When Truth Turns Trite
TRISHA GUPTA
FILM >> WELL DONE ABBA
DIRECTOR >> SHYAM BENGAL
STARRING >> BOMAN IRANI, MINISSHA LAMBA, ILA ARUN
RATING >> * *
SHYAM BENEGAL has spent a great deal of his directorial life representing the Indian village on screen. His latest offering, a rural comedy, marks the distance he’s travelled from the intensely realist critique of patriarchy and caste in Ankur (1974), Nishant (1975) or the equally trenchant Samar (1999).
It isn’t that Benegal can’t do — or hasn’t done — comedy. But the broad buffoonery and lame jokes of Well Done Abba make one ache for the nuanced black humour of Mandi (1983) — where the travails of a house full of prostitutes formed the focus of a marvellous satire about politics and middle class morality. Or at least for the warmly humanist humour of Welcome to Sajjanpur (2008), which managed to woo urban multiplex audiences into a rural cinescape, and whose success Benegal is clearly trying to recreate. Unfortunately, Sajjanpur’s already stagey village and deliberately stock characters, now transported from north India to the Dakhani Urdu-speaking regions of Andhra Pradesh that Benegal knows well, dissolve completely into caricature here.
The main narrative — about the super-sincere Armaan Ali (Boman Irani), whose attempt to build a well on his own land under a government BPL loan scheme is thwarted by the system — might even have been alright on its own. But it is forcibly tethered to the unfunny shenanigans of Rehmaan Ali (Armaan’s beimaan twin, also played by Boman) and his wife (an irritating Ila Arun) and a saccharine-sweet romance between Armaan’s perky daughter Muskaan (Minissha Lamba doing a decent Preity-Zinta-lite) and local mechanic Arif. The lack of nuance with which issue after issue is dealt with is disappointing — the sarkari ad-like reference to the RTI Act, the appallingly flat subplot about poor Muslim girls being married off to Arab Sheikhs, the fact that Arif must be shown to be of indeterminate religious background to establish secular credentials. Benegal attempts simplicity but only achieves simplisticness.
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 14, Dated April 10, 2010
8 April 2010
3 April 2010
Thanks Maa - Film Review
Children Of The Underbelly
FILM >> THANKS MAA
DIRECTOR >> IRFAN KAMAL
STARRING >> SHAMS PATEL, BABY ALMAS, MASTER FAYAAZ, SANJAY PANDEY, RANVIR SHOREY
RATING >> * * 1/2
MOVIES STARRING CHILDREN in central roles can be difficult to pull off. Kids may tug at the audience’s heartstrings, but that directorial advantage — of being able to pull the viewer in with ease — comes with the danger of tipping over into maudlin territory.
Thanks Maa begins shakily, with a confusing title sequence that cuts between a nervous burqa-clad woman so distracted by her husband’s crankiness that she endangers their crawling baby, and street kids stealing a wallet under the pretext of polishing shoes. Debutant director Irfan Kamal seems to be setting the viewer up for an oddly overcooked morality tale, pitched somewhere between Amar Akbar Anthony and Boot Polish, with neither the zany humour of one nor the emotional kick of the other. Thankfully, Kamal recovers swiftly. Initial caricatures (like the bug-eyed seth from Surat) and amateurish acting are forgotten when we meet the film’s real subjects: a charming bunch of street urchins named Soda, Municipality, Cutting, Sursuri and Shana. Shams Patel’s star turn as the twelve-year-old Municipality Ghatkopar (named for the place where he was found as a baby) has garnered a National Award for Best Child Actor, but his co-actors’ performances are pitch-perfect too — fluctuating between jaded cynicism and wide-eyed vulnerability. Among the adults, mention must be made of Alok Nath and Ranvir Shorey's superb cameos as the smarmy head of a juvenile home and a nervous middle class husband, respectively.
The narrative centres on Municipality’s discovery of an abandoned infant and his determined effort to trace its mother, who he is convinced is grief-stricken and waiting to be reunited with it. The film teeters on the brink of a Madhur Bhandarkar-like sensational excess, but Kamal and cinematographer Ajayan Vincent use Municipality’s journey as an opportunity to shoot a magnificently varied set of urban locales. That old Mumbai cliché, the Ganesh Chaturthi festival, is captured afresh and memorably, but the camera also manages to make us see a strange and startling beauty everywhere — in the hill-like slums of Parkside, Vikhroli, in the surreal space of a BPO as seen by a street child. That, in itself, is a remarkable achievement.
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 11, Dated March 20, 2010
FILM >> THANKS MAA
DIRECTOR >> IRFAN KAMAL
STARRING >> SHAMS PATEL, BABY ALMAS, MASTER FAYAAZ, SANJAY PANDEY, RANVIR SHOREY
RATING >> * * 1/2
MOVIES STARRING CHILDREN in central roles can be difficult to pull off. Kids may tug at the audience’s heartstrings, but that directorial advantage — of being able to pull the viewer in with ease — comes with the danger of tipping over into maudlin territory.
