Happy Birthday!!! Dev Das!
iView Author: Nishant G (Mumbai, India) Email: Witheld
Happy Birth Day!!! Dev Das!
Dev Das was born in 1901 when it was conceived by Sharatchandra and appeared in to black and white in 1917.
Dev Das is 108 years old today. Not in the sense of mortality. But an immortal character that Dev Das has been for the Indian psyche and sensibility. (Avoid shaving for a week or two, give your comb a rest, a t-shirt can last a few days… you know what to expect from your friends and family.) I believe cinema played a vital role in immortalizing Dev Das; in different languages, on different scales, for different set of audiences and at different times. Before the ‘Hang Over’ was over, Dev Das was there to serve and to be served in the celebration of the failure in love, self-destruction and pity.
Times changed. But Dev Das remained the same. A century old guy who still wore dhoti-kurta when he had access to the designer wears. Still believed in bachpan ka pyar when we kept on scoring till we turn pachpan (55). Still consumed liquor in those colourful unbranded bottles when liquor companies shouted out loud of their packaged drinking water and music CDs in their brand names. Still went to brothel when he could just use his finger; to dial, to click or to turn over the news papers which are flooded with heavenly massage services, friendship clubs and true friendship offer classifieds.
Dev Das got trapped. Dev Das was still a literary character. A character with grey in black and white. Kept wandering in the jungleof words for over a century and never found its way out through the maze of changing times. Dev Das was born but never came alive. Than again, cinema played a vital role here too.
Happy Birthday Dev Das.
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Yeah, without Pramathesh Barua & Bimal Roy, Deb could never have started on the journey to be Dev.D
srk’s version of dev das was total fuck u to the character