A lot has happened since the Toronto premiere of The Golden Pen… it was premiered in New York City under the auspices of the Foreign Policy Association at Scandinavia House.

The even drew a near packed house with a lot of media. For me the highlight was being on stage with my brother, Sarwar Kashmeri and answering questions, some of them from Americans and South Asians who knew Aghajani Kashmeri, our father, personally.

Then there were reporters such as Renee Lobo, who put together a brilliant 24-minute special on her TV show called The Renee Lobo report that airs in several parts of the United States. You can watch it below.

Watch this video on YouTube.

• OMNI-2 in Ontario on Sunday, May 20 at 9 p.m. in English;
• OMNI-2 in Ontario on Sunday, May 27 at 9 p.m. in Hindi/Urdu;
• OMNI Alberta Sunday, May 27 at 9 p.m. (played in most of Western Canada except B.C.);
• OMNI B.C. on Sunday, May 27 at 10 p.m.

Watch this video on YouTube.

As we mentioned earlier, The Golden Pen was selected to premiere at Toronto’s ReelWorld Film Festival on April 13 (the video above with Zuhair Kashmeri introducing the documentary was from the premiere); won a runners-up in the short documentary category at the Winter 2012 Asians on Film Festival in West Hollywood; and has its New York premiere on June 6, 2012, hosted by the prestigious Foreign Policy Association in Manhattan.

This has been an amazing journey for me, much as it was an amazing journey for my father, from his hometown of Lucknow, India (not Lucknow, Ontario) to Toronto, Canada.

Enjoy and after you watch the doc, please return here to http://thegoldenpen.ca, leave your comments or e-mail us.

The golden pen has been awarded an Honourable Mention as the runners up in the Best Short – Documentary Category at the Asians on film festival in west hollywood, california. The first place went to Merde! which was directed by Earl McDaniel III.

The announcement was made barely three days after The Golden Pen was premiered on Friday, April 13, before a packed audience at the ReelWorld Film Festival in Toronto. A full video report of the premiere and an animated Q&A will be on this site shortly.

The tremendous reception at the premiere was way beyond our expectations. We were graced with directors such as Shakun Batra, whose Bollywood movie Ek Main aur Ek Tu, was also premiered at the festival. And now we have been showered with recognition from a well-know West Coast festival that specializes in a certain genre of films.  This sort of recognition would have  been impossible but for the team involved in filming and putting together The Golden Pen.

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COMING SOON: A FULL VIDEO OF THE GOLDEN PEN’S TORONTO PREMIERE AND AN ANIMATED Q&A.

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The Asians on Film Festival recognition was in the Winter 2012 Awards segment. Films that win in each season award go on to compete for the annual big award at the end of the year. Here is a blurb on the festival on its own website:

 MISSION & OBJECTIVE OF THE AoF FESTIVAL

Asians On Film Festival is an extension of the website www.AsiansOnFilm.com and like the website, our mission is to provide recognition to Asian/Pacific Islanders who work in the English language film industries (not necessarily in English language films) either as actors, actresses, writers, directors, producers, editors and/or those who work in other aspects of filmmaking. Our primary focus are films from the USA, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand where recognition of Asian/Pacific Islander talent is often overlooked because of their minority status. With the festival as an extension of the website, we are committed to promotion via news, information, interviews and recognition given by the festival. We hope to show the world talent that otherwise may be missed. With readership in 187 countries we expect the marriage of the website and the festival will provide an amazing forum for great films.

 ABOUT THE FESTIVAL

New films are being released every day, every month of the year. We therefore, do not constrain recognition of films to a yearly event, but have an open rolling deadline so that we can recognize films when filmmakers are ready to have the world see them! The online format also enables us to give recognition and awards to films at the start of their festival run that will help them promote their work and be a means to get acceptance into other festivals.

Because the format of the festival is designed so that films can receive immediate attention, films that meet a minimum creative standard as determined by the panel of judges are accepted and considered for quarterly awards (short films) or bi-annual awards (feature films) as they are received, but not screened. The unlisted deadline for short films submission is the last day of each quarter (March, June, September, December) and for feature films the last day of June and December. Films will be screened by a panel of individuals who work in the film industry, not random people off the street! Winners in a variety of categories will be determined and posted the following month after the end of a quarter and online certificate awards will be given out. Winners will automatically become nominees for the yearly awards.

