| Sigh... Those were the days... |
[02 Sep 2004|12:00am] |
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mood |
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 nostalgic |
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music |
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Tears In Heaven - Eric Clapton |
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I wish I was a space man.
The fastest guy alive.
I'd fly you round the universe,
In Fireball XL-5.
Way out in space together,
Compass of the sky,
My heart would be a fireball,
A fireball,
Everytime I gazed into your starry eyes.
We'd take the path to Jupiter,
And maybe very soon.
We'd cruise along the Milky Way,
And land upon the moon.
To our wonderland of stardust,
We'll zoom our way to Mars,
My heart would be a fireball,
A fireball,
If you would be my Venus of the stars.
~~
Cable has ruined my TV watching experience completely...!
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| Down memory lane... |
[02 Sep 2004|12:23pm] |
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mood |
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seriously reminiscing |
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music |
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Romeo and Juliet - Dire Straits |
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My parents bought our first television, a black and white TOSHIBA set, a short while before the 1980 Moscow Olympics (if my memory serves me right)... We were the first family in our apartment building in Bombay to own one and very soon our house transformed into a post-dinner hangout spot for all and sundry... At least until the neighbours upstairs bought a set of their own and the craze about having one eventually died out...
Back in the early 80s Doordarshan was the only channel on air, trying desperately to juggle it's various priorities of family entertainment, distance learning, rural programming, etc. and did a fair job too...!
Anyone growing up in Bombay during the 80s would probably remember Carl Sagan's Cosmos... We all wanted to be astrophysicists...! Then there was a host of sci-fi serials... William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy playing Kirk and Spock in Star Trek...! As kids we made our very own communicators out of discarded matchboxes and rubber bands and created our own Trek-universe between the stilts of our apartment building... And then there was Fireball XL-5 with Colonel Steve Zodiac at the helm... A brilliantly executed supermarionation... That was a huge rage I remember... The original theme was composed and conducted by Barry Gray and performed by Don Spencer if I'm not mistaken... (that should probably explain my cryptic post of last night)
And we weren't total pseuds either... DD had a whole bunch of home grown programming in Hindi and vernac languages... Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi remains totally unforgettable... The first of the desi sitcoms, it put together Swaroop Sampat, Shafi Inamdar and Rakesh Bedi in really memorable roles and directed by Kundan Shah (a la Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron)... The fact that the series was shot entirely on a single camera set-up makes the effort all the more commendable...! (imagine the same Kundan Shah directing utterly avoidable films like Hum To Mohabbat Karega..!)
We had Raghubir Yadav playing the daydreaming protagonist in Mungerilal Ke Haseen Sapne and Anjan Srivastav as RK Laxman's common man in Wagle Ki Duniya... There was also Dilip Prabhavalkar doing a Marathi take on MKHS in Chimanrao...
Buniyad and Hum Log, the forerunners to the now ubiquitous afternoon soaps... But unlike today, both the soaps had depth to their characterisations... Even as kids we could connect to Chhutki and Lallu and Babuji... There was Govind Nihalani's Tamas with it's very disturbing partition imagery... And serialised versions of the short stories and plays of Tolstoy, Muapassant and others would run on Sunday mornings... After the kids had had their fill of Disney hour, Star Trek, Cosmos and UFO...
The 80s with the solitary, state-run TV channel weren't such a bad time after all... In fact, today my TV shows upwards of a hundred channels and there's not one show that's really up there...
~~
And all I do is kiss you through the bars of a rhyme
Juliet I'll do the stars with you anytime.
Mark Knopfler's gravelly voice can be very seductive...
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