Montage of a Bollywood legend

Book review of A Patchwork Quilt: A Collage of My Creative Life

A black-and-white photograph from the sets of the 1981 hit film  Chashme Buddoor has circulated on social media for a while. In it, director Sai Paranjpye demonstrates how to light a cigarette with some style while actors Farooq Shaikh and Saeed Jaffrey look on. For a keen lover of Bollywood films, Sai Paranjpye is a legend — and for good reasons. Her films such as Sparsh (1980), Katha (1983), and Saaz (1998), created a niche for themselves among the formula films of the 1970s and 1980s, with their realistic, empathetic humour. They not only brought in bagsful of national and