SHOLAY: My memories of watching Sholay 50 years ago...

  The year 1975 was a defining year especially for me as I was packed to lead a hostel life in Nainital, then Uttar Pradesh now Uttarakh...

 

The year 1975 was a defining year especially for me as I was packed to lead a hostel life in Nainital, then Uttar Pradesh now Uttarakhand. The school was Sherwood College. Significant so much that Mr Amitabh Bachchan who had just started to rule the Box Office during this time was also an alumni of Sherwood. Junior school town leaves were just once a month. We were not allowed to see films, the only exception being special days like 15th August.

 

Cut to winter holidays. After 9 months of gruelling hostel life we could come home for 3 months of holidays. On coming back to my hometown in Calcutta (now Kolkata), my family told me that they had got tickets through contacts for the film which had been running ‘houseful’ . The film was Sholay. The theatre was Elite. Now Elite was a theatre which used to screen Hollywood films because of its 70mm screen. Sholay was 70mm with stereophonic sound. I was thrilled. The tickets had come in an envelope through the distributor of the film. The show timing was 12-4-8pm. A really long film. I was jumping in joy. On reaching the cinema hall for the 8pm show, I was totally blown away by the huge larger than life hand made cut outs of the film adorning the cinema hall. On top of it there was a serpentine queue to enter. We were privileged as the manager ushered us in. 

 

Well I will not talk about the film- it blew me away. The only sad part was Jai (Amitabh Bachchan) dying in Veeru’s (Dharmendra) arms. Oh the other thing was we saw the revised version in which Thakur (Sanjeev Kumar) doesn’t kill Gabbar (Amjad Khan). What a villainous debut it was by Amjad Khan. So this was the first time I saw Sholay but followed it up again at Jyoti Cinema (70mm) thrice next year in 1976 but this time the audience and I were mouthing the dialogues. Sholay ran in Calcutta for two years straight. Some small cinema halls had edited the Soorma Bhopali (Jagdeep) and Jailor’s (Asrani) portions to fit in four shows. Also only Elite & later Jyoti cinema halls had the 70mm versions. I was lucky enough to see the 70mm versions and had a good laugh at my friends who had seen the truncated version. 

 

The story doesn’t finish here. A few days after watching the film, my parents took me to one of the best record shops in Calcutta- Harry’s Music House and presented me with a Bush stereo turntable (record player) and two long playing records (vinyls) of Sholay. The songs in one vinyl and the dialogues in the other one (see the pic). The present because I had stood second in class.  So Sholay’s vinyls are my first ever vinyls- I still have both the vinyls and the turntable in working conditions.

 

Sholay turning 50 seems just the other day that I had witnessed all the euphoria.

 

By Sanjay Mishra, filmmaker, actor