Conversations Over Chai: Tom Daniels

Thomas Daniels - aka Tom - has been lovingly cleaning up old Hindi movies and uploading them on his YouTube channel at tommydan55 for years. Despite immense challenges, from sourcing old movies to fending off false copyright claims, Tom has continually striven to put the best possible version of the old films that he can find. Hindi film enthusiasts owe him a huge debt of gratitude for restoring these films, some of which we may never have seen in public domain were it not for his yeoman service.

In 2019, Business Standard carried an article on Tom titled:

Hawaiian Healer

A retired commercial fisherman in Hawaii shows his love for vintage Hindi and Urdu films by carefully restoring them at home, writes Ranjita Ganesan

When Thomas Daniel first travelled to India, the country did not capture his imagination in the best way. He spent a short week here during a trans-Asian journey with a pal from school, with flying visits to West Bengal, Delhi and the Taj Mahal in Agra.

The sights, sounds and swarms of people had overwhelmed him.He remembers waiting in line to buy a train ticket to Delhi as a malnourished woman with a baby in her arms touched his feet, asking for money. He also vividly recalls crossing the landmark Howrah Bridge in Kolkata. Years later, he would come to love a film by that name, Howrah Bridge (1958), starring Madhubala and Ashok Kumar, and Hindi and Urdu movies eventually became, for him, a quite favourable vehicle to traverse the Indian subcontinent.

Daniel now lives in rural Hawaii where, having retired from commercial fishing and driving tour buses, he devotes the majority of his time to painstakingly restoring classic films from India and Pakistan, mainly from the 1930s to the early 1950s.

To know more about him and what drives him, click here.

LIST OF RESTORED FILMS ON TOM'S YOUTUBE CHANNEL