Counting My Blessings

For eighteen years B.K. Karanjia held the most glamorous job in India. The job: editor of Filmfare a magazine devoted to the starry world of Indian cinema a distractingly beautiful irresistibly beguiling setting to millions of people. In Counting My Blessings Karanjia takes us behind the dancing images on- screen to this world part fantasy part heartbreaking reality. But first there is an equally fascinating story that precedes this one?his own. His grandfather an army private rose to become a merchant prince of Baluchistan. His father was a doctor his mother a music lover and ardent Napoleon fan. A bright student he entered into a fairy-tale romance with Abad who would become his wife cleared the ICS examinations and seemed all set for a life lived happily ever after. Instead he decided the job of a bureaucrat was not for him and chose in a somewhat Napoleonic vein the harder one of film journalism publishing a magazine that left him penniless. The magazine closed down but the association with the film world continued with other magazines and with film bodies such as the Film Finance Corporation and he provides an incisive analysis of a host of issues connected with the industry in this memoir. He also recounts his efforts to encourage the new cinema movement which brought stature to an industry known for quantity rather than quality. He had a brush too with corporate India as chronicler of the hundred years of the Godrej enterprise and continues to edit the Godrej house magazine Change. Enlivening the narrative are his warm portraits of his family and of mentors friends and colleagues including a smattering of the famous Sohrab Modi Motilal Dilip Kumar and Madhubala among them. Sometimes provocative always honest Counting My Blessings is an entertaining account of a memorable life. B.K. Karanjia journalist and author edited Filmfare a Times of India publication (1961-78) and Screen of the Indian Express group (1978-88). He was chairman of the Film Finance Corporation (1969-76) and also of the National Film Development Corporation (1988-91). For several years he was a member of the advisory committee of the Film and Television Institute of India and the National Film Archives of India. He has served on various national and international film juries. Among his published books are Portrait of a Citizen a biography of Rustom Masani; A Many-Splendoured Cinema a compilation of editorials from Screen; More of an Indian a novel; Masks and Faces a collection of short stories; Blundering in Wonderland a partial memoir; Godrej: A Hundred Years a history of the Godrej group in two volumes; Give Me a Bombay Merchant?Anytime! the life of Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy; Final Victory: The Life?and Death?of Naval Pirojsha Godrej; Sohrab Godrej?s memoirs entitled Abundant Living Restless Striving; and Vijitatma a monograph on Ardeshir Godrej the pioneer-founder of the Godrej corporation.