1953 Do Bigha Zamin
WHEN Bimal Roy made Do Bigha Zamin in 1953, he was a relative newcomer to the Bombay film industry. It was an unusual film to make in Bombay. It told the story of a poor man eking out a living on the city streets and had no opulent settings, dream sequences, middle-class moral point, nor fairy-tale features. In the first Indian Filmfare awards in 1954, Do Bigha Zamin bagged prizes for best picture and best director. It also became the first Indian film to win the Prix Internationale in the 1954 Cannes Film Festival. The New Wave in cinema was launched.
Like Satyajit Ray, another New Wave luminary, Bimal Roy was influenced by Italian Neorealism and fascinated by Vittorio de Sica’s 1948 film, Bicycle Thieves. His attempt was to capture everyday realities faithfully through the camera.
Do Bigha Zamin was followed by Ray’s Pather Panchali in 1955, Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara in 1960, Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome in 1969, and in their wake Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G. Aravindan, Mani Kaul, Balu Mahendra, and several others, together creating a formidable body of Indian New Wave cinema.
THE story of Air India is about how a Tata founded an airline, only to have the government take it over, and how another government returned it to the Tatas after struggling to run it for nearly 70 years.
The Indian government nationalised the private airline in 1953, ran it with taxpayer money, repeatedly underwrote losses after 2007, put it up for sale, and finally handed it to one of the bidders, the Tata group.
When Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy (JRD) Tata set up India’s first private commercial airline in 1932, it was viewed with wonder. On October 15 that year, he piloted Tata Air Services’ first flight, from Karachi to Mumbai, and thus began the story of commercial aviation 15 years before Independence.
In 1938, JRD Tata named the company Tata Airlines, and later Air India. In June 1948, it started a service to London. Four years later, the Planning Commission recommended to the government that the airlines be nationalised.
In 1953, Parliament passed the Air Corporations Act, enabling the merger of all airlines into two corporations owned and operated by the government. Nine airlines operated in India then:
Air India, Air Services of India, Airways (India), Bharat Airways, Deccan Airways, Himalayan Aviation, Indian National Airways, Kalinga Airlines, and Air India International. The result was a monopoly for Indian Airlines and Air India. JRD Tata was chairman of the government venture. He held the post for over two decades, despite a few unpleasant incidents with politicians.
When the airline was finally picked up again by the Tata group last year, it marked the biggest disinvestment of a government-owned asset.