Thanks Maa begins shakily, with a confusing title sequence that cuts between a nervous burqa-clad woman so distracted by her husband’s crankiness that she endangers their crawling baby, and street kids stealing a wallet under the pretext of polishing shoes. Debutant director Irfan Kamal seems to be setting the viewer up for an oddly overcooked morality tale, pitched somewhere between Amar Akbar Anthony and Boot Polish, with neither the zany humour of one nor the emotional kick of the other. Thankfully, Kamal recovers swiftly. Initial caricatures (like the bug-eyed seth from Surat) and amateurish acting are forgotten when we meet the film’s real subjects: a charming bunch of street urchins named Soda, Municipality, Cutting, Sursuri and Shana. Shams Patel’s star turn as the twelve-year-old Municipality Ghatkopar (named for the place where he was found as a baby) has garnered a National Award for Best Child Actor, but his co-actors’ performances are pitch-perfect too — fluctuating between jaded cynicism and wide-eyed vulnerability. Among the adults, mention must be made of Alok Nath and Ranvir Shorey's superb cameos as the smarmy head of a juvenile home and a nervous middle class husband, respectively.
The narrative centres on Municipality’s discovery of an abandoned infant and his determined effort to trace its mother, who he is convinced is grief-stricken and waiting to be reunited with it. The film teeters on the brink of a Madhur Bhandarkar-like sensational excess, but Kamal and cinematographer Ajayan Vincent use Municipality’s journey as an opportunity to shoot a magnificently varied set of urban locales. That old Mumbai cliché, the Ganesh Chaturthi festival, is captured afresh and memorably, but the camera also manages to make us see a strange and startling beauty everywhere — in the hill-like slums of Parkside, Vikhroli, in the surreal space of a BPO as seen by a street child. That, in itself, is a remarkable achievement.
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 11, Dated March 20, 2010
8 March 2010
Trickster City: Writing from the Belly of the Metropolis
What can a city mean for those whose homes are demolished at will? Young writers from Delhi's worker colonies produce an anthology unlike anything in Hindi literature.
A young man describes the art of skinning a hen. A man buys a refrigerator — and cuts his neighbour’s electricity cable. A 14-year-old makes up his mind to leave school and work as a courier delivery boy. A girl getting drenched in the rain steps reluctantly into a phone booth. The first thing one can say about Trickster City is that it contains voices that one has never heard before. Not in the existing world of Hindi literature, and certainly not in the world of English. For the 20 authors of Trickster City, a collection of writings on Delhi first published in Hindi as Bahurupiya Shehr (Rajkamal Prakashan, 2007), are all first-time writers, young men and women from working- class neighbourhoods across Delhi.
All under 30, they began to think seriously about writing on the city sometime in 2005, when the spectre of the Commonwealth Games first appeared on the horizon of Delhi’s future. They met under the aegis of the Cybermohalla labs set up by Ankur Society for Alternatives in Education and the Sarai Programme of the Centre for Developing Societies. These labs, “spaces for extended conversation, creative experimentation, mutual exchange and self-learning”, have had 400 young people pass through them since May 2001.
Some in the collective were closet writers before they encountered Cybermohalla. If Azra Tabassum, 26, filled diary after secret diary with the minutiae of her life at 14 (only to have them discovered and destroyed by an angry aunt), Jaanu Nagar, 24, remembers writing as having always been the stable counterpart to his ghummakkad (wandering) existence. Like with most young people, though, their initial writings were mostly about themselves. But as the group acquired a sense of collectivity, so did the scope and maturity of their writing. “We’d meet and discuss everything. And what we discussed we’d take back with us. Over the years, that questioning became fused with living itself,” says Azra, who lives in LNJP colony near Delhi Gate. The collaborative process was crucial to the texts they eventually produced. “One’s own experience of something is never enough,” says Suraj Rai, 22. “When the private is pushed outwards into the collective, it acquires a newness,” agrees Love Anand, 22. “When your perspective is forced to confront that of others, it is altered.”
Far from what you might expect, then, the fragments that make up Trickster City are no simple autobiographical narratives, content to depict worlds familiar to themselves (and unfamiliar to us). They are pieces of carefully crafted prose, engagements with experience: their own and others’. These are writers who have grappled long and hard with the gap between life and narrative, and do not promise any objective ‘truth’. If Anand wants to escape the unreflective snappiness of news reports, Azra is keen that her writing be a product not simply of what happened but of “[her] struggle with what happened”.
The process of collective thinking and writing had been underway for some time when something did happen. Between March and August 2006, the neighbourhood of Nangla Maanchi, where several of the writers lived, was demolished under a High Court order. “Nangla did bring about a thehraav (pause) in our thought,” says Lakhmi Chand Kohli, 29. The deliberate destruction of a settlement of some 30,000 people placed upon those who lived in Nangla (as well as the rest who now visited it) a huge weight of witnessing. But this is a book that successfully steers clear of bathos, even when bearing testimony to an event as crushing, as dramatic, as the demolition of Nangla Maanchi. Lakhmi puts it well when he says, “Writing is a strange thing. It brings you nearer even as it creates distance.” The enormity of the experience was distilled in different ways. Those who lived in the resettlement colony of Dakshinpuri found in Nangla a way into their parents’ unspoken histories of displacement, while those who moved from Nangla to Sawda-Ghewra struggled with the creation of community, of place. These intellectual and emotional journeys combine with a mass of fragmentary detail — from the shapes of stoves in Nangla to the municipal markings indicating which houses would go under the next day — to create a text more moving than any all-encompassing narrative could have been.
