FilmIndia (1946)

October, 1946 FILMINDL Filmindia's famous cover artist S. M. Pandit has become news in America and Canada. They want him there but his little studio in Shivaji Park, Dadar, Bombay, has also queues of nroducers waiting: for his remarkable colour designs. India mustn't lose this artist. Fransjordan and Syria, where the burning summer sun creates a temperate of 160 degrees by day and no natural shade exists over hundreds of miles. In winter the temperature drops as much as a hundred and thirty degrees from this level. Life under natural conditions is almost impossible for human beings, and no tribes live actually in the desert itself. Even the Bedouins, natural nomads of Arabia's sandy wastes, do not settle there, passing through only when necessary to seek a change of pasture. Searing winds which literally scorch the flesh in summer, icy blasts which freeze the limbs in winter, render this desolate-waste land habitable only on camels or swift moving animals like gazelles. The only habitations seen by passengers on the trans-desert coach route' from Baghdad to Syria are the Iraqi Petrol-nun Company Stations. These little colonies in the ^desert, surrounded by barbed wire and stone walls, pump the oil through the pipelines, which start far away to the north near the Iraqi-Turkish border. Each station i< self-contained, with its own hospital and amusements, and the British staffs in these encampments live, sometimes with their families, exiled from civilization and the faces of their own kind. A visit to a cinema, (if you feel like going to a cinema l involves a little jaunt of 300 miles. Outside the walls of the station lie the naid-brick dwellings of Arab workers and pipeline guards. CAPTURED BY ARAB PRINCE It was in these surroundings that the Tarzan boy was found, and nearly lost his life, when Prince Lawrence Al-Shaalan was out on a hunting expedition. ,lI was astonished to see what looked like a boy running among a herd of gazelles we were chasing." he told me. "I called to the occupants of the other cars to stop shooting, and we concentrated on chasing the herd. We were still far away, but could see that the boy was running as fast as the gazelles. We chased the herd for •")0 miles, during which time he kept up with them, bounding along with a half-human, half-animal gait. Suddenly the herd dispersed and we saw the boy stumble and fall. '"When we came up to him we found that his leg had been injured by a large stone which had brought him down. He looked up at us with fear starting from his luminous eyes and shrank from our touch, emitting cries like a wounded gazelle. "I took him to my home and tried to feed and cloth? him. but he refused both. The first day he ran away several times, making bis escape by jumping from one roof to another until he landed in the street. We sent every available car and horse after him. eventually recapturing him after a chase lasting two hours. This decided me to take him to Dr. Jalbout at the Petroleum Company station." COULD OUTRUN CHAMPIONS Dr. Jalbout scoffed at any suggestions that the boy is in any way an unnatural monstrosity. He acts, eats and cries like any ga*elle, but I have no doubt that he is a human being who has lived all his life among gazelles." he said. "I believe that his mother lost or abandoned him when he was an infant and the gazelles found him and brought him up as one of their own young. I believe lie is the fastest human being on earth and can make every running record ridiculous." In his early days he would have lived on the milk of the female gazelles, and then learned to crop the sparse desert herbage along with the herd. This diet, while sufficient to keep him alive and extremely strong — thanks largely to a naturally strong constitution — is inadequate to keep a human being in good health for any long period. If he had not been found, it is doubtful whether he could have survived to full manhood. A Syrian expert of desert lore •xpressed no surprise at the story in Damascus this week. It often happens, he said, that Bedouin women giving oirtb in the desert abandon the babies to the mercy of nature. Such babies almost invariably die. but in extremely rare cases one is found, adopted and brought up by wild animals. Music-director Hansraj Behel will be front-page news in 1946-47. His remarkable t' nes in "Gvalan", produced by Mi. Baburao Patel. proclaim him 'o be an outstanding musician with a rare talent fr film music. 43