We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
This neiv charmer from Bengal with those magnetic eyes is Protima Das Gupta. She costars with Sadhona Bose in "Raj Nartaki" the first English talkie produced in India by Wadia Movietone.
*
Girl on the Cover Jyoti in "Sanskar" a National picture.
Annual subscription inland Rs. 5/Foreign Rs. 8/ or Sh. 12. 3 dollars in U.S.A.
Proprietors: Filmindia Publications Ltd., 104, Apollo Street, Fort, Bombay
Editor: BABURAO PATEL
Vol. 6 OCTOBER 1940 No. 10
Percy -The Little Parsee Boy
"Bawaji, Bhook Lagi Chhe. Char Ana Apo" (Father, I am hungry. Please give me four annas). These words — spoken sweetly and melodiously inspite of their grim meaning — interrupted my reverie as 1 waited in my car for the driver to return with medicines for my ailing son.
The words had come from a young Parsee lad of fourteen, clean, fair and handsome. It was clear that his effort at begging was amateurish. Like the professional he did not even know that the standard coin of begging in Bombay was a pice. This boy had asked for four annas and in doing so had torn aside the too transparent cloak that covered the supposed prosperity of our Parsee community in Bombay.
My own son was ill because two doting parents had given him several comforts of life in excess. Just when I was buying medicine for my boy who had become a victim of our excessive affection, here was another boy of the same age, as handsome and well bred, suffering from hunger for which neither his parents nor he could be responsible.
The only medicine which that ailing boy needed was money to buy food. Money which his father had stopped earning, because of the Government'^ prohibition policy or because of the numerous other causes which have contributed to the present economic distress prevalent in the Parsee community.
Before paying the price of that hunger I asked the boy why he was begging. The story he told me was pathetic. The way he related it convinced me that he was telling the truth. That boy had not yet learned to tell any beggarly lies.
That boy had an old father, an old mother, two grown-up sistersj two younger brothers and his mother's aged sister — a family of eight, which till a year back was maintained by a small country-liquor shop in the suburbs of Bombay.
Prohibition had closed that shop. The old Parsi, after a life-time spent in measuring out country liquor, had to begin it all over again trying to learn new work.
3