English (Core) · Ch 6 — Poets and Pancakes
Summary
Summary
- 'Poets and Pancakes' is an excerpt from Asokamitran's memoir My Years with Boss, set in the Gemini Studios of Madras (Chennai) — an influential early Indian film studio founded in 1940 by S.S. Vasan.
- The piece has no single plot; it is a chatty, rambling series of humorous recollections in which one thought leads to another, a style much prized in this Flamingo Class 12 English chapter.
- The title yokes together two unlike things: 'Pancake' was the brand name of the make-up material the studio bought in truck-loads, and the 'poets' were the many writers, and the literary and foreign visitors, who passed through the studio.
- The make-up department, housed in a building said to have been Robert Clive's stables, used harsh incandescent lights (the 'fiery misery') and could turn a good-looking person into a 'hideous crimson hued monster'.
- Its staff — a Bengali, a Maharashtrian, a Dharwar Kannadiga, an Andhra, a Madras Indian Christian, an Anglo-Burmese and local Tamils — was, the author jokes, an example of national integration long before A.I.R. and Doordarshan.
- A strict hierarchy ran from the chief make-up man down to the middle-aged 'office boy', whose blighted dreams of stardom and writing left him bitterly blaming Kothamangalam Subbu for all his failures.
- Subbu, the versatile, loyal and endlessly resourceful No. 2 at the studio, could solve any film problem and was also a poet, novelist and character actor — admired, but envied for his closeness to the Boss.
- The Story Department's legal adviser, nicknamed 'the opposite', unwittingly ended a temperamental actress's career by recording and playing back her outburst; when the department closed, 'a lawyer lost his job because the poets were asked to go home'.
- The Gandhiite staff held only a vague, caricatured fear of Communism; the Moral Re-Armament (MRA) army visited in 1952, and its plays deeply influenced Tamil drama. …