I am calling this post “Tributes to Bollyviewer” mostly because I want to recommended two fine tributes to Bollyviewer that appeared on other blogs. The blogs are Conversations over Chai (by Anuradha Warrier) and Dustedoff (by Madhulika Liddle). Both Anu and Madhu apparently became good friends with Bollyviewer both in the blogging world and outside of it. It is therefore fitting that they ended up writing the most moving farewells. I don’t imagine that this post is going to be nearly as moving, but I do feel the need to say a few things . . .
I trust that many people who read this blog have also read a blog by Bollyviewer, whether it was Masala Punch or the earlier Old Is Gold. To be frank, I also hope that you already know the following news and I am not the one to break it to you: Bollyviewer died on February 12 after a battle with cancer that hardly any of her readers even knew about. Because I had no idea, myself, I was very surprised when I found out a couple of weeks ago and, needless to say, it made me feel very sad.
I never met Bollyviewer in person, but I was acquainted with her in the blogging world for about a dozen years. She last posted a comment to this blog just a year and a month ago, but she had started sending me comments as far back as May of 2008. That was not exactly the time when I started this blog (which was close to a year earlier), but it was pretty soon after I had started to center it on old Indian films. Then by August of 2008, she was posting comments to my blog regularly, often offering helpful suggestions regarding things that I should look for and places where I could find those things (and others) on the Internet. She was definitely one of the bloggers whose comments below my posts contributed to my education about old Hindi films. Plus, I found her blogs to be very informative, engagingly written (they certainly had personality), and often funny, too. (If you look at a bunch of her posts, keep an eye out for the captions below her screen caps. Madhu shows a very amusing example in her post.)
If you read Anu and Madhu’s posts, you’re going to find a few things very similar to what I am saying here. That is because Bollyviewer also made a point to encourage both of them when they were new to blogging about Hindi films. She really went out of her way to make the nicest contributions to our little community of bloggers.
RIP, Bollyviewer. You are certainly going to be missed.
Dances on the Footpath 