Marketing a movie (Mandi)

There will never be such a brilliant set of actors. The moment they land up together on the screen they ignite the frame with the most scintillating of antics. They complement each other immaculately and spice up every story...
I'm talking of luminaries such as Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, Saeed Jaffrey, Smita Patil, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Annu Kapoor, Amrish Puri and Om Puri. In Shyam Benegal's Mandi, they continue the rule; they are too good to be not true...

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What a beginning!!! (Masoom)

There is a scene in Shekhar Kapur's Masoom where Mini tries to lighten the air of tension looming large over dinner. She doesn't know that her parents have had a nasty fight, resulting from her mother's new-found knowledge that her father has cheated on her in the past. Ignorant of the prevailing bitterness between the couple, she breaks into a mischievous, "Tayyab Ali pyar ka dushman hai hai..." before fading off to just a whimper.
This scene, eminently forgettable to many viewers, stay etched in my mind to this day, almost 15 years since I first watched Masoom, Kapur's directorial debut and definitely one of his best treatises on the complexity of human emotions.

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