Rock-a-bye baby.

At the foot of my bed is a steel cupboard. As I lie in bed reading, I sometimes lower the book and look up. My eyes fall on the very special baby rocker stored on top of it. This rocker was specially made when I was born in 1936 in my uncle’s house opposite the Roxy Cinema close to the Royal Opera House. At that time, my father was a Presidency Magistrate presiding at the Girgaum Police Court one the top floor of which the Mankars resided at that time before they moved to 233 Khetwadi Main Road. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/08/family-car.html. The rocker is a rectangular cage open at the top with columns on three sides and two poles at the centre of each of the shorter sides. There is a detachable strip on top resting on two knobs at the end of the poles. The aforesaid poles extend downwards and are fitted with two crescents at the floor-level end that allow it to rock without losing its balance or stability. The wood is of an excellent quality and the craftsmanship is so intricate and exquisite that the final effect is what you would call a work of art. You put a baby bed in the cage, cover it, add pillows and bolsters to make the baby safe and secure, slip a mosquito net over the top strip. Quite ingenious, what? Apart from me, several other babies have been rocked to sleep in this rocker. My three nieces: Rekha (now in New Zealand), Shubhada (still in Mumbai), Dnyanada (now a medical practitioner in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada), our sons Ashu and Abhi as well as Ashu’s younger daughter Avantika (now in the US of A one and all) are the ones that readily come to mind. It’s possible that the rocker may have rocked many more infants in its seventy and odd years on Planet Earth. (In fact, Ujwal says she can think of at least two more occasions when the rocker went to homes of strangers.) Of the seven known babies it rocked, five now happen to live abroad. This may be no more than a coincidence, of course. I remember the name-giving (christening) ceremony of Ashu. The father’s and the mother’s respective sisters “give” out, i.e., announce, the names chosen by either side. (In Ashu’s case, the two names were Ashutosh, a name of Lord Shiva, and Ashish = "benediction".) Before that, the baby is lifted by one of the aunts and passed to her counterpart from under the bottom of the rocker – a somewhat dicey and risky procedure as far as the poor infant is concerned. I remember seeing this curious rigmarole on six occasions, five of them at 233 Khetwadi Main Road.

It’s only a film.

Ashok Kumar was one hell of an endearing actor. Totally a non-cliché, non-method performer who claimed to have told a fellow artiste of the opposite persuasion: "Hey Charlie. It's only a film. Take it easy," he later laughingly admitted to film critic Khalid Mohamed that he had borrowed the idea from Hitch. By and by, he became the quintessential actor who never was, I daresay. He wanted to be a film technician when he left Bhagalpur for Bombay, you see. I'm certain he was fallible. I'm equally certain he would have been the first to admit it. He was terrified of his very first heroine (Devika Rani, I suspect), he confessed. The first of his last two films I saw on the idiot box a week before his exit from the divinely produced, directed and scripted movie we all feature in was Khoobsoorat, c. 1980. In it, he kept calling his soon-to-be 'bahu' (Rekha) "girl friend". The other one, called Harfan Maula (1976), was full of cinematic clichés one associates with the seventies' Bollywood comedy-thrillers. (In the Ultraindia.com filmography, 'HM' is listed as a 'family drama', though.) So what? Each one of them was "only a film", as he would have said. An Ashok Kumar Filmography of sorts can be found at http://www.ultraindia.com/movies/filmography/filmography.php?choice=2&na=Ashok%20Kumar.