Mackenna's Gold

"Better put on your belt, Mackenna, or, your pants may fall down!" - who can forget that dialogue from Omar Sharif to Gregory Peck.

A totally different panorama from Lawrence of Arabia, where Omar Sharif plays a Sheikh's Warrior Son in Arabia to a brigand cowboy in the American West who dreams of becoming a playboy in Paris.

India, and Mumbai, saw the American Indians up close, for the first time in Mackenna's Gold and empathised with them more than with the story.

Boys in Mumbai practised for days on end to swing their pen knife and small made-up hatchet axes in the manner that the American Indians threw them.

I must have gone on at least 3 so called "expeditions" in 1975-76 with my "gang" from school, Sunil Gvalani, Zaheer Allam Abbas and Melwyn Aruja, to Antop Hill to hunt for gold canyons.