Since I have known this world, I have always loved movies.
My early memories of growing up as a kid involved a movie theater, called venkateswara theater, just a block away from where we used to live at that time. Our family friends owned that theater and I had a free pass to go watch a movie anytime I wanted. My group of friends, which included the grand kids of the theater owner, and I used to watch movies many times a week. We used to watch whatever movie was running at that time, several times over, whether the movie was good or bad. For us kids, all the movies were magical. We used to often sneak into watch just the best scene or song of a movie. We used to wait with anticipation about which new movie will be shown next.
I knew all the people that worked at the theater and there were no restrictions on where I could go. I still vividly remember going to to the projector room and watch with fascination everything that went in there. Looking back it was my first exposure to the magic of technology though I never looked at it that way at that time. I can still remember the sounds of the spools of the film reel turning, the smells associated with the film and the projector light going through the film (placed upside down to my amazement) and through the holes on the wall to show up as beautiful moving pictures on the large screen. It was as though there were real people bottled up in those films that came alive on the bright silver screen. It was just a wonderful experience that I can never forget. My friends and I would enact scenes from the movies we watched may times over, each time in a different way than the time before. I always played the part of the hero since I was the ring leader of the group. I guess that was our own theater group, though we didn’t have a name for it.
Since I didn’t have too many toys at that time, I used to create my own games. One of my favorite games was projecting movie films on the walls of my home. I used to bring home strips of film that were disposed off in the projector room. I created my own way of projecting them at home. I used to remove the metal top (with the filament) off of a light bulb and fill it with water. I used a flash light to project light through the bulb with water in it and place the film in front of the bulb upside down. It used to project a beautiful large picture on the wall. I used to adjust the distance between the film and the bulb to to adjust the focus. I used to try to move the film vertically to simulate the movie but could never get it right (I didn’t know about 24 fps at that time). That was my first home entertainment system.
My parents, both public school teachers, got transferred to a different place and I lost access to this magical theater. They stopped showing movies in the theater a few years ago and it now lies in a dilapidated state. I made new friends and got serious about studies and my movie watching dwindled down to a few movies a year. It also didn’t help that there were no movie theaters nearby that I could sneak into with my pocket money. I remember wanting to watch movies more often, but my father set an informal limit on the number of movies I could watch because he didn’t want me to get distracted from studies.
Things changed when I went to college at IIT Madras. It is one of the best engineering colleges in India, similar to MIT or Stanford in the US. It has a beautiful sprawling campus set in a forest of green trees and herds of running wild deers in the southern indian coastal city of Chennai (It used to be called Madras then). It has a very competitive culture academically and socially, which puts a lot of pressure on students. One of the best ways to release that tension was to catch a movie on saturday nights at OAT (open air theater). This is one of the many traditions at IIT madras. This rekindled my love for watching movies on a large screen. OAT has a beautiful setting that looks like a coliseum where students watch movies sitting on the steps (with pillows brought from their rooms) under starlit night sky filled with salty sea breeze flowing from the bay of bengal.
After my graduation from college, I moved to the US for my post graduate studies. I was fortunate enough to attend the Stanford University for my PhD. It has a stunning campus sprawled over even a larger area than the IIT madras campus. One of the popular activities of Stanford students is catching a movie at memaud (memorial auditorium). I loved watching movies at memaud with friends which has a quaint old style theater feel to it.
As my life moved along after I graduated, started working life, got married, and had two beautiful kids, I watched fewer and fewer movies. They became even fewer while I was working on my startup companies. Even the few movies I watched were kids’ movies. Then it all changed again thanks to netflix. I could start watching my favorites movies at my leisure. It also happened that I decided to start working in the area of digital media, thanks in large part to my, some what dormant, love for movies and music.
Around this time, another thing happened by chance. One of my stanford buddies, avijit goswami, who had earlier returned to india, came back to US temporarily for work reasons. He, being interested in movies himself, suggested that we take some film classes at de anza college (located near our home) in our spare time as a hobby. This has taken my interest in movies to a whole different level. I have not only rediscovered, yet again, my love for watching movies but also found a new interest in the art of making movies.
Making movies is a whole new world in itself and I hope to write quite a bit of this on my blog as I explore this magical world.
the Google India Elections Center
