Burjor Khurshedji Karanjia

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Burjor Khurshedji Karanjia (mostly BK Karanjia ; Gujarati : બી. કે. કરંજિયા Bī. Ke. Karañjiyā ; * December 21, 1919 in Bombay ; † June 22, 2012 in Pune ) was an Indian film journalist, film official and book author.

Life

Burjor Karanjia was the third and youngest son of the ophthalmologist Khurshedji Karanjia and his wife Temina. His oldest brother was the journalist Russy Karanjia , and his other older brother is called Sawak. The family belonged to the Parsees religious community ; his mother tongue is Gujarati. Like his brothers, he attended St. Xavier's School in Bombay, but then Wilson College . In 1943 Karanjia passed the Indian Civil Service exam , but after initial work experience at Rustom Masani in the National War Front, after the end of World War II, he decided against a career in civil service and followed his brother Russy into journalism.

Karanjia had developed an interest in the Indian film industry since the mid-1930s and now turned to this field professionally. He published his first monthly film magazine “Cinevoice” from 1947 together with Adi M. Kapadia and with the benevolent support of the Association of Indian Film Producers ( IMPPA ). In early 1949 he organized “A Nite with Stars”, the first charity event in India with actors, singers and other filmmakers, including Kamini Kaushal , Nargis , Raj Kapoor , Motilal , Mubarak , P. Jairaj , Sitara Devi and Mukesh , from Paul Zils filmed a documentary of the same name. 80,000 rupees were collected for the needy population in the Kashmir war . Since “Cinevoice” was unable to adequately present the flood of new film releases and ran into financial problems due to insufficient advertising income, Karanjia and Kapadia also published the twelve-page weekly “Movie Times” from 1949. Despite support from filmmakers, they had to discontinue “Cinevoice” in 1952 and “Movie Times” in 1953 for reasons of economy. Then Sohrab Godrej hired him for public relations work for his family's corporate group, the Godrej Group , where Karanjia worked until 1960. On the side he wrote several short stories in the 1950s that appeared in magazines such as the "Illustrated Weekly" published by Khushwant Singh . One of them was filmed by Vijaya Mehta with Naseeruddin Shah and Anupam Kher in the lead roles in 1987 under the title Pestonjee .

JC Jain, the first Indian general manager of the Times of India , recruited Karanjia from Godrej and hired him as editor of " Filmfare ". From 1961 to 1978, Burjor Karanjia was responsible for this fortnightly film magazine - a successful publication by the financially strong Times of India ( The Times Group ), which has appeared since 1952 . His duties also included organizing the annual Filmfare Awards ceremony. Under his aegis, “Filmfare” dealt in the early 1970s with three problems in the Indian film industry: black money transactions in private film financing, the black market for cinema tickets created by professional mass buyers, and the frequent plagiarism of US films.

A representative of film journalism, Burjor Karanjia was a director of the Film Finance Corporation in the 1960s ; In 1968 he was appointed chairman of the FFC as the successor to Himmat Singh. During his seven years at the helm of the Indian Film Fund , which is under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting , 36 films were financed between 1969 and 1976, which won 21 national and international film awards. This wave of artistically oriented low-budget productions known as New Indian Cinema began with Mrinal Sens Bhuvan Shome (1969). Karanjia was a member of the Advisory Committee of the Film and Television Institute of India and the National Film Archive of India for several years . Because of disagreements with the Ministry, Karanjia resigned along with the entire FFC Board of Directors in 1976.

In 1978 Ramnath Goenka recruited him from "Filmfare" and made him editor of the weekly magazine " Screen " of his Indian Express Group . Until 1988 Karanjia headed this second most successful Indian film magazine and worked regularly as an expert author. A selection of his articles for "Screen" appeared in book form under the title A Many-Splendid Cinema .

Then in April 1988 he returned to the head of the Indian state film subsidy, now trading under the name National Film Development Corporation , and was its chairman until 1990. The monthly magazine “Cinema in India” created by him during this time was discontinued when his chairmanship ended.

In the 1990s Karanjia worked for Godrej again and over the course of 14 years also wrote a two-volume anthology about the hundred-year history of the Godrej company and three biographies of members of the Godrej family of industrialists. In 2005 he published his autobiography Counting My Blessings .

He was a member of the juries of the National Film Awards , the International Film Festival in New Delhi and the International Documentary Film Festival in Leipzig . In 2001, the Bimal Roy Foundation awarded him the Bimal Roy Memorial Trophy, their prize for the life's work of filmmakers.

Karanjia died of pneumonia .

bibliography

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Silver Jubilee 1951-76 - INFA Press and Advertisers Yearbook
  2. ↑ Counting My Blessings , p. 29 Quetta in Baluchistan ,
    often referred to as the place of birth, was the place of residence of his maternal grandparents, but according to his own statements in     Counting My Blessings , p. 23 he first visited as a toddler and otherwise regularly during the summer holidays
  3. ↑ Counting My Blessings , p. 9
  4. ↑ Counting My Blessings , p. 192
  5. ↑ Amrit Gangar: Svabhāva Flowing Into Streams: In Continuum - Interrogating Avant-garde. And the Wave (PDF file; 324 kB), p. 21.
  6. ↑ Counting My Blessings , p. 197
  7. ↑ Counting My Blessings , p. 222
  8. ↑ http://bimalroymemorial.org/default/category/brm-trophy/
  9. ↑ http://bimalroymemorial.org/default/2001/05/2001-awards/
personal data
SURNAME Karanjia, Burjor Khurshedji
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Karanjia, BK; Karanjia, Burjor K.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Indian journalist, film official and book author
DATE OF BIRTH December 21, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Bombay
DATE OF DEATH June 22, 2012
Place of death Pune