A Glittery World
Saba Mahmood Bashir
SONE CHANDI KE BUTH: WRITINGS ON CINEMA by K. A. Abbas Penguin Vintage, 2022, 232 pp., 590.00
February 2023, volume 47, No 2

If the advance praise of the book is written by Amitabh Bachchan, Shabana Azmi and Professor Ira Bhasker one can assume the book is going to be good, given that it has been appreciated by actors in the popular area as well as in the critical arena, plus by an academician. And, so it turns out to be. There is something for everyone who is interested in Hindustani Cinema to take away from this book. Yes, that is a term—Hindustani Cinema—that I have been using, and hoping others pick it up as well, as against Hindi Cinema, or worse, Bollywood. That was the instant pull into the book for me when I read the translation of Khwaja Ahmad Abbas’s ‘Introduction’ to the book that he wrote in 1986:

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