One very distinct happy childhood memory I have is that of watching classic B&W movies in the ‘open air theatre’ of our colony. The ‘open air theatre’ was nothing more than an open, multi-purpose ground, at the end of which was a house whose wall was painted white to serve as the ‘screen’. About 25 feet from the ‘screen’ was a raised mount made of brick-work on which the 16 mm projector was mounted. A temporary connection from a nearby electricity pole was pulled to this mount before every screening. I believe an official notice regarding the screening was put up on the colony’s notice board but we never looked there for the intimation. Everyone just always knew which movie was to be screened and on which date. On the said date, people would start trickling to the site early in the evening, carrying with them their own chairs, durries etc for sitting as the management didn’t provide the chairs. Contrary to what people prefer to do in a theatre, there was a scramble for a place closest to the screen, not for a better view, but to make sure they got access to clear audio, since the speakers were placed near the screen and the audio wasn’t exactly dolby quality. On most occasions, the movie ‘reels’- a set of four or five rolls of films contained in a tin case- used to arrive much in advance, but sometimes the arrival got delayed due to a variety of reasons. On such occasions, the crowd would impatiently wait for the ‘reels’ to arrive, and when they did, usually in a jeep, there would be a collective euphoric roar in the crowd along with another scrambling of people to regain their places in the ‘theatre’. The movie would then proceed with as many numbers of breaks as the number of reels because they would need to change them on the projector. As kids we saw most Bollywood classics as we grew up in the colony- Shree 420, Awara, Aah, Barsat Ki raat, Anarkali, Maghal-e-Aazam, Pakeezah, Jagte Raho, Garam Hawa, Teesri manzil, Wo kaun thi, Mother India, do aankhein bara haath, and Saraswati Chandra just to name a few. There would be a few vendors near the venue selling their merchandise of chana jor garam, peanuts and the like. The screenings used to take place all year round except during monsoon and exam season. Unlike these days, summers used to be very pleasant with cool breeze blowing through the evenings. In winters people used to wrap themselves in blankets, both for the cold and to fend of the mosquitoes. The uncle who was in-charge of screening movies was the dad of one of my class-mates, and many times, when the movie reel would have arrived sufficiently in advance, and the projector would be lying idle in his home, we would do a ‘special’ screening for ourselves by making one of the walls in his home the screen and blackening out the room by pulling the drapes across. This way we would then annoy the crowd by shouting out the dialogues in advance as the movie progressed later in the evening. The uncles and the aunts would then shoo us away. It has now been many, many years since I went to the colony, but I’m sure there are no longer any open air screenings of movies there. The said ground was a multi-purpose one- we all played cricket there, and during dussehra, Ramlila was enacted on a stage that was built on the other end of the ground, opposite to where the movies were screened. During the navratris, this ground was used for garbas, and for the bonfire during the Lohri celebrations. I now wonder if even the ground exists or not. It could have easily been abandoned because the houses surrounding the ground were very old and could have been long since demolished by now. One of these days I plan to visit my colony once again, and if the ground is still there, I would like to just linger around it, and try to listen to the echoes of the dialogues of Dev Anand, Nargis and Raj Kapoor, and try to the find the kid in me that I lost somewhere around there, many, many years ago…
Posted on: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 06:33:49 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015