




A super-thrilling ski chase follows where Bond is attacked by Russian gunmen on the mountain slopes. Bond shoots as many as he can but you wonder how he’s going to escape. Well, he simply skis off a steep cliff. It’s a freefall to sure death. My heart is in my mouth and suddenly, his backpack springs open, a parachute unfurls, its design revealing the Union Jack. The famous theme music kicks in. Followed by the surreal title sequence and song. ‘Nobody does it better.’
And as I sat in the stalls of Pune’s Alaka Talkies, barely ten minutes into the movie, I had already decided I was going to see this again.
“It’s what you expect of an adolescent mind, which I happen to possess,” said Ian Fleming who started writing Casino Royale to take his mind off an impending marriage. He was in his early 40s then and had served during World War II as an intelligence officer. He dashed off the novel in a month and called it a ‘dreadful oafish opus’ written with ‘half a brain.’
He wanted a dull name for his fictional spy and chose the name of an ornithologist named James Bond, whose book Field Guide To The Birds of West Indies was lying in his library. Twelve years and 14 books later, by the time of his death in 1964, the Bond books had sold over 40 million copies worldwide.
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