My Years with Boss: At Gemini Studios

For nearly thirty years from 1940, the Gemini Studios of Madras (Chennai) was the most influential film-producing organisation of India and its founder, the brilliant multi-faceted entrepreneur S.S. Vasan lent substance and quality to the rather fragile and unpredictable movie business. The Gemini emblem of two small boys with bugles was true to Vasan’s slogan for the Studios, ‘when the bugles blow, there is a great show,’ Gemini films entertained millions all over India and abroad. Sahitya Akademi award-winning Tamil writer Ashokamitran worked for the Gemini Studios from 1952 to 1966. A full twenty years after he ‘renounced’ films, poet-editor Pritish Nandy persuaded Ashokamitran to record his reminiscences and the result was a series of articles making up My Years with Boss. The book covers only five of his fourteen years with the Studios but captures that phase of Indian movie business when the key factors of the box office were imperceptibly shifting from the studios to the stars. My Years with Boss is one of the most unusual books to be written about the entertainment world and clearly indicates the enormous impact of the movies on virtually every aspect of life in India. The author’s ability to capture the life and breath of people and events, and his puckish narrative make this a brief but special book of film history.