotionally mature. (Of course that expectation can backfire horribly, but that's for a different day to discuss.) But Bollywood, as I have discovered, doesn't like emotionally mature characters. It follows logically that they cannot have jobs (or if they do they're in the artistic realm), live on their own or make reasonable (read: mature) decisions. So... they don't.

I have already discussed in my blog that a fair percentage of the male characters have become manchildren (without actually getting to the bottom of why that is, but we might get there in this post), so it's only right to now discuss what type of female characters will suit these boys. Not surprisingly: girls! Not women. Girls. Sometimes (not very often, thankfully!) manic pixie dream girls and other times just girls in the process of growing up along with their hero. But girls nonetheless.

Look around at Bollywood movies from the past two decades: how many women can we count and how many girls? And of those women, how many are the heroine? Moreover, how many of those heroines end up with the hero? Three questions, each worth exploring in some detail.

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VICKY DONOR: More than a Find... a Hit!

 

Backed by John Abraham's production and cool promotional video, Vicky Donor surprises by thinking out of the box in all departments: its subject, its excellent acting (Yes! No humongous stars in this one but still lots of bang for your buck!), cute and funny script and last but not least, a pleasant soundtrack. With all this working for the film, there is no going wrong with Shoojit Sircar's comedy.

New Delhi is the setting of Dr Baldev Chaddha's (Annu Kapoor) failing fertility clinic and sperm bank. Dr. Chaddha's problems seem solved when he meets Vicky Arora (Ayushmann Khurrana), a handsome young man who lives with his mother struggling to make ends meet. Dr. Chaddha is convinced that Vicky is the donor who would erase all his sperm bank woes. His duty remains to convince the young man, and once this happens, one wonders what the future love life of Vicky will become.

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TOP 10 ROAD TRIP MOVIES OF THIS CENTURY

Guest post by: Arnab Maity

Arnab is at simultaneously a photographer, a seasoned traveler and a software analyst from Bangalore who also delights his readers and photography enthusiasts regularly at his own blog: www.arnabmaity.com His never ending wanderlust has contributed to making him develop a keen taste for road movies. Fly away with him and his list of Top 10 Road Trips of the Century from all over the world, which features a couple of our own Hindi language favorites.

We all love our road trips, don’t we? That orifice to vent out the vapors of our day to day chores, to bring us out into the open, sometimes gifting unusual sights and sometimes making us meet unusual people, who leave a mark throughout our lives.

We all have such road trips in our lives, which had changed many a thing about us and there are many such movies which have inspired us to leave our couches and get onto to the road!

This compilation consists of those movies, which had left us thinking and made us pack our bags, to explore the unexplored and meet the unknown.

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