Going into the closet, with a movie-shopping tote bag
Criterion Collection, where visitors ranging from Martin Scorsese and Juliette Binoche to Pamela Anderson and Slavoj Žižek make their picks of movies to take home.
Budget with ET
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In my hand was the iconic black tote bag with a large silver 'C', slightly tilted, emblazoned in its centre. All around me were hi-def DVDs of world cinema, and I could take all that I could cram into my bag. Like Chaplin in a sorority full of pious pubescents, I quietly set about my task. On the top shelf, I found Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro (Don't Cry for Salim, the Lame), Saeed Mirza's 1989 incendiary movie about rapidly evolving Hindu-Muslim relations in Bombay in the backdrop of the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi movement.
I had first seen the movie in Patna's Elphinstone Cinema Hall in the 1990s. The image of Pawan Malhotra as Salim walking up a desolate flyover, the anger, the angular narrative of that film had made an indelible impression on my teenage mind. I began writing stories then, vowing to always use art for a political purpose-a vow I would break many times during my long apprenticeship.
Two shelves below, there was a whole pride of Satyajit Rays. I picked out the 1970 Pratidwandi (The Adversary). It was the first Ray movie I had ever seen. This was in the late-1980s in Bolton, a small town near Manchester, where
