Long before Hindi cinema was rechristened Bollywood, there were film posters and showcards under glass in the lobbies of the theaters in India.

As you bought your tickets to enter a magic world, you sauntered by the display cases to check out these show cards, a collage of hand painted photographs which whetted your appetite for the treat to come.

Most of these old markers have disappeared but recently cinema fans got a chance to see a cache of vintage cards, lovingly preserved.

It’s not every morning that you get to chat with a big Bollywood star even before you’ve had your morning cup of tea. So there I was, a bit bleary-eyed with the hot star Riteish Deshmukh on the phone, me in New York and he in Mumbai.

His big movie, the Ram Gopal Varma film ‘Rann’ is being released this month, and so Riteish was chatting up the international media. We talked about Rann, Amitabh Bachchan, and how Riteish developed his passion for cinema

New York is full of surprises and unexpected treats, of twists and turns. You can take a detour and find yourself face to face with the cinema you loved in your youth, the films which gave you goose bumps and showed you the futility and heartbreak of life, films which took you into a deeper, more complicated world and made you disregard the bag of chips in your hand. Who can forget the aching pain of ‘Pyaasa’, the disillusionment of ‘Kaagaz Ke Phool’ or the churning emotions of a fading way of life in a changing world in ‘Sahib, Bibi Aur Ghulam’?