Poets and Pancakes — Class 12 MCQs with Answers

Key concepts: Poets and Pancakes (Class 12 English)

An excerpt from Asokamitran's 'My Years with Boss', a gently ironic account of Gemini Studios in Madras. It moves from the make-up department, through the frustrated office boy and the many-sided Kothamangalam Subbu, to the baffling visit of an English poet whose identity the author uncovers only years later.

Asokamitran and Gemini Studios

Asokamitran (1931-2017), a Tamil writer. Gemini Studios, Chennai, was set up in 1940 by S.S. Vasan and was one of the most influential film-producing organisations of early Indian cinema. The author's job was to cut out newspaper clippings and file them.

Pancake

The brand name of the make-up material 'that Gemini Studios bought in truck-loads'. The make-up department was upstairs in a building 'believed to have been Robert Clive's stables'.

Fiery misery

The make-up room looked like a hair-cutting salon, with lights at all angles around half a dozen large mirrors — all incandescent, hence 'the fiery misery of those subjected to make-up'.

National integration

The department was headed by a Bengali, then a Maharashtrian, assisted by 'a Dharwar Kannadiga, an Andhra, a Madras Indian Christian, an Anglo-Burmese and the usual local Tamils' — integration 'long before A.I.R. and Doordarshan began broadcasting programmes on national integration'.

The hierarchy

The chief make-up man made the chief actors ugly, his senior assistant the 'second' hero and heroine, the junior assistant the main comedian — and the crowd players were the responsibility of the office boy.

The office boy

Not a boy at all but in his early forties, he had entered the studios hoping to become a star actor, top screen writer, director or lyrics writer. 'He was a bit of a poet.' He mixed paint in a giant vessel and slapped it on the crowd players.

His frustration

He lectured the author on 'how great literary talent was being allowed to go waste in a department fit only for barbers and perverts', until the author was 'praying for crowd-shooting all the time'. He blamed all his woes on Kothamangalam Subbu.

Subbu, the No. 2

'Here was a man who could be inspired when commanded.' Asked how to stage an impossible scene, he produced four ways at once, then fourteen more. 'If ever there was a man who gave direction and definition to Gemini Studios during its golden years, it was Subbu.'

Subbu's many sides

A poet who deliberately addressed his poetry to the masses; author of original 'story poems' in folk refrain and of the sprawling novel 'Thillana Mohanambal'; an amazing actor in subsidiary roles; and a man whose house was 'a permanent residence for dozens of near and far relations'.

The legal adviser

Officially the legal adviser, 'but everybody referred to him as the opposite'. In a crowd of khadi-clad dreamers he wore pants, a tie and sometimes a coat 'that looked like a coat of mail' — 'a man of cold logic in a crowd of dreamers'.

The actress episode

When a temperamental actress blew over on the sets, he quietly recorded her and played it back. Hearing her own voice, 'she was struck dumb' — and never recovered. 'That was the end of a brief and brilliant acting career.'

Moral Re-Armament

Frank Buchman's MRA army, two hundred strong, visited Madras in 1952. Their plays 'Jotham Valley' and 'The Forgotten Factor' so impressed Madras that for years Tamil plays copied the sunrise-and-sunset scene with 'a bare stage, a white background curtain and a tune played on the flute'.

The English poet

A tall, very English, very serious man read to a dazed audience whose understanding 'his accent defeated'. His visit 'remained an unexplained mystery'.

The solution

Years later the author found The Encounter in the British Council Library and recognised its editor: Stephen Spender. Later still he bought 'The God That Failed' for fifty paise — six writers on 'their journeys into Communism and their disillusioned return' — one of them Spender. 'The Boss of the Gemini Studios may not have much to do with Spender's poetry. But not with his god that failed.'