For the still uninitiated, The Golden Pen is about the life of Aghajani Kashmeri and unfolds through the stories told by his descendants and a historian in Lucknow.  In Mumbai, the heart of Bollywood, the film picks up with footage from his films, interviews Bollywood actors such as the late Shammi Kapoor and Joy Mukherjee, and the veteran sweetheart of early Bollywood, Nimmi. Others such as Amin Sayani of the radio show that could make or break movies, Binaca Geet Mala or hit parade, reminisce about a man who entertained six generations of Indians, and was a celebrity who lost much of his wealth on the racetrack before finally moving to Toronto late in life.

In the upcoming weeks, we are looking to use this site and our Facebook page as platforms to share more information about the film and the incredible life of Aghajani Kashmeri, so if that is something you’re interested in please join us on Facebook or check back here regularly.

Finally, we sincerely hope that you can join us April 13th in Toronto as we celebrate Aghajani Kashmeri, a man who lived to make movies, with a cinematic tribute told with the deepest admiration by those that knew him best. If you cannot make it, stay tuned for our upcoming Television premiere on Omni-TV and other screening opportunities as they are announced.

Click here to read the full press release.

Watch this video on YouTube.

We begin of course in Lucknow, Aghajani Kashmeri’s

Just before he ran away to become a Bollywood hero (CLICK to enlarge)

birthplace, the city in Northern India that raised him, the city where he imbibed Urdu poetry and literature,

rubbing shoulders with the most famous Urdu writers and poets, being taken on as the pupil (shagird, in Urdu) of Arzoo Lucknowi, the giant among poets in those days. No wonder that he decided in his late teens that his classroom would not be in front of a blackboard.

Rare still of Aghajani in Zamindar with Begum Akhtar

Arzoo’s most famous quatrain is about his first sexual encounter, first night, after reading a heavy tome on love. The whole experience is like a blizzard and the book is lost in translation. As the blizzard continues, the book wonders whatever happened to the logic it had imparted to its reader! Babba’s life was like a blizzard, to the end. Both his own autobiography, Sahar Hone Tak, and the documentary bear witness to this.

But given the finite nature of books and the superficiality of timing in a documentary, there is a lot of interesting but extraneous material that is left out. I am going to try and recreate some of that here, in the hope that a bell goes off in the mind of somebody out there. And a comment or many comments appear on the post like the magic of day and night, the seasons, love.

In Jawani ka Nasha with Begum Akhtar and Khalil, produced in Calcutta

Lucknow is a city that survived the wrath of the English Raj after the mutiny of 1857, in which scores of English men and women were slaughtered. The revenge for this was taken in usurious compound interest. But it was also a city where the Urdu language, the language of Bollywood, came into full bloom, after being born in the southern Indian Deccan region and growing up in Delhi, as writer and historian Nasir Abid tells us in the doc.

It was a city where Hedonism, the pleasure of the senses, always clashed with Islam, the religion of the Nawabs who ruled Oudh (Uttar Pradesh or UP today), whose capital was Lucknow. And hedonism always won out, giving rise to Urdu and Hindi literature and poetry, painting, drama, classical Indian dancing and of course magnificent architecture. Almost every well-known neighbourhood would at least once a week see a neighbourhood mushaira or poetry session, in which ghazal, a very distinct poetic genre made up of couplets and quatrains, would be recited or sung. This was Aghajani’s hangout. And this rubbing shoulders with the doyens of Urdu literature, writers of epic stories and fantasies and love tales, poets whose horizons knew no boundary, would propel him to the top of the heap in Bollywood in later years.

(Even in later years, the neighbourhood poetry sessions stayed with him as did the poets he had surpassed in fame although not in the quality of verse. Some of them would stay with him until the end. Among the great ones who would always visit him was the poet Josh Malihabadi.  My father’s assistant was Majnu Lucknowi (Munnawar Agha Majnu). In later years, when Josh would visit from Pakistan, everybody from lyricist Rajinder Krishan, Shakeel Badayuni, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Ali Sardar Jafri, and others woulg congregate at our home, along with Begum Akhtar. Scotch would flow freely. Poetry would be written and Begum Akhtar would sing the freshly minted verse in her sonorous voice. In one such session, I remember meeting Haji Mastaan, the well known gold smuggler and billionaire, with his assistant Aziz. Mastaan is the central character in a 2010 offbeat Bollywood flick called Once Upon a Time in Bombay. I realized from my mother’s scrapbook that he connected his old master, Arzoo, with the famous producer and director Mehboob Khan and arranged for him to write the lyrics for one film. Arzoo being a purist, soon faded away from Bollywood for good reason.)