Trickster City is the work of gifted writers, but it is also the product of a constant give and take — within the Cybermohalla labs, among the writers and, crucially, between the writers and their environments. How has their new status as published writers been greeted in their families, their neighbourhoods? “Our conversations are open to everyone,” stresses Babli Rai, 27, describing the wall magazines she helped create in LNJP Colony. “We try not to stand out as different, as adbhut.” For Lakhmi, writing cannot be about a solitary, personal vision: it must resonate in the spaces it grew out of. If Babli privately tutors local children, Anand is researching the media environment of Dakshinpuri, while Lakhmi and co-writer Rakesh Khairalia, 32, have set up a studio that acts as a gathering point for poets, cinephiles, singers and collectors. Lakhmi is exhilarated when he has Dakshinpuri readers tell him that they identify with his ‘Rasool Bhai’. He is convinced that his intellectual life is inseparable from the everyday business of living, of being part of a community of practitioners who may or may not wish to transform themselves into performers. “The intellectual/artistic world cannot, must not, cut itself off from the social. Each thrives on the other. And it is from the collision between them that creativity emerges,” he says — perhaps the greatest lesson of Trickster City.
Published in Tehelka, Vol 7, Issue 10, Dated March 13, 2010
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| Trickster City: Writings from the Belly of the Metropolis Translated by Shveta Sarda Penguin Viking 326 pages, Rs 499 |
All under 30, they began to think seriously about writing on the city sometime in 2005, when the spectre of the Commonwealth Games first appeared on the horizon of Delhi’s future. They met under the aegis of the Cybermohalla labs set up by Ankur Society for Alternatives in Education and the Sarai Programme of the Centre for Developing Societies. These labs, “spaces for extended conversation, creative experimentation, mutual exchange and self-learning”, have had 400 young people pass through them since May 2001.
Some in the collective were closet writers before they encountered Cybermohalla. If Azra Tabassum, 26, filled diary after secret diary with the minutiae of her life at 14 (only to have them discovered and destroyed by an angry aunt), Jaanu Nagar, 24, remembers writing as having always been the stable counterpart to his ghummakkad (wandering) existence. Like with most young people, though, their initial writings were mostly about themselves. But as the group acquired a sense of collectivity, so did the scope and maturity of their writing. “We’d meet and discuss everything. And what we discussed we’d take back with us. Over the years, that questioning became fused with living itself,” says Azra, who lives in LNJP colony near Delhi Gate. The collaborative process was crucial to the texts they eventually produced. “One’s own experience of something is never enough,” says Suraj Rai, 22. “When the private is pushed outwards into the collective, it acquires a newness,” agrees Love Anand, 22. “When your perspective is forced to confront that of others, it is altered.”
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| Standing: Babli Rai, Love Anand, Neelofar, Lakhmi Chand Kohli. Sitting : Shamsher Singh, Jaanu Nagar Photo: Anshika Varma |
The process of collective thinking and writing had been underway for some time when something did happen. Between March and August 2006, the neighbourhood of Nangla Maanchi, where several of the writers lived, was demolished under a High Court order. “Nangla did bring about a thehraav (pause) in our thought,” says Lakhmi Chand Kohli, 29. The deliberate destruction of a settlement of some 30,000 people placed upon those who lived in Nangla (as well as the rest who now visited it) a huge weight of witnessing. But this is a book that successfully steers clear of bathos, even when bearing testimony to an event as crushing, as dramatic, as the demolition of Nangla Maanchi. Lakhmi puts it well when he says, “Writing is a strange thing. It brings you nearer even as it creates distance.” The enormity of the experience was distilled in different ways. Those who lived in the resettlement colony of Dakshinpuri found in Nangla a way into their parents’ unspoken histories of displacement, while those who moved from Nangla to Sawda-Ghewra struggled with the creation of community, of place. These intellectual and emotional journeys combine with a mass of fragmentary detail — from the shapes of stoves in Nangla to the municipal markings indicating which houses would go under the next day — to create a text more moving than any all-encompassing narrative could have been.
Trickster City is the work of gifted writers, but it is also the product of a constant give and take — within the Cybermohalla labs, among the writers and, crucially, between the writers and their environments. How has their new status as published writers been greeted in their families, their neighbourhoods? “Our conversations are open to everyone,” stresses Babli Rai, 27, describing the wall magazines she helped create in LNJP Colony. “We try not to stand out as different, as adbhut.” For Lakhmi, writing cannot be about a solitary, personal vision: it must resonate in the spaces it grew out of. If Babli privately tutors local children, Anand is researching the media environment of Dakshinpuri, while Lakhmi and co-writer Rakesh Khairalia, 32, have set up a studio that acts as a gathering point for poets, cinephiles, singers and collectors. Lakhmi is exhilarated when he has Dakshinpuri readers tell him that they identify with his ‘Rasool Bhai’. He is convinced that his intellectual life is inseparable from the everyday business of living, of being part of a community of practitioners who may or may not wish to transform themselves into performers. “The intellectual/artistic world cannot, must not, cut itself off from the social. Each thrives on the other. And it is from the collision between them that creativity emerges,” he says — perhaps the greatest lesson of Trickster City.
