By Prem Das and Raj Melville

We lived in Ashdown when we first got to MIT and used to meet at the community kitchens, where most of the connections with Sangamites happened. Prem was recruited by Subbu to help out with some of the Sangam activities and when Raj moved into the same suite as Prem at Ashdown, he got inducted too.

 Previewing Hindi movies the night before. Prem Das and Raj Melville

In those days, Sangam was one of the only organizations that had access to projection equipment and an auditorium for free and wound up in the business of showing Hindi movies. This was a monthly event for the nostalgic Indian community, both students at MIT and other schools as well as South Asians who lived in the area.

An essential part of Sangam initiation was to manage the process of fetching, previewing and projecting the movies and pretty soon we found ourselves involved in this. Each month a fresh set of 16 mm reels would be shipped by the film distributor via Greyhound (imagine that) and one of us had to hike down to the bus terminal, which was near Park Street as we recall, to pick up these large rolls of film. Saturday evenings typically were screening parties, especially when we moved into the 507A suite. With friends dropping in for dinner, we would run through the entire movie to ensure that the reels were in the right order, that the film was not broken or in some cases the wrong reels were sent. Continue reading “Slinging celluloid at Sangam” →