More About Ila

I met Ila in 1979. I was 19 then. She must have been few months younger.

Ila was a slightly chubby, reasonably pretty, happy, upper middle class teenager, like any other. Not particularly intelligent, nor significantly dumb. I fell in love - in retrospect, with the idea of Ila in my mush inclined head.

Poor girl. For the next three years, and much beyond, I must have stood for her as an unhappy example of a gentleman pest, fruitlessly bombarding her unwilling but consistently polite self with half-digested ideas of revolution and the meaning of life. My virginal attentions, devoid of any thoughts of real physical contact, must have seemed to her quite odd.

But Ila was a very decent human being. All through the time I knew her (she later got married and went off to Ohio) she never ever (not even once) ticked me off for being so annoyingly persistent. For a very long time afterwards she personified chaste virtuous love for me. I even ran a company called Ila Film & Video (after graduating from FTII) for a few years.

The female lead in my FTII diploma film "Avkash Kal" is called Ila.