Golden Age of Hindi Film Music...In Ten Episodes

I will take one giant leap forward from 1962 to 1971. Charles Manson and his death cult, the so-called 'Manson family', were sentenced to death  by the courts - it was  later commuted to life in prison in 1972 - for what were called the Tate-LaBianca murders, one of the most gruesome serial killings in the US at that time.  I had recently watched a Netflix series called 'The Mindhunter', about a breakthrough effort, in the 70s,  by the Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI that revolutionized the methods used by law enforcement agencies to profile criminals. The interviews with the serial killers like Charles Manson and Edmund Kemper that helped device these methods were  at once fascinating and deeply disturbing. Fascinating for the insights into the psychology of serial killers that it provided and disturbing for how brutal and psychotic these seemingly intelligent and, at least in Kemper's case, affable people could be. The other big event of 1971 was the India-...

Prithviraj Kapoor, the progenitor of the Kapoor khandaan, was a pioneering film actor and a passionate dramatist. He had this habit of being associated to greatness, like Forrest Gump. 'Alam Ara' the first Indian talkie, 'Awara' the movie that set the entire Eastern Bloc on fire, and 'Mughal-e-Azam', K. Asif's obsession and arguably the biggest Indian movie ever made (yeah, bigger than 'Bahubali', factoring for inflation), all had Prithviraj Kapoor playing pivotal roles. It was his passion for acting that brought the Kapoors from Peshawar to Bombay, and enabled them to eventually acquire the mantle of the First Family of tinsel town. But Prithviraj's actual calling was elsewhere. He was a sucker for theater. To a point where he literally bankrolled his fervor for it with his movie earnings. In 1944, he founded Prithvi Theater, a hundred-plus-strong, traveling troupe that went all around the country and staged Hindi plays. Over time, they complete...