Still from the movie for which he ran away from home... CLICK TO ENLARGE

Eventually, Babba, as I called him, would run away from Lucknow to join the movies – Bollywood in those days was a disreputable industry and children from so-called good families did not contemplate a future in the movies, even though in the early 1900s, India was already the third largest movie industry in the world. Today of course it is the largest. He had been offered the lead role in a movie being shot in Rangoon – yes, the header shot of this website is from that movie, Shan-e-Subhan. A friend typed him a letter purportedly that he was getting a job as an assistant manager of a tea estate in Darjeeling. And he was gone, first to Rangoon where his escapades had me rolling in laughter on the floor. One of them is recounted in his obituary published in the Toronto Globe and Mail that you can read by clicking here.

His next stop was Calcutta (Kolkata today) where he acted in several films, joining his

Aghajani Kashmeri as Rustom in Ameena

first cousin, the famous character actor, Nawab Kashmiri. In between roles, he would also help write dialogues, but his heart was set on becoming a hero in the Bollywood of the day. Something had to give and it was not happening. In the interim he became friends with a co-Lucknowee, a charming and very artistic woman from a city called Faizabad, near Lucknow, whose literary upbringing matched that of my father. She was quickly becoming the nightingale of Urdu ghazal singing.

Her name was Akhtaribai Faizabadi, who

Aghajani Kashmeri almost seemed as if he could carry it off!

eventually, after several lead roles, married a Bombay (today Mumbai) lawyer and took on the honorific, Begum Akhtar. Aghajani’s writing career was not going anywhere, and as he described to me, Begum Akhtar sat him down one day and pointed to the hero of a film in which he was a supporting actor – six feet something, a hunk who towered above Aghajani. My father got the message, and quickly agreed with a film producer that he would end an affair his was having with a supporting actress desired by the man for a sum of money and a train ticket to Bombay!

Next stop Bollywood. There is so much more I can tell you, but much of that will have to come out from his autobiography that I am translating. Stay tuned!

PS. In the slideshow of Aghajani Kashmeri’s Lucknow below, you can hear Begum Akhtar singing a famous ghazal by Mir Taqimir of Lucknow whose opening lines are: “Na socha na samjha, na seekha na janaa // Mujhe aagayaa, khud ba khud dil lagana.” (I didn’t think or understand it, learned it or mastered it // Giving away my heart just happened, little by little, bit by bit.”

Life they say is full of pleasant surprises. For me, one of them came when I was in the middle of translating my father’s autobiography, Sahar Hone Tak, and making notes for a documentary proposal I was going to make to OMNI-TV for a one-hour TV show on Babba.

I was rummaging through a large box containing the personal possessions of my father.

More on this 1934 film in the next installment of scrapbook...

My wife Carlotta Cattani had already dived into some other boxes and discovered several rare photographs of my dad during his early bid to become a Bollywood hero in Calcutta (Kolkatta). To my pleasant surprise, I found that Adda my mother (Khursheed Kashmeri, nee Khursheed Kabiruddin Kazi) had kept a scrapbook which contained even more gems, everything from Babba’s filmography to the reviews of his movies, little pamphlets of rare films that I had no idea he had written or in which he had acted. It even included invitations to the premiere of several of his movies.

That scrapbook proved invaluable during the production of The Golden Pen, giving me material, ideas and inspiration. It became the sum and substance of my Bollywood dad. And I drew heavily from Adda’s scrapbook as we plowed ahead with the documentary, battling everything from a shortage of funds to the kind of red tape that besets all governments. Now of course I am finding more and more sites listing his early films, one of them being movietalkies.com. He is variouisly listed in these films as Aghajan, Aghajani, and sometimes as Aghajani Kashmiri, a popular variant of the spelling he chose as his last name, Kashmeri.

My intention is to share the contents of the scrapbook with you, or at least part of the contents that I believe would be of interest to those of you who’ve experienced Bollywood up to the 1970s. And of course to those of you who take a keen interest in the history of the Indian cinema.

In the early 1930s, Aghajani Kashmeri was just one of hundreds who were part of the building blocks that laid the foundation for today’s mega cinema emanating from India. But Adda’s scrapbook that she so dilligently kept and maintained provide us with pictures and program booklets (yes, in those days every movie had its own program booklet for the audience) and reviews give us an insight into Bollywood’s history. A pictorial and popular history rather than a tome churned out by anthropologists or anthropologist wanna-be’s!