Published in Tehelka, Vol 7, Issue 10, Dated March 13, 2010
20 February 2010
Bhanu Athaiya Interview
‘Before My Designs for Waqt, Women Wore Dumpy Salwars’
Bhanu Athaiya, 83, was born Bhanumati Annasaheb Rajopadhye in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, the third of seven children. After graduating from the JJ School of Art, she found her niche as a costume designer in Hindi cinema, and has never looked back, winning India’s first Oscar in 1982 for her costumes in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi. She spoke to TRISHA GUPTA on the eve of launching her memoir, The Art of Costume Design, describing her five decades in the Mumbai film industry. Excerpts:
How did you end up working as a costume designer in Mumbai films?
I had a two-page spread in the popular magazine Eve’s Weekly where my brief was to draw inspiration from Indian heritage. My fashion illustrations were noted by directors and film stars. They asked my editor to set up a boutique, where I started to design dresses. That boutique was visited by everyone from Kamini Kaushal and Nargis to Ramanand Sagar. It was Kamini Kaushal who gave me my first assignment. I started by designing her personal wardrobe, and soon went on to design her costumes in films like Shahenshah and Chalis Baba Aur Ek Chor
How did you meet Guru Dutt?
Guru Dutt’s sister was studying with me in JJ School. My illustrations had made me famous. I had also presented my paintings at the Kala Ghoda Artists’ Centre alongside MF Husain and Krishen Khanna. Guru Dutt asked me to design costumes for CID.
How did costume design in cinema work when you started?
The director had a clear idea of what he wanted, and the art director and he would brief the tailors. Actors would also join in. I became a bridge between director and actor.
Who were the directors you particularly enjoyed working with?
Guru Dutt had the sensitivity to do what was needed. Like during Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, he felt I should make a trip to Calcutta. So I visited the old mansions, and met people, and shopped. The films I did for Guru Dutt were based on reality. Raj Kapoor, in contrast, demanded something unique. One had to be more creative: Satyam Shivam Sundaram, the Prem Rog dream sequence, which was an Arabian Nights fantasy. Or Henna’s Pakistani gypsy. Hindi cinema makes all kinds of demands. Songs, dream sequences, rain sequences — all these give scope to a costume designer.
Any clothes or ‘look’ that you created that became particularly popular?
Waqt (1965) brought in the form-fitting salwar kameez and made it the rage. Before that, women had been wearing broad kurtas and dumpy salwars. Then Mumtaz’s sari in Brahmachari (1968) — the orange stitched sari that was wound round her body so that every twist revealed something — that was copied even by designers. In Nikaah, I gave the nawabi look a contemporary spin, focussing not on embroidery but on Hyderabadi pearl jewellery.
Has Hindi cinema’s approach to costume design changed?
The costume designer should design the whole look of a film. Like in Lagaan, I created the costumes across the board, from the villagers to the British elite. In the Oscars, that is a rule – that all costumes must have been designed by one person. But in most films here, even to - day, actors’ clothes are taken care of by costume designers and someone else fills the gaps. Stars come and say, ‘Get my dresses designed by so-and-so’. The 1980s brought in a lot of fashion designers into cinema. But designing for a star and designing for a character – that is a different cup of tea.
Published in Tehelka magazine, 2010.
16 February 2010
The Quiet Riot: Dibakar Banerjee profile
The middle class loves Dibakar Banerjee’s films. If only they knew that this is unrequited passion.
The first thing Richa Puranesh, Dibakar Banerjee’s wife of eleven years, remembers about him is his introductory line: “Hi, I’m Dibakar. I’m going to make films.” They were both in advertising then, and Richa remembers saying, “Right. Television commercials…?” To which Dibakar responded, with an air both casually explanatory and utterly certain, “No, films. The kind that Satyajit Ray makes.” Sitting in his 18th floor Parel apartment some fifteen years later, Dibakar Banerjee, highly-feted director of two of the most layered, thoughtful Hindi films of the last decade, Khosla ka Ghosla (2006) and Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (2008), laughs an embarrassed laugh.
It is tempting, especially when you know what happens in the end, to create an epic back- story. But Dibakar Banerjee is not the man to take the easy way out in any narrative, least of all an autobiographical one. He denies emphatically the self-confidence of that anecdote. “It sounds very glamorous, very determined. But nothing could be further from the truth,” he says. In a recent blog post, he has bluntly refused the romance of the struggle: “No one had it easier than me… I didn’t sleep on the platforms in Bombay, didn’t cart around my dog-eared script to various stars fresh out of make up in Juhu. I didn’t even call a producer. All I had were some silly ideas and a lot of arrogance...”
