The Official Blog Of Ritam Saha

The history of Indian cinema goes back 105 years to 1913, when Dadasaheb Phalke birthed the industry with a silent, 40 minute feature film, Raja Harishchandra . “A performance with 57000 photographs. A picture two miles long. All for only three annas” was Phalke's promotional line for Indian cinema's first film. However, when one takes a glance at its poster released in the prestigious “Times of India”, it is a disappointing far cry from the general layout of a film poster – it had no glossy pictures and thick fancy writing. Phalke would continue making films - all of them silent, after the elite audience he'd invited and the thousands who gathered to watch Raja Harishchandra at the Coronation Cinematograph said good things about his 57,000 pictures. However, the posters that accompanied would be as bland and full of writing as the first, at least until ten more years had passed. In the 1920s, Bollywood cinema (a portmanteau of Bombay and Hollywood, dubbed by the m...

Line Of Control Ritam Saha, July 22, 2018 Kolkata, India “Geopolitics and peace cannot go together”, commented nanaji , as he stared at the morning’s Times of India lying on the sofa. The front page had a large graphic and bold headlines which announced “Two Pak Rangers killed in gunfire near LoC”. As someone who's personally followed the papers each morning, this was probably the tenth or eleventh article on Pakistan I came across this month. In 1947, the British left the Indian subcontinent, dividing it as they went. What happened to be a united Punjab in the heart of the empirical colony was now divided into half with a pen across a map. For a first, India would be broken in two parts, one Hindu, one Muslim. On the western side, the state of West Pakistan was born. Curled up under the arm of the larger landmass of the newly formed India, the second, significantly smaller province of East Pakistan came into being. Seven million people crossed the newly drawn borders ...