So stay tuned… and be patient as I put together the next installment of Babba’s scrapbook.

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It is hard to believe that the most flamboyant star of Bollywood, an actor who lived life to the fullest, driving the fanciest cars and drinking the finest Scotch whiskies, has passed away, just nine months after being interviewed by me for The Golden Pen, a documentary on the life of my father, Aghajani Kashmeri, being produced in Canada with funding from OMNI-TV.

How can I or anyone else from my generation forget the most famous song, better known as the Yahoo song, in his best known hit, Junglee, written by my father. More on that later in this post. Watch just the song and you’ll understand why he was also called the Elvis Presley of India.

My father and Shammi were the best of friends. Somewhere in my files, I still have Shammi’s condolence letter written to me in 1998, when my father passed away in Toronto, Canada. The two shared the zest for life, for films and for everything beautiful and nice. Although we could not include the entire interview in the one-hour documentary, I am hoping to include it in the DVD that I produce next year of the documentary.

I still remember Shammi’s words on camera: I love life even though three of my toes have been amputated and a fourth one will go soon and I am on a wheelchair. I still get into my Mercedes Benz, drive to Lonavla (a hill station about one hour away from Mumbai), have a coffee, turn around and come back.

He backed my father in every which way, especially when Babba was publishing his autobiography in the 1960s, Sahar Hone Tak, and never stopped talking about the book. The two would often spend time together at Chowpatty Beach, as Shammi recounts in The Golden Pen, eating pani puree, drinking coconut water, chatting about everything from soccer and good looking actresses to philosophy and life and politics. “Not necessarily movies,” Shammi told us.

The two also shared a zest for good food with their favourite Scotch whisky, Dimple. I did manage to find this old Black & White photograph of the two sitting before a veritable feast at Shammi’s home. He had an incredible chef. And as the picture bears witness, they are too busy eating to even talk to each other, when otherwise they couldn’t stop talking to each other.

I have such fond memories of your father, Shammi Kapoor told me, that you can’t even imagine. They were so close that he even knew the route that Babba took in his evening walks and would often drive by there deliberately to bump into him and pick him up for snacks and a hearty conversation by the Arabian Sea.

In another part of the interview, he recounted how he once flew my father down to Southern India where he was shooting a film. He was not happy with a scene and the writer of the film could not oblige. “I wanted Aghajani down to rewrite it for me,” he said. Babba went over, rewrote the scene and only then did he shoot it.

Babba also wrote his most famous movie, Junglee, the first movie of Saira Banu, freshly returned from a finishing school in England. Babba trained Saira Banu for her first role. Junglee, for those who have seen it, is still remembered for the famous Yahoo yell that Shammi Kapoor gives as he dives ont he snow in Kashmir and slides down to the bottom with Saira. It is know as the Yahoo song and when listening to it this morning, I could imagine Shammis soul streaking across the heavens singing Yahoo, Chahay koi mujhay Junglee kahay…

Wherever you are Shammiji, keep a shot of Dimple for me when I join you up there and of course one for your old friend Aghajani Kashmeri! I have no doubt that you will continue to liven up the ambience wherever you go.

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I reproduce below news stories on his death published in The Times of India and The Indian Express:

Shammi Kapoor Passes Away

Courtesy: Times of India, August 14, 2011

MUMBAI: Veteran actor Shammi Kapoor, hailed as ‘Elvis Presley of India’ and whose famous yell ‘Yahoo’ signified the arrival of a rebel star against the reigning trio of his time Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand and Dilip Kumar, passed away here on Sunday morning due to chronic renal failure.

The 79-year-old legend, who was often compared to Elvis Presley due to his looks, was in the ICU of Breach Candy Hospital and breathed his last on Sunday morning, family sources said.

The funeral will take place on Monday morning, they informed.

Kapoor is survived by his wife Neeladevi, son Aditya Raj, daughter Kachan Desai.

For the last few years, he was undergoing dialysis for three days a week.

Born Shamsher Raj Kapoor on October 21, 1931, Kapoor was the middle son of veteran theatre and film actor Prithviraj Kapoor and younger brother of showman Raj Kapoor.

Despite his family background, Shammi’s entry into Bollywood was initially not successful even though he worked with major heroines like Madhubala in Rail ka dibba, Suraiya in Shama Parwana and Nalini Jaywant in Hum Sab Chor Hai.

