Mining the Mother Lode

My Mirror column today:

Is there a new kind of Hindi film mother? Or have they become so complicated that they transcend the category?

In Vishal Bhardwaj's film Haider, Tabu plays Ghazala, the mother of Haider (Shahid Kapoor) 

We recently watched in shock and awe as Swaroop Sampat -- playing Kareena Kapoor's mother in Ki Aur Ka -- responded to her on-screen daughter Kia's declaration that she's found the man she wants to marry with the teasing remark, “Sex ho gaya na? Important before commitment.” 

Hindi cinema, it would seem, has truly arrived in the age of the New Movie Mother. Even the lower middle class mother these days – think of the winsome Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015) – can be shown being cheerfully forthright about her progeny's sexual well-being. We have clearly left far behind us those anxious matajis who wept or threatened their way through their offsprings' romantic adventures. Nowadays, like Sampat in Ki Aur Ka, they might just be embarking on one of their own.

So is the filmi mother – that all-too-familiar weepy figure who sacrificed herself for her children (mostly her son, the hero) and thus was seen to almost deserve her quota of emotional blackmail – gone for ever? Not counting Tanvi Azmi's nasty Radhabai in Bajirao Mastani (since despite all appearances to the contrary, it was meant to represent an 18^th century family), it seems to me that the last really bitchy, clingy mother we saw on the Hindi film screen might have been Amrita Singh in 2 States – that was two whole years ago, and Singh's Kavita was so loud, shallow and son-obsessed that we were clearly meant to have no sympathy with her. In any case, even in that film, the mantle of new Indian motherhood was redeemed by Revathy, playing the frosty but civilized (read TamBrahm) foil to Amrita Singh's gross North Indian stereotype.

It's not that our films have stopped having martinets and manipulators. But their aims – and their modus operandi – are different from those of a previous generation of on-screen mothers. In just the last year and a bit, we've had Ratna Pathak Shah rejig (her real-life mother) Dina Pathak's unusual role as the disciplinarian matriarch in the Disney remake of Hrishikesh Mukherjee's classic Khubsoorat, while the bizarre Shandaar gave us a particularly evil Mummyji duo, in the shape of Sushma Seth and her horrible daughter Nikki Aneja Walia. 

In less of a caricature mode, Shakun Batra's 2012 directorial debut Ek Main Aur Ekk Tucast Pathak Shah as the mother of the hapless Imran Khan, who needs all the courage he can muster to get out of the straitjacketed life she has planned for him. More recently, Zoya Akhtar's Dil Dhadakne Do depicted a whole generation of the Delhi business elite as heartless creatures for whom their sons and daughters as nothing but pawns in their financial gameplans. These are mothers trying their hardest to keep their children under their thumb – but they seem cold and controlling rather than needy and scheming. And the driving force of their actions is the maintenance of money.

A most interesting repertoire of recent maternal roles has been Dimple Kapadia's. In Luck By Chance (2009), she was fantastic as the over-the-hill star Neena Walia, who now lives to launch her debutante daughter Nikki (Isha Shervani). In Dabangg (2010), she was the classic Hindi film mother, the most important thing in her son's emotional life – but with a twist: she had married a man other than his father. Imtiaz Ali's Cocktail (2012) gave her a more caricatureish role – the Lajpat Nagar mummyji transplanted to her son's cool London milieu, who misreads his love life completely – but Kapadia made her desire for a bahu seem deeply felt. Recently, she added much-needed spark to Homi Adajania's distressingly dull Finding Fanny (2014). As the well-endowed, easily flattered Rosie, who lives almost peaceably with her widowed daughter-in-law (Deepika Padukone), Kapadia created an engaging mother who spends years preserving her dead son's secrets and her own – but manages finally to shed these burdens and get on with her own life.

This new kind of maternal figure is one whose love of her children does not preclude a new, palpable sense of herself. She might be a working, independent, single mother like Sampat, for whom the template is probably Ratna Pathak Shah's feisty Savitri Rathore in the 2008 comic hit Jaane Tu... Ya Ja Jaane Na, trying her best to raise her son as a thoughtful feminist, away from the shadow of his patrilineal family. 

