In 1982, a murder mystery film called Dial 100 directed by S Ramanathan was released. In the film, the characters Raju and Rana kill Seth Din Dayal and loot his diamonds. In a tiff that follows, Raju hides the stolen goods inside a guitar belonging to Gautam, a singer. Rana kills Raju but somehow, Gautam’s to-be-fiancé, Geet thinks she may have killed him instead. Amidst all this confusion, their engagement ceremony takes place and a song plays in the background: ‘Koi kunwara maara gaya, ye maajra kaise kab ho gaya?’ (a young man was killed, how and when did this happen?). Before one can even comprehend the absurdity of it all, what looks like a corpse on a stretcher enters the scene and Geet, thinking her fear has come true, faints at the sight of it. As it turns out, the corpse was actually a cake.
Aditi Sen, historian and professor at Queen’s University, Canada, absolutely loves cake. She loves Hindi cinema equally and almost always watches a film more than once. So, in 2015, she combined both passions and started a rather quirky Tumblr page called ‘Kaho Na Cake Hai’. From the oddest cakes like the one in Dial 100 to pancakes disguised as cakes, and a lot more, her page is a treasure trove of cakes that have been used in a range of Hindi films.