Dibakar’s story does start out quietly: a bright Bengali boy growing up in Delhi’s New Rohtak Road. It was an insular upbringing, in the way that a Bengali middle class upbringing can be, especially when your classmates are the North Indian children of West Delhi businessmen. The rest of the world is money-minded (“don’t play with them”), you’re told, while being drilled in what writer Amitav Ghosh once called “the jungle-craft of gentility”: the barely-hidden hysteria about academic success. Because “it would take just a couple of failed examinations” to end up over there, on the street. Dibakar was the model child: he topped his class, he won interschool quizzes, he learnt the tabla. But things didn’t stay smooth long. “In Class XI, his principal called me and said, Mr. Banerjee, Dibakar has failed in all subjects!” The stunned father swiftly put his son through a rigorous tuition routine, and Dibakar managed a 74% in Class XII. He also signed up for Agarwal Tuitions for the joint engineering entrance examinations and trotted off, several mornings after his Boards, to take the tests.
But secretly, he had applied to study Visual Communication at the National Institute of Design (NID), and once he made it, managed to persuade his befuddled parents to let him go. It was a few days after Dibakar had left for Ahmedabad that the engineering entrance results arrived. A friend happened to call his mother, who expressed her puzzlement that her son had gone off to this strange design thing when he’d got an A in every entrance test. “Aunty, A ka matlab hai absent,” the friend said, laughing. Dibakar hadn’t attended a single exam.
“He said nothing, but always did exactly what he wanted,” says his mother. She laughs now about finding an NID entrance form that asked: “Do you obey your parents?” and Dibakar’s response, in big bold letters: “NO”. But neither she, nor his father, were amused when, two and half years after having insisted on going there, Dibakar dropped out of NID. “My parents were pretty shocked. In achiever Bengali families, you do academically well. You don’t get chucked out and come back home,” says Dibakar wryly. His father somewhat shamefacedly admits to taunting his son as he sat around at their Ashok Vihar home, silent and bespectacled, seeming to do absolutely nothing: Since he was so clever, since he’d decided that he had nothing left to learn, what was he going to become: a Rabindranath or a Satyajit?
It took seven months before Dibakar found a job, as a trainee with a corporate film and AV maker called Sam Mathew. “Within one year, he was drawing 20,000 rupees,” says his father. Dibakar became first a copywriter, then a Creative Group Head for Contract Delhi, a subsidiary of ad major JW Thompson. It was at this time, around 1992, that he met Jaideep Sahni. Jaideep was brought in as the head of a competitor group, but Dibakar and he hit it off from day one, brainstorming on campaigns “across the partition”, physical and metaphorical. “We soon formed a firm alliance against the rest of the world,” laughs Dibakar. In 1997, both left the company, within months of each other. Dibakar started an ad film company called Watermark with two ex-NID friends, while Jaideep moved to Mumbai to work with Ram Gopal Varma on the script of Pyar Tune Kya Kiya, Jungle and later Company. “I used to miss him a lot. I’d call and say ki tu hamare saath aake kaam kyon nahi karta yaar?,” says Dibakar.
What happened eventually was the opposite. In 2002, Jaideep, ostensibly fresh from the success of Company but in fact increasingly unsure about whether the industry would ever allow him to write the kind of films he wanted to, called Dibakar. Savita Raj of Tandav Films, “essentially a Delhi-based ad agency”, wanted to produce a film about generation gap. Would he direct? Dibakar jumped at it, but it took four years of hard work and harder waiting (the grilling, tightly-budgeted, 45-day shoot was the easy part) before Khosla ka Ghosla saw the light of day. UTV finally decided they’d take it – on a second viewing that Boman Irani might have had something to do with – and from there on, things were smooth sailing. UTV even decided to co-produce Dibakar’s next project, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!
People who’ve watched both Dibakar’s films are often at a loss to reconcile them. Khosla’s deep identification with a middle class, with being “decent people”, seems irrevocably at odds with Oye Lucky’s merciless indictment of the hypocrisy of that very class. Dibakar himself is clear-eyed about what each film is doing. “The only thing patently false about Khosla is its climax – but that’s what also made it the darling of the middle class,” he says carefully. He describes an alternative ending, where the Khoslas, having failed to get back their plot from the swindling Khurana, join their son Cherry in the US visa queue. Jaideep remembers being “extremely attracted” to that ending, but ultimately persuaded Dibakar that no one was going to come and watch a film which didn’t give them something to hold on to.
The ‘born-again Hrishikesh Mukherjee’ tag is something Dibakar threw off with Oye Lucky, where a thief is betrayed by a respectable, smooth-talking doctor. He takes savage delight in having subverted the attempt to slot him as a clean, family entertainment sort of guy. “You’re a good filmmaker, you stay in the multiplex where good audiences with good taste come. The rabble can watch the Bollywood extravaganzas,” he says in a cutting imitation of our arbiters of taste. It’s clear that Oye Lucky’s darkly comic vein runs much deeper than the gentle laughter of Khosla. “He used to write Bengali verse, chhora. It was funny, but always satirical,” says his sister Mallika, eight years older. She recalls a poem he wrote as a ten-year-old about a zamindar whom no food can satisfy. The poem ended with the chilling phrase, “Shob theke bhalo khete goriber rokto” (What’s most delicious is the blood of the poor). [Dibakar later corrects this fond sisterly account, saying the line wasn't one he wrote himself but one he took from a renowned Bengali poet.]