Or she might be a much more tragic, romantic character, like the intensely sexual mothers brought luminously to life by Tabu -- in Haider and then Fitoor. These characters, of course, come to us from Western literature: Haider's Ghazala is a gloriously realised version of Shakespeare's Queen Gertrude -- profoundly attached to her son Haider/Hamlet, but unable (and unwilling?) to let motherhood subsume her sexual identity, while Fitoor's Begum is a heavily sensual version of Dickens' Miss Havisham – a woman who pours her life-long bitterness into a poisonous brew that warps the young people around her. 

Deepti Naval plays a frightening version of this warped maternal figure in the powerfulNH10 (2015) a woman who fully embodies the patriarchal system that has produced her, to the extent that she can sacrifice her children to it.

We may have (thankfully) moved away from the self-sacrificing mother. But the dangerously non-maternal version remains an extreme case. What is more likely to come to populate our screens is a figure like Pathak Shah in Kapoor And Sons: loving but also chafing at her burdens, trying but failing to keep her fears and frustrations in check, letting her deepest emotions create havoc between her own children. This is the flawed mother we know well, and it is nice, finally, to be able to meet her on screen.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.

Mocking 'filmi-ness': more on Chashme Buddoor

A guest column I did for Business Standard:

A still from Sai Paranjpye's Chashme Buddoor (1981)

Sai Paranjpye's Chashme Buddoor, a light-hearted and mild-mannered comedy which also gave us an unforgettably sweet romance between a bespectacled, padhaaku Farooq Shaikh and Deepti Naval as the irresistible but real girl next door, was recently restored and re-released in theatres alongside a new David Dhawan remake. A distressed Paranjpye has charged Dhawan with having killed her delicately funny film by injecting it with double entendres, bawdy jokes and a general crassness so antithetical to the sensibility of the original that to call the new Chashme Baddoor a remake was a travesty.

I watched both films last week, and I have to confess that while the old one has lost none of its delicate charm, the new one is a rambunctious and rather enjoyable ride. The new film, like the old one, centres on a trio of young men (inaugurating a whole Hindi film tradition of male friendship movies since). One is the sincere student who reads Economics textbooks for pleasure, while the other two spend their time gadding about the empty leafy avenues of 1980s Delhi in search of girls. Or to adopt the celebratory whoop with which they greet every sighting of young female flesh - "shikaar!". The reference to prey may sound shocking, but there's something about Omi and Jomo's unthreatening comicness that makes it not just alright but hilarious. And yet the indiscriminateness of their attentions is enough to indicate the unabashedly joyful sexual basis of their interest. Paranjpye's world may have been innocent, but it was not coy.

That frank vision of youthful (male) hormones is a clue to what made Chashme Buddoor such a remarkable film: its absolute outsiderness to the conventions of the Hindi movie - and even more, the quirky, tongue-in-cheek way in which it chooses to play with those conventions.

In 1981 - the year in which Chashme Buddoor released - the top 10 grossers at the Hindi box office included four Amitabh Bachchan starrers (Yaarana, Kaalia, Naseeb and Lawaaris) replete with dramatic father-son battles and villainous villains on whom revenge had to be wreaked. Other films in the top 10 were a colonial fable involving revolutionary Indian pirates and evil Britishers (Kranti), a reincarnation-revenge-romance (Kudrat), and two stories of star-crossed young lovers (Ek Duuje Ke Liye and Love Story). This was the cinematic universe that Chashme Buddoor emerged into - a universe whose high drama and heroic stunts it both distinguished itself from, and gently but thoroughly mocked. From the first scene, in which the Mehdi Hassan classic of the scorched heart Yeh dhuan sa kahan se uthta hai plays as accompaniment to our heroes' silent communion over a shared cigarette, to having them imagine their romantic conquests as a medley of old Hindi film songs, Chashme Buddoor never stops making fun of our filmi-ness.

Sai Paranjpye was not unique in this sort of mockery. The urban "middle class cinema", represented among others by Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Gulzar, enjoyed poking fun at the more unreal aspects of Hindi films. One of their favourite things to mock was the ubiquitous double role. Gulzar pushed it to its limits (and returned it to source) with Angoor (1982), his superb adaptation of The Comedy of Errors, giving us not one but two pairs of twins. And Mukherjee's Gol Maal (1979) used the idea of fake identical twins as the masterful basis of its comic plot. (Rohit Shetty's reworking, Bol Bachchan, 2012, was grotesque, among other things, because it created a "real" humshakal for Asin - seemingly unaware that Gol Maal's humour was based on mocking the proliferation of twins.)

