ABSTRACT
Javed Akhtar attended an international workshop on the 1970s and its legacies hosted at Temple University in April 2011, where he held a public conversation with Priya Joshi before an audience of roughly 300 people. At Temple, he spoke on the 1970s and his start in Hindi cinema, his career as poet and lyricist, and Hindi cinema today, an industry he characterized as devoted to the 'A/C and juice generation'. During the public conversation, Akhtar describes his insomniac working habits and, relatedly, the dream-language of popular cinema that requires a special vocabulary to fully uncover. He remains optimistic that the cinema of India's Golden Ages is not a thing of the past: that eventually, today's A/C and juice generation of filmmakers will speak more fully to the many Indians that are currently ignored in their drive to capture the well-heeled multiplex audience.
