When I had first heard about a film actor called Vishnuvardhan, I was already a die hard fan of ‘our’ Rajkumar. Not that I had seen much of Rajkumar’s films, but he was the undisputed favorite. Vishnuvardhan was the guy who had accidentally pulled the trigger of a rifle during the shooting of the film [...]

After whacking my brain left, right and center, the other day I decided that I would become Dadasaheb Phalke in my previous birth. Why not? I may not have introduced cinema into India, but like Phalke sir, I too had carried a projector to show my films in Indian villages. At some point in his [...]

On the eve of the Deepavali festival, I had to urgently send a couple of DVD copies of a film of mine to a Film Festival. At the government post office that I normally frequent, out of the two multi purpose counters where one could register posts, only one was operational. The second one was [...]

Once upon a time, many years back, I had made a short film that was budgeted to around three hundred rupees - the then cost of a digital video tape. The shooting location was my ex-180 square foot house and my camera assistant was a crumpled Sony PD 150 manual.  
There was a struggling actor living close [...]

The Udupi restaurant near the railway station was surprisingly quite empty. I had with me my new glasses. But before I could have a ‘first day-first show’ look at it, the waiter waived a menu card at me. ‘Idli Sambaar’ was a big bore and quickies like ‘Upma’ and ‘Shira’ were out of stock. Before [...]

As the last shot of the film ran through the sound studio projector, the three minute flute piece for the yet to be done end titles, had already begun. The re-recordist’s fingers were alert, ready on the faders and my sound designer gave a smiley sigh of relief. The mixing of my children’s film was [...]

‘The audience does not want to see your images. It shells out money because it wants to see faces’, declared the elderly colorist from a film laboratory in Mumbai, in an almost godly tone. His voice had a – I have seen it all, kid – kind of feel to it.  
Our film which neither had [...]

The thrill of meeting a celebrity is something that one can’t describe with words. As a kid, when I first saw Dr Rajkumar, the Kannada actor, my joy new no bounds. It was a life ambition being fulfilled.  
A few years later I saw, in very close quarters, Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Mr. Lal Krishna Advani [...]

It is quite a job to be judging someone or a film or a work of art; leave alone adjudicating one among many as the best. I have been involved in quite a few situations where either someone has judged my work or I have judged someone’s. 
Scanning other people’s work to evaluate it gives you [...]

A few days back, when I had just finished the shooting of a project, the children who were with us for a whole month or so acting in it, felt sad that it was all getting over. One little child even had uncontrollable tears pouring from her eyes. It triggered the memories of two seemingly [...]