But Chashme Buddoor went further than those. There's the marvellous scene in which Amitabh and Rekha appear to demonstrate a Hindi movie-style wooing - and how "the technique" falls flat in real life. Earlier, Jomo (the late Ravi Baswani) pretends to be a Bombay producer "talent-scouting" in Delhi, and, in his imagination, Deepti Naval giggles delightedly to hear that "there's a bit of a vacuum in the industry after Jaya ji" that she can fill. In the scene as it actually unfolds, Jomo is crisply rebuffed: she never watches Hindi movies.

Yet, when Naval and Shaikh fall in love and find themselves in a flower-filled Delhi park, they cannot but burst into song. "How do those people in the movies think up rhyming words and tunes on the spot?" muses Neha to Siddharth, before seguing neatly into a half-jokey rhyming song, holding a large flower up like a microphone. And while the climax sets out to stage a kidnapping so that the hero can rescue the heroine filmi-style, Paranjpye decides to play with our now-established expectations by turning the fake kidnapping into a real one. We may laugh at Hindi movies, she seems to say, but we also inhabit them.

David Dhawan, self-declared acolyte of Manmohan Desai - a specialist in mistaken identities and long-lost reunitings if ever there was one - has made a much louder, filmi-er, lowbrow film than the original. But it is also a cheery, self-conscious send-up of the raucous comedies for which he became famous in the 1990s. And in that combination of self-consciousness and inhabiting lies his tribute to Chashme Buddoor.

Film Review: Farooq-Deepti nostalgia not enough magic for Listen… Amaya

The main draw of Listen… Amaya is the fact that it brings back together two actors who’ve given us some of the tenderest, most identifiable romantic couplings in the history of Hindi filmdom: Farooque Shaikh and Deepti Naval. In a cinematic universe so dominated by grand gesture and loving excess, it seems almost wondrous that they managed to carve out a space for the middle class romantic encounter, transforming the everyday into quiet on-screen magic.

In a lovely little scene from Sachin Kundalkar’s otherwise curiously confused Aiyyaa, Rani Mukherjee’s Meenakshi shocks her prospective husband Madhav (Subodh Bhave) by telling him that she’s never heard of the Deepti Naval-Farooque Shaikh pairing, leading him to break into a spontaneous rendition of Jagjit Singh’s ‘Tumko dekha toh yeh khayaal aaya’ from Saath-Saath. Seeing Madhav so overcome, Meenakshi asks what was special about them. Nothing special, replies Madhav – that was the point – that they were so normal, so un-made-up, so utterly un-filmi. The movie-mad Meenakshi, who spends her technicolour daydreams dancing her way through Sridevi-Madhuri-Juhi hits, is genuinely flummoxed. If you wanted to watch regular people, she muses, why would you go watch a film?

No-one who has ever actually watched Saath-Saath, though, is likely to ask that question. A marvelously affecting example of the Naval-Shaikh romantic pairing, Raman Kumar’s film contains several classic Hindi movie elements – the new girl in college; the radical poet-writer-hero; the poor boy-rich girl romance; the rich parents opposed to the relationship – but it uses them to craft a narrative that is perhaps unique in our cinema. Because the crisis in the film – our sense of impending tragedy – is created not merely by people or things extraneous to the central characters, but by an internal transformation within a central character. Shaikh’s Avinash, a committed socialist student who storms out of newspaper offices rather than re-write his pieces, finds the economic pressures of domesticity bending him into a rather more pliable employee than the idealistic girl who fell for him could ever have imagined.

In that transition— from the unflashy, stubborn grit of the college-going Avinash to a man who seems almost enthusiastic as he adopts one sharp practice after another to advance his publishing career—we see the brilliant range of Farooque Shaikh as an actor. The bumbling confusion of the good boy encountering the possibility of romance – think of Chashme Buddoor – and the garrulous sharp talker whom you probably shouldn’t believe but whom you cannot fail to be charmed by – think of Katha – are, in Saath-Saath, merged into a single character. Naval, too, transitions with consummate ease from the demure girl with the dancing eyes to the woman choked by the tears in her throat.

