A somewhat chaotic and disorganised evening marred the celebration of the T20 – Top Indian films of all time – celebration at the International Film Festival of India in Goa last night at the Kala Academy The event was attended by a swathe of top personalities including Ben Kingsley, Amrita Rao, Madhur Bhandarkar and Gurinder Chadha. Sayali Bhagat was one of the hosts for the evening.
But organisational errors abounded. Firstly, the show started an hour late. Also, many invitations only went out on the day of the event, with the result that guests didn’t know where to go when they arrived, the anchor doing the introductions missed many of them and a disaster happened when Ben Kingsley was sat in the wrong seat, made himself comfortable, and was then asked to move by some flunkey. He then left. Finally, compere Srivastava made a classic boo-boo when at the end of the awards part of the function, he told the audience they should now go and have some fun. This was misunderstood by many who promptly left, missing what turned out to be an excellent fashion show looking at the changing styles of Bollywood over the years and a performance by Stereo Nation.
Amongst the T20 films were Sholay, Pyaasa and Mother India. Six people had guessed correctly the full list of twenty in one of those strange competitions where you are not really voting for what you think are the best films – but simply trying to attune yourself to what you think the jury of twenty ‘experts’ would choose.