It comes as no surprise to see that acerbic gaze directed at his own audience. “I know that many who like Oye Lucky actually laugh at the characters, not with them,” says Dibakar sharply. He himself may have an OSIAN’s audience in splits with his rendering of a Delhi Jat accent versus a Meerut accent, but as Richa Chadda (Dolly in Oye Lucky) puts it, “his characters never come from a space of mimicry.” Everyone has a context, a reason for being. The foul-mouthed Dolly who dances for a living but keeps a Tuesday vrat is as searingly observed as her sister Sonal, who won’t touch stolen money (or Dolly when she’s drunk), but quietly accepts her burglar boyfriend’s gifts.
Dibakar’s vivid eye and ear for worlds beyond his own owe much to the Bengali childhood mentioned earlier. It may have been insular in some ways, but it was also richly eclectic, immersed in a post-Nehruvian cultural universe. His mother, a municipal school music teacher and Hindustani vocalist, turned on Vividh Bharati’s Lok Sangeet every afternoon (planting the seed of Oye Lucky’s stunning folk music track, for which Dibakar wrote magnificent lyrics in Punjabi). Daily family music sessions embraced everything from Rabindrasangeet and classical to folk and film songs. The same omnivorousness extended to films (everything on Doordarshan, from Aan Milo Sajna to Jean Cocteau) and books: devouring the Hindi Champak and Nandan alongside the Bengali Shuktara and the racy pulp his grandmother borrowed from Bangiya Sansad Library. At fourteen, he made a storyboard of Bibhutibhushan’s adventure classic Chander Pahar (Mountain of the Moon) – in English translation. Dibakar remembers the linguistic shift to English as propelled by a quest for “higher knowledge”: looking up Brahms and calculus in the school library’s Encyclopaedia Brittanica. NID opened up a world “five times as big”, introducing him to rock and blues, history and anthropology, American Cinematographer, Bladerunner and Istvan Szabo. By the time Jaideep Sahni met him, “Dibakar had seen every film ever made.”
For someone so rooted in place and time, Dibakar is surprisingly unwistful about his move to Mumbai. “Delhi is about communities, stereotypes, mentalities. Bombay is about work, money, living spaces: pure lebensraum. It has an urban politic I’m excited by. And in any case, Delhi is a depressing place for a filmmaker to be.” As always, Dibakar’s grasp of the essentials is acute, unsentimental. He is matter-of-fact even about being nostalgic. “My kind of filmmaking depends on local detail to intensify the drama. Though if you psycho-analyse me, you might find I make films to capture what is gone,” he muses. He wants to make the films he does, but he doesn’t want to lose money on them. So he plans his budgets and runs an office that makes ad films on the side. And just when you think you’ve pinned him to down to a genre or locale, he ups and moves on to something else.
The edgy, digitally shot, Love Sex aur Dhokha, to be released this March, promises a raw, unapologetic take on love in the time of the media. LSD’s three interwoven tales, involving a suicidal sting journalist, a security camera company executive and a film institute student, reveal a world where desire is no longer pure or intimate, tinged as it is with exhibitionism on the one hand and voyeurism on the other. And yet these are love stories. Like the man – and unlike so many of his cool contemporaries – his films manage to be both riotous and thoughtful. As always with Dibakar Banerjee, cynicism is layered generously with humour, the humour layered with love, and so on until the circuit closes. One wouldn’t have it any other way.
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 07, Dated February 20, 2010
The first thing Richa Puranesh, Dibakar Banerjee’s wife of eleven years, remembers about him is his introductory line: “Hi, I’m Dibakar. I’m going to make films.” They were both in advertising then, and Richa remembers saying, “Right. Television commercials…?” To which Dibakar responded, with an air both casually explanatory and utterly certain, “No, films. The kind that Satyajit Ray makes.” Sitting in his 18th floor Parel apartment some fifteen years later, Dibakar Banerjee, highly-feted director of two of the most layered, thoughtful Hindi films of the last decade, Khosla ka Ghosla (2006) and Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (2008), laughs an embarrassed laugh.
It is tempting, especially when you know what happens in the end, to create an epic back- story. But Dibakar Banerjee is not the man to take the easy way out in any narrative, least of all an autobiographical one. He denies emphatically the self-confidence of that anecdote. “It sounds very glamorous, very determined. But nothing could be further from the truth,” he says. In a recent blog post, he has bluntly refused the romance of the struggle: “No one had it easier than me… I didn’t sleep on the platforms in Bombay, didn’t cart around my dog-eared script to various stars fresh out of make up in Juhu. I didn’t even call a producer. All I had were some silly ideas and a lot of arrogance...”