In recent years, both Naval and Shaikh have had their chance to return to the big screen – and in two memorable instances, to actually flex their acting muscles: Naval in Nandita Das’s Firaaq as a middle-aged Gujarati housewife in post-riot Ahmedabad and Shaikh in Dibakar Banerjee’s Shanghai, as an oily bureaucrat adept at the power games of a rotten polity, shifting expertly from obsequious to threatening.

Sadly, Listen… Amaya doesn’t offer them any such opportunities. What it does do is to bring the two of them into the same frame for the first time in decades, giving their loyal following—all us Madhavs in the real world—a chance to bask in the nostalgic glow of their togetherness. Being the attentive, natural performers that they are, Shaikh and Naval—playing widowed upper middle class 60-somethings who have found companionship and comfort in each other—carry most of their scenes with an easy warmth. Swara Bhaskar plays Naval’s daughter, making fairly believable both Amaya’s rather-too-childish mood-swings and her discomfort with the fact that her mother could possibly share a life (and a bed) with another man—even if he’s as teddy-bearish as Farooque Shaikh.

And yet much of this film seems stilted and coy, a picture postcard version of upper middle class life that fails ever to come to life. Part of the problem is that these characters are given very little by way of location—and what there is seems like something of a la-la-land. Deepti Naval’s coffee-shop-owning Leela Krishnamurti – archly referred to by her cool young customers as Mrs. K – seems to have led a life in which even the early death of a husband did not catapult her and her young daughter into any kind of financial stress. The café-cum-bookshop, set in a perpetually rainy (!) Delhi bungalow-with-garden, doesn’t seem like it would actually pay even for its own upkeep. Farooq Shaikh’s Jayant, too, is given only a personal history, not a professional one. In the film’s present, he lives in his own lush bungalow-with-garden, and spends his time taking amateur photographs. This is a supremely comfortable Delhi in which everyone has a superbly-appointed tasteful house, young women can leave their jobs at the drop of a hat and not have to find another one, and stories one wrote as a nine-year-old can become the basis for coffee table books about “memories” that have Oxbridge-accented publishers lining up for sequels.

“Live by what you believe in, even if it kills you,” Amaya’s dead father apparently used to say. It is a statement that might have encapsulated the difficult dilemmas of Saath Saath. Somehow, in a world so utterly bereft of conflict or danger as, it feels like empty rhetoric. Amid the perpetually steaming coffee cups and rain-drenched windows of Listen… Amaya, it’s just another coffee table line for a coffee table movie.

Published on Firstpost.

‘Writing is much more intimately who I am’: An interview with Deepti Naval

The difference between Deepti Naval the actress and Deepti Naval the writer

Best known as the demure girl next door from Sai Paranjpye’s Chashme Baddoor, Deepti Naval starred in some of the gentlest, funniest comedies — Gulzar’s Angoor (1982), Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Rang Birangi (1983) and Kissi Se Na Kehna (1983)—as well as some of the hardest-hitting films of the 1980s: Saeed Mirza’s Mohan Joshi Haazir Ho (1983), Prakash Jha’s Damul (1985), Jagmohan Mundhra’s Kamla (1985) and Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala (1985). She returned to the screen after a long gap with a startlingly vivid performance as a housewife haunted by the 2002 Gujarat riots in Nandita Das’ Firaaq (2008). In 2011, we’ve seen her in Bhindi Bazaar, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, Rivaaz and the lovely Memories in March. A prolific painter, photographer and twice-published poet, Naval can’t seem to stop finding new ways to express herself. Her first book, The Mad Tibetan and Other Stories, is a collection of acutely observed tales, including some real-life encounters—Balraj Sahni as a child in Punjab, a Nepali sex worker she once chatted with till 4 am, and a strange old man in Ladakh. An interview:

Q You were ‘foreign-returned’ long before it was common for Indians to have a slot in which to place NRIs or ABCDs. How did that experience shape you, going from Amritsar to New York, and back to Bombay?
A See, it worked both ways. The advantage was that I was very independent. I’d lived in New York, I knew exactly where I wanted to go with my career. I knew the kind of cinema I wanted to belong to, the kind of people I wanted to work with. But because I had come straight from New York, it was hard to gel. The industry was a little unnerving for me in the beginning. The studios in those days were very shabby, smelly; we had terrible toilets, too many flies (laughs).

Q How long had you been away?
A Seven years. My New York years were my blossoming years. I studied Fine Arts at Hunter College. I’d be in my white sari with red border crossing the street, and the traffic would stop.

