Walking Manto’s Bombay

Related post HERE.

Excerpt: “This spring I went on a journey in search of Manto’s city with the journalist Rafique Baghdadi, flaneur par excellence of Bombay. Rafique himself could have stepped out of one of Manto’s tales. He lives in a tiny single room near Mazagon docks, surrounded by canyon walls of books stacked floor to ceiling. A narrow passage of floor leads to a table and chair by the window. Rafique not only has an encyclopedic knowledge of Bombay and its history, he has also walked all of its streets. He seems to know every shopkeeper in every quarter of the city, and he is steeped in the world of cinema.”

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Prints of old classics go up in flames — Mumbai Mirror

A sad day indeed! In general, the neglect of our cinematic heritage is pitiful (most of the time the prints of even famous films are in such poor condition that when watches a film like — e.g. — Kinara (from well into the 1970s; I saw this a few months ago but one could come up with any number of films) it is very difficult to appreciate the visuals; the film might as well be from World War I. — Qalandar

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Indian cinema lost some of its greatest milestones forever to a fire which broke out at the Borivli office of the legendary film studio, The Bombay Talkies Limited, on Thursday.

Mirror has it, masterprints of around 60 films were reduced to ashes. These included