FilmIndia (1940)

September 1940 FILMINDIA can see hundreds of these aspirants to film fame, begging, cajoling threatening the pathan to grant them entrance. There they flock in their tawdry finery. Rain or shine, they are always there. ... living monuments of human despair. GONE WITH THE WIND! They no longer covet 'hero' roles nor do they hanker for careers any more.... all that has gone with their respectability deep into the sloth and slush of Bombay. It is jobs they want now; whether coolie, servant or tea-boy does not matter ....so long as they can cross the forbidden frontiers of the film studio outside whose gates they have come to realize all the pangs of starvation and all the miseries of the damned. How long can humanity suffer? How long can the pangs of the stomach be suppressed? Alas, not for long. Man must eat, and from then onwards it does not matter from where the food comes.... no job is too bad, no occupation too gross, no work too low. Gone with the wind are those dreams of glamour which once a heavy stomach helped to illustrate restless nights. The stomach was empty now and its pangs kept the eyes open through days and nights. Only the weight of food can now close the thin eyelids. If you are observant enough and if you happen to be as inquisitive as I am, you may probably see the dreamer of film fame selling newspapers in the streets, or serving ."ou single cups of tea in hotels, or you may even find him lurking in shady lanes waiting to guide you to brothels and prostitutes. Even this is not the end. From this desperate plight to crime is but a small step, and most of these 'glamour' struck young men take the fatal step. I cannot relate here within the confines of this short article ail the sordid details of the gradual decline of the hapless youth who happens to come to Bombay in search of film fame. Homeless, friendless and penniless his end is slow but sure. LEILA IN SEVERAL BEDS The woman's story is still more pathetic. Her's is a problem that affects the very roots of society. The young girl who leaves a sheltered home and hearth and sometimes even a college for the glamour of the screen is soon disillusioned. Unlike the male of the species, she is often received with open arms, literal embraces. Unscrupulous men in film studios, like hungry birds of prey, await her arrival as r choice tit-bit. She is flattered, petted and fawned. All the artifices of che seducer are practised on her. She is promised a film career and made to believe that she is to become the 'screen sensation' ut the year. The promises, hopes and dreams nu-jt in the morning when she v akes up in a foreign bei. That ia the beginning of the end. The story goes on, she drifts from bed to bed. Her glamour gradually wears off the end is written with a red lantern or a parrot case in the window of some decrepit building— an eloquent epitaph over a soul that was once a woman. Countless are the women in Bombay who will tell you with tears in their eyes of the happy homes they left behind in search of film fame. Some are bitter, some just shrug their shoulders and resign their fate to kismet, while most of them develop into hardened hussies. This is where the trail of the elusive film glamour ended for them.... in the gutters of Bombay, where food demanded the price of human flesh and blood. I could give you an endless list of the women who have had to sell bodies and souls to appease the hunger in their stomachs while in search of a film career, but would it be any use? No. It would not. For as long as there is glamour attached to the screen, youth will come. And we cannot take away glamour from the screen and leave anything behind. Thus an industry that is born of make-believe has to be fed with the blood of battered youth, the agonies of despair and shattered hopes of countless hearts — a sad case of realism helping illusion. But cannot the juggernaut of destruction as it passes on, from glitter to glamour, pause awhile to look upon the pulp it has left behind of them who have sacrificed their everything on the altars of film fame? No! Fools rush in, where angels fear to tread. And here's Sarojini and Bacha together in "Dipak Mahal" a Mohan picture. 21