Q You wore a sari to college?

A No, no. On occasions: on Diwali, or for dances. Anyway, in those days, most people in the industry were uneducated, other than directors and some actors. But luckily, I got the best of directors. So it was a dichotomy. But I’d always dreamt of coming back.

Q Was your relationship with the idea of India shaped by your going away?
A Well, thodi identity crisis toh thhi. When I started writing poetry, for example. You’re in America but you’re Indian. I thought hum toh apni zabaan mein likhenge, in Hindustani. I’m a great lover of old Hindi songs and Sufi poetry, so there’s something there. Later I outgrew that complex, and started writing in English. But in terms of coming back, there was never any doubt. I had dreamt of acting since I was seven.

Q Was that when you met Balraj Sahni, that remarkable moment you describe in the book?

A Yes. A wintry morning, Gandhi Ground, Amritsar: aur main dad ke saath, with blazer and socks and shoes and braided hair… But I wanted to act even before that. I never thought of my life any other way. Later, at 13, I thought I’d either be an actress or a nun.

Q So either you’d become an actress, or give it all up? Thankfully that didn’t happen. But how did Ek Baar Phir come to you?

A (Laughs) The idea of acting never left me. I never made it obvious to my family, I was very shy. But inside I had great plans that nobody knew about. When I finished college, I thought, ‘Now I can speak my mind.’ When my parents heard, they flipped. They said, ‘You want to go to Paris, study art, fine. But this?’ Both my parents have been teachers all their lives, so it was hard. I came to Bombay under the pretext of a holiday. I met Hrishida, I met Shyam Benegal. Then I went back, and my mother said, ‘Who told you you can go and become an actress?’ I was also getting a very good modelling offer. They were looking for an Eastern face. The head of this agency in NYC said to me, ‘Put yourself in my hands and I’ll make you the face of the decade’. I said, ‘No, I don’t want to be this plastic face’.

Q Oh, you should have tried it out!

A Yes, I should have made my money then! I never made any money. But then I thought I’m born to emote, be an actress, not a model. So I never thought twice. Then I convinced my parents finally, and came back. I went to Doordarshan to audition for a play. I met Farooq Shaikh there. He was compering something. I was asked to co-host a programme with Farooq, which I did. Then I went off to shoot for Benegal’s Junoon (1979): I had three scenes. When I came back, there was a message from Farooq, saying that a director from London called Vinod Pande was looking to cast a girl with big eyes and long hair. That’s how I got into Ek Baar Phir (1980). That was the first big role. But Junoon was the big learning. See, I had never done a play in my life. I used to dance on stage. But life is so funny, I never got one role that required me to dance.

Q Dance is the one thing that’s not listed in your creative accomplishments.

A Yes, it’s not mentioned. But I was trained in kathak. I used to be good at it.

Q Do you see yourself as very rooted?

A I’m not rooted at all. My father’s family was from Lahore. My mother’s family was from Dharamsala and Jammu. My nana was a Dogri, and I have a great affinity for the mountains. That’s what I feel I have inherited. I’m a perpetual wanderer. You put me down in one place, and I feel, God, bhatak gaye yaar. And when I’m bhatkofying, I feel I’ve come back home. I get miserable if I have to stay put in one place.

Q And yet you’ve spent so much of your life in Bombay?

A I’ve only survived Bombay because I’m always getting away.

Q Returning to acting: there’s a remarkable honesty in your performances, even when it’s a character quite distant from you, like in Firaaq. How does acting work for you?
A I’ve always felt when I am acting is when I’m exposing my innermost feelings—and not acting, actually. When the camera goes on, it all becomes real. I find a connection to something and I just relive that. To that moment I am totally honest. I’m never putting on an act. I had gone to Ahmedabad after the riots: Dolly Thakore, Nafisa Ali, Anjolie Ela Menon and myself. I remember visiting the refugee camp, and I was so badly hit. Nafisa Ali told me, ‘It’s okay, you can smile for the camera.’ But I just couldn’t. I’m not made like that. I’m not an attention seeker in real life. Only on screen I want full attention, because I’m living a real moment over there.

Q What about vanity? Was seeing your own face on screen part of the fascination with acting?
A Apna chehra toh hai, it’s a big thing. When I was little, I would watch B&W morning shows of old films with Nutan, Meena Kumari, Nargis and think, ‘That’s what I want: I’ll be emoting over there and all these people will be affected by what I’m feeling’. I wanted to affect people.

