Description
Book SynopsisAn outspoken memoir by a much-celebrated Indian filmmaker. “I am a filmmaker by accident and an author by compulsion,” claims Mrinal Sen, who became part of the great triumvirate of Bengali cinema—along with Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak—in the 1950s and ’60s when he founded the rebellious Indian New Wave. Throughout his career, he kept that fire of protest burning, his acute political awareness and left-wing orientation spurring his creativity. Over decades, the themes that pervaded his cinema mirrored the spectrum of human suffering and experience, and in turn crystallized the anger of a restive mind against social injustice, economic deprivation, and communal divide. In this memoir, a celebrated ambassador of Indian cinema on the global stage, for whom cinema became a lexicon that gave voice to the times, reflects on encounters with the legends of the world of images as well as his inspirations and obsessions—not least among them, the city of Calcutta.
Always Being Born is a fascinating memoir of a great artist and a buoyant social commentator who continued to confront, fight, and survive on the very challenges that propelled him to look beyond and dream.
Table of ContentsPreface
Acknowledgements
Editor’s Note
1.My City: Mercilessly Maligned, Dangerously Loved
2.Given the Bene?t of the Doubt, I Walked into the Brave New World — Long Way, Dif?cult Way
3.Hiroshima and the Cannibal Time
4.Long Years Ago, We Made a Tryst with Destiny, and Now
5.We Make Things Spectacular, but Not by Their Exceptional Qualities
6.I Live in the Instant Present. I Invest the Past with Contemporary Sensibilities
7.I am Twenty. For One Thousand Years, I Remain Twenty
8.Deadly Discipline, When Trains Ran on Perfect Time
9.Wherever I Go, Things Keep on Happening
10.I Pull Myself by the Hair, and Force Myself to Look at the Mirror
11.Nineteen-eighties! A Decade, Every Inch Worth My While
12.Take Chances! I Wish You All a Very Tough Time
13.An Old Letter, and a Few Things, Here and There
14.The ‘Delicious Liar’ Continues ‘To Tell The Tale’, Left Untold
15.Nineteen Eighty-three! Going Places, Meeting the World
16.Nineteen Eighty-four: The Year of ‘The Ruins’, and Back and Forth
17.I Never Say I’ll Retire, for I am Always Being Born
Epilogue
Annexure
Filmography
