Flowers bloom on Chowringhee Lane

When my cousin asked me about movies that I had watched recently, I laughed and reminded her that our movie tastes do not always coincide.  I told her about two movies that we had watched, and strongly recommended them.

Right from a young age, I have gravitated towards the non-commercial, non-formulaic, movies. One of my greatest complaints when growing up was that the "art" movies were not shown in theatres near me.

Fortunately, television solved that problem.

One of those non-commercial movies that I watched and enjoyed, and one which made me think a lot, was 36 Chowringhee Lane.  I was impressed with every aspect of the movie.  About how the story was told. About the story itself.  And about the director being a woman!

The main character there was an Anglo-Indian woman.  Only because of that movie did I know that she was the wife of one of the big-time commercial Hindi actors--Shashi Kapoor.  I felt a personal loss when she, Jennifer Kendal, died soon after I came to know about her.

Now, more than three decades later, Shashi Kapoor is also dead.

Balbir Raj Kapoor was born on March 18, 1938, in what was then Calcutta (now Kolkata). He had no trouble breaking into the movie business: His father was Prithviraj Kapoor, a famous actor. His mother was the former Ramsarni Mehra.
Shashi, as he became known, was still a child when he appeared in his first films, in the 1940s and ’50s.

There is so much of a dynastic effect in some professions, especially in movies.

Shashi Kapoor, too, was more than a mere lip-syncing Bollywood actor:

In 1963 he played a teacher in the domestic comedy “The Householder,” directed by James Ivory and produced by Ismail Merchant, the first of a series of films Mr. Kapoor made for that production team.

Yep, that Ivory-Merchant team that gave us all those awesome movies in which nobody danced around trees!

But, as much as I loved the non-commercial movies, I loved the junk-food that the commercial ones were. Not because of any weighty stories that helped understand the human condition.  Nope, those Bollywood movies couldn't care about them. Shashi Kapoor himself talked about it:

“Of course, a lot of these films look silly,” he told The Times for an article about how movies had become a sort of balm for India’s poor. “But this is exactly what people want, pure escapism. You have people who are uneducated, poor, hungry — they want to escape from all that, they want and need some unreality.”

I couldn't understand the language too.  But, there was one thing that was awesome in those movies--the melodies of many of those film songs.

My favorite of the Shashi Kapoor film songs is this one, particularly because of the classical raaga that is the basis of the tune.

Yes, Shashi Kapoor did what was expected in the commercial Bollywood. Like life itself, it is all a part of the package.