Q You worked through the 1980s and returned to the industry in the 2000s. Has Hindi cinema changed?
A Some exciting stuff is happening. But there’s a loss of depth, too much froth; I’m not talking about films like Guzaarish, Raajneeti, Satya or Dil Chahta Hai; I love those. And the women don’t look Indian any more. Though many are hugely talented: Kareena, Priyanka… I wish they’d try to retain their individual traditional look, charisma. I was happy to see Aishwarya Rai in Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam. And now Vidya Balan. Hats off to her for doing the role she’s doing now. I like women who are traditional in appearance but have a mind, an attitude that’s universal.

Q In your story 'Thulli', you describe meeting a sex worker because you were going to play one in a film. Did that ever get made?
A No, it didn’t. But I’m glad you brought it up. Years later, I did a film for Tapan Sinha based on Premendra Mitra’s story 'Mahanagar', about a boy tracing his sister to the red light district. Now that title had already been taken by Satyajit Ray’s film, so Tapanda used the title Didi. It was only after the film that I realised that my reference had always been Thulli. Subconsciously. And ‘thulli’ in Nepali means ‘elder sister’. Four stories in the book are from real incidents. I used to keep a diary. When I was writing in the last two years, I looked up my notes and then recreated them in laborious detail. I met the ‘Mad Tibetan’ in 1998. Shabana [Azmi] asked me at a recent Crossword interview about taking risks, meeting this mad Tibetan in an empty Ladakh landscape. You feel scared at first, but as you see him in another light, another moment, he becomes a concept. I just trust people. I trust myself to evoke good feelings in them.

I don’t feel scared. For many years I did nothing but drive around the mountains and stay in the passes where Tibetan women run dhabas. First it was with Vinod Pandit, my fiancé—we bought a Sumo. I didn’t want a car in which I would step out wearing a sari and high heels. I wanted something for the roughest terrain, cross-country driving. In 1993, we went for a week and stayed for two months.

In 1998, I went alone. I wanted to see the colours of winter there, take photographs.

Q When did you start taking photographs?

A Oh, a long time ago. But I’d never shown my work. Painting I graduated in, that was official. Photography was a hobby. I love it because doing landscapes took me away from cities. But when the prints from this 1998 trip were being made at Colour Art Lab in Bombay, two photographers saw them and asked Mukund Patel whose work it was. Mr Patel told me, ‘You should show this work.’ So I had my first exhibition: In Search of Another Sky. Then I did other series: The Road Builders, Shades of Red.

Q How do you choose which medium to use?
A If I have not been able to say something one way, then it gets extended into another medium. I’ll give you an example. My first painting in India was done at a very disturbed time in my life: it’s me standing on my balcony, a monsoon night behind me. But nobody understood ki kya hai. ‘Really dark, ya,’ they said. So I wrote my poem 'Black Wind', about a suicidal moment. With the mad Tibetan, too, I took photographs, but they never did justice to the impact he left on me. Perhaps a short film would have worked. But some things need to be written.

Q You’ve recently made a film, too: Chaar Paise ki Dhoop, Do Paise ki Baarish.

A Yes, hopefully it will release in India in March.

Q You’re a painter, photographer, director and now writer. Do you still feel like an actress first and foremost?
A I’m in my own skin when I’m acting. I feel I was born to be this. But there I’m a tool in the hands of the director or writer. It’s their concept, their take on life. What about my take on life? Acting is not first hand who I am. This — writing — is much more intimately who I am, first hand.

Q You give the impression of being totally at peace with yourself.
A It has been a long journey till this point. There have been times when I’ve not known how to control my own anger. But those days are long over.

Q Do you see yourself as political?
A I think to be successful in politics, you have to be a manipulator. I don’t see myself having a platform. But I do feel gratified by contributing something to people’s lives. So social work, yes; politics, no.

Q You run a trust for the education of girls.

A I’m not an activist, I’m not committed to the cause enough that I would drop all these things for it. It’s a gesture. I want to start old people’s homes, for people like the bent old coolie at Amritsar station who begs me to let him carry my luggage because only then can he earn. There should be some dignity in old age.

Published in Open magazine, 19 Nov 2011.