Of pirates, hard drives and cinephilia in India

livemint.com:

Jules and Jim, Wings of Desire, Metropolis, Notorious—bought between the ages of 21 and 26 at hole-in-the-wall shops in Mumbai and Chennai but most often in the dank underground of Delhi’s Palika Bazaar. There was an unvarying routine: you would ask for foreign films, be offered porn, explain that you meant the other kind of foreign film, bargain half-heartedly, and stumble into the sunlight clutching Renoirs and Kitanos that may or may not play when you got home. It had all the unreliability and exhilaration of a drug deal.

It goes without saying these were bootleg DVDs, ripped from the original Criterion Collection and Kino and Artificial Eye releases. Thus, my first steps towards a broader appreciation of cinema were founded on piracy. It wasn’t a moral conundrum at all.

If you wanted to watch foreign films, this was just what you did. A few years later, homegrown labels like Palador and Lumiere started releasing world cinema titles. I was earning by then, and graduated from bootlegs.

But DVDs never really took root in India. Instead, by the end of the 2000s, torrents had taken over. They altered the reality of being a cinephile.

Instead of hunting down a favourite director’s films one title at a time, you could download a “filmography" overnight. Hard drives became the new currency: a mark of your seriousness was if you arranged by director, country and genre or just dumped them into a giant “movies" folder. A decade and a half later, it’s as much, if not more, of a struggle in India to access cinema that isn’t recent or mainstream.

I subscribe to six streaming platforms. I watch at least one film a week in theatres. I spend an unwise amount of money buying Blu-rays from US and UK retailers, because you just can’t