Dibakar’s story does start out quietly: a bright Bengali boy growing up in Delhi’s New Rohtak Road. It was an insular upbringing, in the way that a Bengali middle class upbringing can be, especially when your classmates are the North Indian children of West Delhi businessmen. The rest of the world is money-minded (“don’t play with them”), you’re told, while being drilled in what writer Amitav Ghosh once called “the jungle-craft of gentility”: the barely-hidden hysteria about academic success. Because “it would take just a couple of failed examinations” to end up over there, on the street. Dibakar was the model child: he topped his class, he won interschool quizzes, he learnt the tabla. But things didn’t stay smooth long. “In Class XI, his principal called me and said, Mr. Banerjee, Dibakar has failed in all subjects!” The stunned father swiftly put his son through a rigorous tuition routine, and Dibakar managed a 74% in Class XII. He also signed up for Agarwal Tuitions for the joint engineering entrance examinations and trotted off, several mornings after his Boards, to take the tests.
But secretly, he had applied to study Visual Communication at the National Institute of Design (NID), and once he made it, managed to persuade his befuddled parents to let him go. It was a few days after Dibakar had left for Ahmedabad that the engineering entrance results arrived. A friend happened to call his mother, who expressed her puzzlement that her son had gone off to this strange design thing when he’d got an A in every entrance test. “Aunty, A ka matlab hai absent,” the friend said, laughing. Dibakar hadn’t attended a single exam.
“He said nothing, but always did exactly what he wanted,” says his mother. She laughs now about finding an NID entrance form that asked: “Do you obey your parents?” and Dibakar’s response, in big bold letters: “NO”. But neither she, nor his father, were amused when, two and half years after having insisted on going there, Dibakar dropped out of NID. “My parents were pretty shocked. In achiever Bengali families, you do academically well. You don’t get chucked out and come back home,” says Dibakar wryly. His father somewhat shamefacedly admits to taunting his son as he sat around at their Ashok Vihar home, silent and bespectacled, seeming to do absolutely nothing: Since he was so clever, since he’d decided that he had nothing left to learn, what was he going to become: a Rabindranath or a Satyajit?
It took seven months before Dibakar found a job, as a trainee with a corporate film and AV maker called Sam Mathew. “Within one year, he was drawing 20,000 rupees,” says his father. Dibakar became first a copywriter, then a Creative Group Head for Contract Delhi, a subsidiary of ad major JW Thompson. It was at this time, around 1992, that he met Jaideep Sahni. Jaideep was brought in as the head of a competitor group, but Dibakar and he hit it off from day one, brainstorming on campaigns “across the partition”, physical and metaphorical. “We soon formed a firm alliance against the rest of the world,” laughs Dibakar. In 1997, both left the company, within months of each other. Dibakar started an ad film company called Watermark with two ex-NID friends, while Jaideep moved to Mumbai to work with Ram Gopal Varma on the script of Pyar Tune Kya Kiya, Jungle and later Company. “I used to miss him a lot. I’d call and say ki tu hamare saath aake kaam kyon nahi karta yaar?,” says Dibakar.
What happened eventually was the opposite. In 2002, Jaideep, ostensibly fresh from the success of Company but in fact increasingly unsure about whether the industry would ever allow him to write the kind of films he wanted to, called Dibakar. Savita Raj of Tandav Films, “essentially a Delhi-based ad agency”, wanted to produce a film about generation gap. Would he direct? Dibakar jumped at it, but it took four years of hard work and harder waiting (the grilling, tightly-budgeted, 45-day shoot was the easy part) before Khosla ka Ghosla saw the light of day. UTV finally decided they’d take it – on a second viewing that Boman Irani might have had something to do with – and from there on, things were smooth sailing. UTV even decided to co-produce Dibakar’s next project, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!
People who’ve watched both Dibakar’s films are often at a loss to reconcile them. Khosla’s deep identification with a middle class, with being “decent people”, seems irrevocably at odds with Oye Lucky’s merciless indictment of the hypocrisy of that very class. Dibakar himself is clear-eyed about what each film is doing. “The only thing patently false about Khosla is its climax – but that’s what also made it the darling of the middle class,” he says carefully. He describes an alternative ending, where the Khoslas, having failed to get back their plot from the swindling Khurana, join their son Cherry in the US visa queue. Jaideep remembers being “extremely attracted” to that ending, but ultimately persuaded Dibakar that no one was going to come and watch a film which didn’t give them something to hold on to.
The ‘born-again Hrishikesh Mukherjee’ tag is something Dibakar threw off with Oye Lucky, where a thief is betrayed by a respectable, smooth-talking doctor. He takes savage delight in having subverted the attempt to slot him as a clean, family entertainment sort of guy. “You’re a good filmmaker, you stay in the multiplex where good audiences with good taste come. The rabble can watch the Bollywood extravaganzas,” he says in a cutting imitation of our arbiters of taste. It’s clear that Oye Lucky’s darkly comic vein runs much deeper than the gentle laughter of Khosla. “He used to write Bengali verse, chhora. It was funny, but always satirical,” says his sister Mallika, eight years older. She recalls a poem he wrote as a ten-year-old about a zamindar whom no food can satisfy. The poem ended with the chilling phrase, “Shob theke bhalo khete goriber rokto” (What’s most delicious is the blood of the poor). [Dibakar later corrects this fond sisterly account, saying the line wasn't one he wrote himself but one he took from a renowned Bengali poet.]