His initial movies flopped at the box office. He reinvented himself with Tumsa Nahi Dekha cutting his hair in the famous duck-tail style of the 50s and never looked back since then.

With the success of Junglee in 1961, an entire decade reeled under its colourful impact.

Shammi heralded the swinging 60s and a large part of his appeal was primarily due to the immensely catchy and upbeat numbers like “Suku Suku”,”O Haseena Zulfo wali”, “Aaj kal tere mere pyar ke charche”, “Aaja Aaja Main hoon Pyar tera” where he was at his boisterous best.

Even though success came with light weight tales like Kashmir ki kali, Rajkumar, Jaanwar and An evening in Paris, his performances in flicks like Junglee, Badtameez, Bluff Master and Pagla Kahin Ka, Teesri Manzil, Brahmachari silenced his critics.

Andaz released in 1971 was his last movie as a leading man but his character roles in Vidhata, Hero, Prem Rog were well received.

Shammi was a computer aficionado and his last years were veered towards spiritualism.

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Veteran Actor Shammi Kapoor passes away

Courtesy: India Express News Service Posted online: Sun Aug 14 2011, 09:50 hrs

Mumbai : Actor Shammi Kapoor, who ruled the film industry in 1950s and 1960s with his flamboyant, charismatic personality, is no more. He was 79.

A prominent member of the Kapoor clan and brother to Raj Kapoor and Shashi Kapoor, the actor died of kidney failure at the Breach Candy Hospital at 5.15 am today, his son Aditya Raj Kapoor said.

“He was a very happy and lively person. He was unwell for sometime. He was on dialysis. He died of kidney failure,” said Aditya.

His funeral will take place tomorrow in south Mumbai, after his grandson returns from the US.

“The funeral will take place tomorrow at around 9 am at the Ban Ganga funeral ground,” said Aditya.

Family members, friends, several Bollywood personalities including Amitabh Bachchan and industrialist Anil Ambani visited Kapoor’s residence Blue Heaven at Malabar Hill after learning of his demise.

His death was mourned by Rajinikanth, Amitabh Bachchan, Lata Mangeshkar, Yash Chopra, Anupam Kher, Mahesh Bhatt, Sharmila Tagore, Deepika Padukone and Priyanka Chopra.

Shamsher Raj Kapoor was born on 21 October 1931 to Prithviraj Kapoor and Ramsarni Mehra. With the demise of Shammi, only Shashi is left of the famous brother trio.

Shammi is survived by his wife Neela Devi, son Aditya Raj and daughter Kanchan Desai. Shammi entered the film industry as a junior artiste in 1948 and debuted as an actor in 1953 with film ‘Jeevan Jyoti’.

He carved a niche for himself with his rock ‘n’ roll dancing style in films like Nasir Hussain’s ‘Tumsa Nahin Dekha’, ‘Dil Deke Dekho’. But it was 1961 film ‘Junglee’, directed by Subodh Mukherjee, which gave him the image of ‘The Yahoo Yuppie’.

The Nasir-Shammi combination struck gold at the box-office with murder mystery ‘Teesri Manzil’, one of the unforgettable films in the actor’s career.

Shammi never really bid adieu to the big screen, appearing in films time and again. He starred with Shah Rukh Khan in ‘Chamatkar’ (1992) and played Salman Khan’s grandfather in ‘Janam Samjha Karo’ (1999).

If shooting “THE GOLDEN PEN — Following the Footsteps of a Bollywood Scriptwriter” in the city of Lucknow was like a romp through fantasyland, filming in Mumbai was like stepping back in time, despite the vibrancy of a metropolis that I and everyone I know still call Bombay.

As we walked up Cumballa Hill Road, the street where Babba, my father, moved to after he wrote hit after hit, and rented a flat in a building called Keki Court, it did not seem like anything had changed.

The tiny cigarette shop at the foot of the Lane was still there and I could have sworn that the bidiwala had aged chronologically backwards. But no, it was his son Suresh.

The only difference: with globalism and liberalization of trade, Lucky Strike and Marlborough could now be purchased at more reasonable prices. Talk of marketing death with panache.

In the nooks and crannies where I played marbles and fought pitched battles, a strange silence prevailed, almost as if all the children had disappeared, followed the pied piper to a distant shore.

As we filmed in the nooks and crannies of the street, strangely enough, no crowds assembled. But then why should they? None of us resembled a matinee idol from Bollywood. So there was this white man from somewhere in the West, walking up and down with a large camera, filming the strangest things. But it wasn’t Bollywood. Not even from yesteryear.

