A little known Bollywood film Chand Par Chadayee not only showed a lunar mission years before Chandrayaan, but also predicted many other modern inventions.
India will enter a select group of countries when Chandrayaan 3’s Vikram lander touches down on the surface of the moon on Wednesday evening. The ambitious programme from ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) marks India’s first foray on the lunar surface. But that’s just reality. In fiction, India reached the lunar surface over half a century ago, and that too not with landers and rovers but astronauts, led by none other than Dara Singh.
Chand Par Chadayee, the story of India’s men on the moon
In 1967, two years before Neil Armstrong even set foot on the moon, filmmaker TP Sundaram made a science fiction film named Chand Par Chadayee. The film, about an Indian mission to the moon, starred wrestler-turned-actor Dara Singh along with Anwar Hussain and Padma Khanna. The film starred Dara Singh as astronaut Anand, who reaches the moon with his associate Bhagu (Bhagwan) and together, they face monsters, aliens, and robots on the moon. It was one of the first Indian films to show otherwordly travel and am ambitious undertaking given the state of special effects in cinema back then. The film was a moderate success.
The inventions that Chand Par Chadayee got right
Chand Par Chadayee, which was released in English as A Trip to the Moon, not only got the lunar landing right but also predicted several crucial 21st century invention. The film showed Padma Khanna’s character Simi talking to her leader on a video call, similar to Skype and also showed a box-like device for viewing, akin to Google Glass, which could only be invented four decades later. The film also showed deviced similar to modern-day printers, scanners, and digital cameras, and showed artificial intelligence and electronic mail, one year before the internet had even been invented. Sadly, the writer of the film – who imagined these amazing inventions years before scientists – was not credited on screen.
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 "A still from the 1967 film Chand Par Chadayee")
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