THE BIRTH OF A PASSION (Or, how I fell in love love love with Dharmendra - Part I)

To kick things off, why not start with how I fell in love with Dharmendra? As a child, we never watched Indian movies in my house (we were too posh - ha ha). No, the real reason was that my brothers owned the remote control and would NEVER have let us watch Bollywood. Nahin! Bilkul Nahin!

Anyways, my aunt in Mushin was much more of a free spirit when it came to movies - she had 'Dus Numbri', 'Disco Dancer' and 'Mard'. And men, whenever we went to spend weekends at her house ('cos we loved going there), we rocked those three movies to the hilt! We knew all the songs and everything!

I also remember that at secondary school, this chick Bunmi in my class was heavily into Hindi movies... as in she had seen every single one. She and this other chick Bisi used to have contests about who had watched more Hindi movies. So from those aimless class gists we used to have when we were bored (you know, who has seen this movie, who has seen that movie, who has seen... 'The Sound of Music'... cue attack on the person who said that); I learned the names of other popular Hindi movies: 'The Burning Train' (starring my main man Dharmendra), 'Sholay' (Dharmendra again with Mr. Amitabh Bachchan - a beloved classic), 'Ghazab' (Dharmendra!), 'Teri Meheribaniyan', 'The Promise' ('Yeh Vaada Rahe'), '1960', 'Mother India', 'Nagin', 'Nagina', 'Dharam Veer', etc etc... yep those were the Bollywood favourites in Nigeria!! So I knew the names of all those movies but had never watched them.

Later on, when cable TV landed in Naija, we got Zee TV. On Sunday mornings, they would show some nice subtiled films and series, and I always enjoyed them. Eventually, I think they realised the NRIs in Nigeria were eager enough for Indian TV channels that they would pay for them, so they took Zee TV out of our standard bouquet of channels. And of course no-one was crazy enough (or passionate enough about Hindi movies at the time) to ask my parents to pay extra for Zee TV. So that sums up my childhood foray into Bollywood... fast forward to a few years later... it's all very exciting but will be discussed in my next post.

Catch you later,
Daddy's Girl