Prof Satish Bahadur honoured with Satyajit Ray Memorial Award

Mumbai, Oct 16 (UNI) Professor Satish Bahadur also known as the 'Dronacharya of Film Studies' has been honoured with the 'Satyajit Ray Memorial award' for Promoting Film as Art at the Asian Film Festival.

Starting this year, the festival recognises individuals dedicated to promoting film culture. Prof Bahadur has completed over thirty years of teaching and holding courses on Film Appreciation.

Says writer Shyamala Vanarese,'' He seems to have decided early that his job was to fertilise culture at the grassroots and he kept on doing it all the time. This happened during an era when 'competent achievers' had fast access to the track of prosperity.

With the preeminent position in film teaching, numerous possilities of self advancement both-nationally and internationally were open to him. However, he stuck to his conscious choice of teaching at Pune and improvised classrooms all over the country.'' ''If we were to look at his long years, we would naturally feel humble that principles of life are not held in high sounding moral statements but in the nitty-gritty of how life is actually lived.'' she added.

He would tell stories, lively anecdotes to make the classroom bubble with joy of learning. During the last 40 years that Prof Bahadur has been teaching, Film Appreciation has moved from a cultist-activity-to-be-sneered at to being on the verge of a popular educational activity and this is no mean achivement,'' says Shyamala.

Some of his papers on Seminal Importance in the basics of thinking about Indian cinema include, ''The Context of Film Culture in India ''UNESCO Seminar (1972), ''Indian Cinema in the Nehru Years'' (Cinewave 1976) and ''Aesthetic Ideas and the Film Medium'' (2003, written for Project on History of Indian Science Philosophy and Culture).

There are several other articles on the relationship of cinema with other Arts as also some Radio talks which are of value. The last mentioned article was brought out as a special issue of January-June 2003 by the journal ''Sandhan''.

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