That Bollywood was in the one-room flat piled to the ceiling with books on movies and newspapers that had seen better times. This was the home of Rafique Baghdadi, a veteran Mumbai journalist and a specialist in movies and Bollywood. He is also the convenor of the film group of the Mumbai Press Club, showing a film every week and introducing its genre before its screening.

To meet the Bollywood of yesteryear we paid a visit to Ameen Sayani, whose sonorous voice still echoes in the minds of hundreds of millions of Indians and Indian expats. After all his Binaca Geet Mala (hit parade) could make or break a movie.

He was our neighbour on Cumballa Hill Road, living in Parvez Mansion across from us, in a building that is now a 30 odd storey skyscraper lying vacant as its ownership dispute goes through the Mumbai courts, a process that on average takes up to 20 years! Babba would be on his show often, explaining the intricacies of Urdu poetry and giving his take on the latest heroine to make Bollywood.

“He had an eye for beauty, there would be a twinkle in his eyes every time he saw a pretty young woman. No wonder he wrote such fabulous romantic dialogues’, said Ameen Bhai as I called him.

We filmed Joy Mukherji (Mukherjee), one of many actors chosen and trained by Aghajani. He recalled how nervous he was in his first movie, Love in Simla, produced by his father Sashadar or simply S. Mukherji. “After he taught me, I found acting so simple and enjoyed it, when getting an award I told in front of the whole film industry: Aghajani was my guru, he taught me to talk, walk, act… I wish he was here to listen to me. But he is no more.”

Shammi Kapoor, one of the famous trio of brothers, and the man who made the call “yahoo” famous across the land in India’s first Technicolor film Junglee. It was written of course by one of his favourite writers, Aghajani, a man, as he put it with a big smile, with whom he finished many a bottle of Dimple scotch, and then listened intently as Aghajani recited love poetry in Urdu. The language of Bollywood, even though people refer to Bollywood flicks as “Hindi movies,” is a mix between Urdu and Hindi, actually mostly Urdu because of its sweetness and extravagance in the affairs of the heart and its quick turn of phrase.

Listen to anthropologist Tejaswini Ganti, in his highly entertaining and instructive book on Bollywood since its early inception, whose tome is a must for anybody hoping to understand the largest movie industry in the world. (“Bollywood: A Guidebook to Indian Cinema” by Tejaswini Ganti, publishers Routledge, 2001.)

While Urdu is a language that originated and is spoken in northern India – the present-day state of Uttar Pradesh – it became the official language of Pakistan. Due to the political tensions between India and Pakistan and the association of Urdu with Muslims, a process that the British initiated in the nineteenth century, Urdu literature and scholarship in India suffered from official neglect as resources were poured into developing and spreading a highly Sanskritized Hindi. Hindi films however continued to be made in Hindustani and many prominent Urdu poets worked as lyricists within the Bombay film industry. It is hard to imagine film songs or dialogues without the vocabulary, metaphors, and idioms derived from Urdu language and literature. Words for love (pyar, ishq, mohabbat), heart (dil), law (kanoon), justice (insaaf), honor (izzat), duty (farz), blood (khoon), emotion (jazbaat), crime (jurm), and wealth (daulat) – all central concepts in Hindi cinema – are from Urdu’s Persian and Arabic-derived vocabulary.

So what were the real and early days of Bollywood like? The thousands who fled their homes, their towns and villages and cities, in search of the becoming the next matinee idol? In search of an excitement that brought with it artistic achievement and fame, and of course money? An actress named Nimmi was our entry into that part of Bollywood history. She was a star in the 1950s, with movies such as Amar, Mela, Mere Mehboob, Deedar, Bhai Bhai and the super hits Udan Katola and Barsaat.

She also happens to be my bhabi, married to my first cousin and Aghajani’s nephew, Ali Raza. Babba established him by involving him as a co-writer in Andaz, a super hit with Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor. She spoke to us about the trials and tribulations of making it in early Bollywood and of the artistic talents, mostly picked up in the cultural hodgepodge that was Lucknow.

There is SO MUCH footage from these interviews that we could not use and I am hoping to include this raw footage in a special DVD edition of our documentary. I am sure this will be of interest to fans, Bollywood enthusiasts, researchers, amateur historians and writers alike.

NEXT STEP: The completed version of THE GOLDEN PEN, its launch date, stations across Canada where it will be aired, its availability and our plans for distributing this worldwide.

Mail us at info@thegoldenpen.ca