On 5 and 6 April 2006, I shot for a documentary on late Mr. Chetan Anand, a well known senior Bollywood director. This documentary, titled ‘Poetics of Film’ is mainly supposed to consist of interviews of personalities who had a chance to work with Chetan Anand. Though many of his contemporaries are now no more, a few names that are short listed to be part of this 50 min long film are Hema Malini, Rajesh Khanna, Dharmendra… among others. We already shot with Shekhar Kapoor, Johny Bakhshi (film producer), Bhupinder Singh (singer/music director) and classical singer Shafqat Ali from Pakistan. Tom Alter is the anchor person for the film.

DVD of this documentary is supposed to be a part of the Mr. Chetan Anand’s biography being penned by Ms. Uma Anand, Mr. Chetan Anand’s ex-wife and mother of both his sons Ketan and Vivek.
It was so nice to meet Bhupinder especially after a very long time. We know each other since my first Navketan film, Ishq Ishq Ishq (1974). Today he had to sing a little for the camera and he did sing very well. He told me that he too has a web site now; but funnily he had to call his wife Mitali to tell me its domain name, which was surprisingly as predictable as bhupindermitali.com.

PS: As we all know many of the people mentioned above, who are/or were or supposed to be part of this documentary are no more – late Rajesh Khanna, late Johny Bakhshi, late Tom Alter, late Bhupinder Singh.

(From my archive 2006)