PassionForCinema: The Blog That Shaped How We Talked About Indian Cinema

Pankaj Sikka—an LA-based IT entrepreneur who wrote under the pseudonym “Oz”—started PassionForCinema.com (PFC) at a time when blogging was still relatively unknown in the Indian movie industry, and the site quickly grew from a founder-led initiative into a much larger, constantly active online cinema community. Contemporary reporting described PFC as an online group where geography felt meaningless and the “chemistry” came from a potent mix of cinema obsession and industry talk, with participation spanning India and NRIs across time zones and the site humming with activity round the clock. 

PFC was not just a movie review site. It was an open space where people could freely share opinions, argue, and discuss films. PFC gave film fans a place to talk seriously about movies, and for many people it helped them get more deeply interested in filmmaking and film culture. 

Filmmakers and film personalities use the platform to talk up their work or spark discussion around it: Shivaji Chandrabhushan was promoting Frozen, Aamir Bashir was promoting Harud, and Pankaj Advani was promoting Sankat City.  Anurag Kashyap was a young, angry blogger who wrote strong rants demanding fair opportunities and the freedom to make films his own way. I still remember his post about creating "Emotional Atyachar" for Dev.D, explaining the brass band song's inspiration from Om Darbadar and scenes from Emir Kusturica's Underground. I watched Underground and became a minor expert on Yugoslavia after that. 

Many regular people also joined in—like aspiring film makers, software engineers, journalists, and other movie lovers—so it felt like a cinema discussion group that was active all the time, not a one-way magazine. Ratnakar Sadasyula, Jahanpanah, jitaditya, Sethumadhavan, Yaatri, Karthik Krishnan, Pavan Jha, Yaatri and Udta Hathi (~uh) are the name of writers that are fresh are in my memory. The Atrocious Eighties was one of the most funny lesson of cinematic history for me during my adult phase of the life. The different viewpoints and debates made the blog brilliant. It was like twitter with better content & without trolls. All that is now lost in digital archives.  I found a better tribute to PFC that I am sharing here. 

From my own experience of that era, I was reading every article on PFC & commenting  as  Yayaver to stay updated on cinema and its discussions, and what struck me was how the ecosystem itself was shifting: films increasingly felt less “made for” smaller towns like Patna and less grounded in the familiar Delhi/Mumbai everydayness while foreign locations and metropolitan sensibilities started to dominate in ways. We saw how films were  catering to metro and overseas audiences had become crucial for box-office success. If you want the deeper context, read the full piece here.  At the same time, PFC felt like it was exposing what was truly original versus what was copied, and it became a lens for spotting patterns, influences, and imitations. 

PFC was a place that broadened my taste through a lot of world cinema and more personal, insider-adjacent insight. PFC sat at a rare intersection of passionate fandom, professional curiosity, and a kind of informal industry salon where conversation itself was the main event. Whenever I see Digital Archives: Passion For Cinema, I feel like Toto in Cinema Paradiso watching old film clips— PFC will live as living fragments of cinema history, moments frozen in time that still carry the warmth, passion, and energy of that era.

Milan Kundera wrote: "Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten..." In that ocean of forgetting, PassionForCinema remains itched in my memory—the Gurukul of Indian cinema where cinephiles built India's first real online film community. 

* Browse few brilliant PFC Archive posts here (tagged collection):