Kishore Maama

                                                            I have vague memories of myself as a 6 year old , sitting atop the petrol tank of his yezdi bike , and vrooming away to mysore city to watch the bollywood film khal nayaak in lido theatre!It was quite a heady feeling , first the bike ride where i felt like the 'king' of the world and then the flashy glamourous movies that had such gorgeous people ...they took me away to a whole different world altogether! I think my first movie in a theatre would be cliff hanger 'cos i remember crying when that girl's doll falls off followed by the girl , n mom trying to shush me while wearing that polite embarassed 'wonder where that came from ' smile on the face as she looked at the irritated neighbours! Guess i fell asleep after that , anyway , khal naayak would have been the first movie in a theatre , that actually registered in my mind , to be followed by baazigar, darr and several other flicks! All these , seen with my movie crazy maama ! He'd drop by over the weekend at our farm with a bar of cadburys dairy milk , play inane games like hide n seek, the joke around then being , he would ask me to hide 'cos i would keep pestering him to play with me till he gave in and i would find a nice little hollow in the garage and hide there for half an hour with a huge grin on my face imagining him to be looking for me ... After sometime ,it used to start getting hot and sweaty in there i would slowly creep out 'ninga mode' and look for him making sure not to break a twig under my shoe , only to find him perched blissfully on the sofa reading the newspaper! He would tell me that i had found the best place on earth to hide and he was taking a break from looking for me... One fine day i overheard him telling mom that he relishes those 30 mins of silence! So anyway , after these shehnanigans it was movie time ! First show ( 6:00 pm) saturday evening. Mom would dress me up in a frilly frock n make me sit on the petrol tank n wave us off with a big grin , now im thinking that she too must have relished those 3 hours of silence... After the movie it was dosa time at the delicious dosa corner nearby! Here we would discuss the scenes and dialogues and how well everyone acted n other 'important' things like that... After getting home , i would enact the whole movie to my parents with the dancing included..  Well I would mostly sing the dance *teehee* . Sometimes while trying to enact a scene from the film (my way ) i think i would get the scene and sometimes even the story wrong (cmon what do u expect from a 6 year old of the 90's ? ) only to be interrupted by maama n then we would get into arguments ( real heated ones) much to the chagrin of pappa and mamma! I now think that that was the beginning of well... my acting school...  So here is the man who introduced  me to many magical things in the world , one  of them being the world of cinema... Kishore maama.. I'm sure you're showing the stars how i enacted my scene today...  And dont worry.. Your darling neice will get her dialogues right this time!