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Articles on Hindi Films

Details: Published: 15 April 2020; Last Updated: 15 April 2020

Chicago Tribune July 1946

Now You Know!

Misc 71

Details: Published: 28 April 2020; Last Updated: 28 April 2020

Hindi Film Geet Kosh (1931-1985) on the Internet

Summary: Revised and expanded edition of the Geet Kosh is under preparation and will be put on a ad-free website.

Here is a summary of some excerpts of My Story, My Words from HFGK Vol 6, published in March 2018 by Har Mandir Singh ‘Hamraaz’.

Revised and enlarged Second Edition of HFGK Vol 3 was prepared by entering the data in computer and released in April 1997. He retired from his bank job in 2011. In the meantime, his wife’s elder sister’s daughter, Ravindar Kaur entered the data for Vol 6 (1981-1985) in the computer and started entering the data for Vol 7 (1986-1990) also. This happened during 1995-1997. Since his collaborator Mr Chatterjee had left to pursue other interests, he was not sure if he should work on Volumes beyond 5. Nalin Shah persuaded him to keep publishing.

In August 2016, he finally started preparing Vol 6 for printing. Apart from the information he already had collected, he made use of new info from CD, DVD, internet, etc. after suitably authenticating it. In this task, he was helped by Harish Raghuwanshi. BNChatterjee had prepared some notes while watching the movies on TV and from other sources. Still the data had to checked again and again to make sure that the information was correct, complete and consistent. In this task, he was helped by Mahesh Kumar Shukla (Lucknow), Devi Shankar Kanojia (Hardoi), Sanjeev Tanwar (Delhi), Abhay Jain (US), Dr Rajesh Deshpande (Bombay), Biren Kothari (Vadodara), Urvish Kothari (Mahamadabad) etc. In the last moments, Murlidhar Soni (Jaipur) helped out by providing some missing info about regional language films. The new info about the cast in the videos and songs was checked again and again by watching the films and listening to the songs. Many films were sent to him by Harvardhan Bhagat (Surat) on a pen drive from his personal collection.

About Google, YouTube, and internet websites, he is of the opinion that there is lack of authentication and correct information, so one would make a grave mistake by accepting such info with “closed eyes”.

Music lovers will be happy know that the present volume (6) has been prepared in such a way using computer that it will be easy to add new info in the future and revised edition can be prepared easily. Not only that, an attempt is now being made to enter into computer all the information from the previous volumes (1-5). In this exercise, all the information that could not be obtained when these volumes were published, is also being incorporated. In addition, the Title Index and complete information from all the HFGK volumes (incorporating any new info) is planned to be made available on the internet (a vast project indeed!) so that music lovers can get answers to all kinds of questions about Hindi films quickly and in an authenticated manner.

Written in March 2018

by ‘Hamraaz’

Summary by Surjit Singh

The above was a summary. The full extract (in Hindi) can be read here.