Movie-love in cyberspace

MARQUEE

A few days ago I realised that this month marks 10 years since I first acquired an Internet connection at home. This led to speculation about the role the WWW played in my evolution as a movie-lover "" even to the point where it helped transfer a personal obsession to a professional sphere.

For a youngster in Delhi, the early 1990s was a lonely time if you were interested in something other than mainstream Hindi cinema "" it was marked by solitary treks to the video libraries of centres such as the British Council or Max Mueller, a copy of a thick movie guide in a polythene bag.

As a teenage Indian who was inexplicably and unreasonably passionate about Hollywood films of the 1930s, it was unthinkable that I would ever be able to discuss these with anyone else; it had to remain a privately-pursued hobby with no future (assuming, of course, that I wasn't going to move to the US and become a film historian).

When I got my first personal computer in 1995, a precious side-purchase was a CD-ROM titled Cinemania 96, a collection of film reviews, essays and "" most fascinatingly "" short clips from around 25 seminal American and British films.

Back then, being able to watch these scenes on a PC, without having to go out and rent a videocassette, seemed like the apotheosis of technology's wonders. But then the Internet made its advent and the parameters changed forever.

In the years that followed, I devotedly followed movie websites and blogs, sometimes contributing short pieces to them. My first paying assignment as a film writer came not for a print publication but for the now-defunct website Cafedilli, which "" the nature of the Net being what it is "" had no problem with a Delhi-based writer contributing articles about international cinema.

And though I'm not a great one for participating in online forums, it can be a stress-buster to occasionally log on to a site run by people with similar interests and take part in a short, intense discussion "" if only to remind myself that the world does contain other nutcases.

Of course, the nutcase factor runs in both directions. One of the recent pleasures of Net-surfing has been the discovery of excellent Bollywood blogs created by non-Indians with a fascination for Hindi cinema "" such as Beth Loves Bollywood (http://bethlovesbollywood.blogspot.com/), Filmiholic (http://filmiholic.com/) and the Post-Punk Cinema Club blog (http://p-pcc.blogspot.com), a treasure-chest of posts about Shashi Kapoor films of the 1960s (even a Bollywood historian would be astonished by some of the detail) and the declaration that "Shashi's designer curls have healing properties, his voice has been known to be more pleasurable than the consumption of opiates, and when he smiles golden rays of the sun shoot from his teeth".

Each time I make serendipitous discoveries like these, I marvel at my naivete in thinking that the Cinemania CD-ROM was the best it could get. On the Net, I've watched documentaries and behind-the-scenes footage that there would be little chance of getting hold of anywhere else; all of it contributes in an ongoing way to my movie-love and helps me grow as a writer too.

Who knows what the future will bring? It's conceivable that a time will come when anyone with a Net connection will be able to access a comprehensive shared online library and watch just about any film with minimum fuss on their computers (no laborious download times or storage issues) "" thus making DVD players and DVD collections redundant.

And of course, since this is an interactive medium, there could be a separate screen for the nerds, providing us snippets and added information/ commentary on each scene even as it plays. Or perhaps far more wondrous things lie ahead, things that our limited minds are incapable of yet imagining.

(jaiarjun@gmail.com)