It comes as no surprise to see that acerbic gaze directed at his own audience. “I know that many who like Oye Lucky actually laugh at the characters, not with them,” says Dibakar sharply. He himself may have an OSIAN’s audience in splits with his rendering of a Delhi Jat accent versus a Meerut accent, but as Richa Chadda (Dolly in Oye Lucky) puts it, “his characters never come from a space of mimicry.” Everyone has a context, a reason for being. The foul-mouthed Dolly who dances for a living but keeps a Tuesday vrat is as searingly observed as her sister Sonal, who won’t touch stolen money (or Dolly when she’s drunk), but quietly accepts her burglar boyfriend’s gifts.
Dibakar’s vivid eye and ear for worlds beyond his own owe much to the Bengali childhood mentioned earlier. It may have been insular in some ways, but it was also richly eclectic, immersed in a post-Nehruvian cultural universe. His mother, a municipal school music teacher and Hindustani vocalist, turned on Vividh Bharati’s Lok Sangeet every afternoon (planting the seed of Oye Lucky’s stunning folk music track, for which Dibakar wrote magnificent lyrics in Punjabi). Daily family music sessions embraced everything from Rabindrasangeet and classical to folk and film songs. The same omnivorousness extended to films (everything on Doordarshan, from Aan Milo Sajna to Jean Cocteau) and books: devouring the Hindi Champak and Nandan alongside the Bengali Shuktara and the racy pulp his grandmother borrowed from Bangiya Sansad Library. At fourteen, he made a storyboard of Bibhutibhushan’s adventure classic Chander Pahar (Mountain of the Moon) – in English translation. Dibakar remembers the linguistic shift to English as propelled by a quest for “higher knowledge”: looking up Brahms and calculus in the school library’s Encyclopaedia Brittanica. NID opened up a world “five times as big”, introducing him to rock and blues, history and anthropology, American Cinematographer, Bladerunner and Istvan Szabo. By the time Jaideep Sahni met him, “Dibakar had seen every film ever made.”
For someone so rooted in place and time, Dibakar is surprisingly unwistful about his move to Mumbai. “Delhi is about communities, stereotypes, mentalities. Bombay is about work, money, living spaces: pure lebensraum. It has an urban politic I’m excited by. And in any case, Delhi is a depressing place for a filmmaker to be.” As always, Dibakar’s grasp of the essentials is acute, unsentimental. He is matter-of-fact even about being nostalgic. “My kind of filmmaking depends on local detail to intensify the drama. Though if you psycho-analyse me, you might find I make films to capture what is gone,” he muses. He wants to make the films he does, but he doesn’t want to lose money on them. So he plans his budgets and runs an office that makes ad films on the side. And just when you think you’ve pinned him to down to a genre or locale, he ups and moves on to something else.
The edgy, digitally shot, Love Sex aur Dhokha, to be released this March, promises a raw, unapologetic take on love in the time of the media. LSD’s three interwoven tales, involving a suicidal sting journalist, a security camera company executive and a film institute student, reveal a world where desire is no longer pure or intimate, tinged as it is with exhibitionism on the one hand and voyeurism on the other. And yet these are love stories. Like the man – and unlike so many of his cool contemporaries – his films manage to be both riotous and thoughtful. As always with Dibakar Banerjee, cynicism is layered generously with humour, the humour layered with love, and so on until the circuit closes. One wouldn’t have it any other way.
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 07, Dated February 20, 2010
7 February 2010
Textures of time: Book Review
If it is SweetBy Mridula Koshy
Tranquebar Press, New Delhi, 2009, 283 pp., Rs 295
Mridula Koshy’s narrative style is not easy to enter into, because her stories don’t necessarily move forward. Like the characters whose internal lives she chooses to map, they move two steps ahead, then take a quick sidestep into an imagined parallel reality, only to loop back without warning and begin to retrace their journeys – sometimes returning to the same place several times before reluctantly, slowly, letting go. Memory, as you can imagine then, is crucial to Koshy’s characters. No-one lives entirely in the here-and-now. Adults remember themselves as children; children remember parents before they were old; migrants, both young and old, long for the places they have left behind. But this is no nostalgic book. The past here is not something soft and warm, in which one can seek refuge. If anything, the dark swirls of memory constantly threaten to rupture the skin of surface calm that people seek to lay over the present.
Even memories of a shared time can divide people. We remember things differently. Often because we experienced them differently – but sometimes simply because we want to. In ‘When the Child was a Child’, the grown-up Emma clings to her childhood memories of “the year they ate fish every night”, trotting out details of rice and fish curry and yogurt in the face of her mother’s insistence that “they were too poor to cook like that very often”. “Emma… won’t allow corrections. She murmurs her memories the better to savour them alone.”
In ‘Once in 1982’, memory is blinding, like the jasmine bush that the five-year-old Maya once conjured up as a “sun” for her elder brother. For the brother, the vividness of that remembered childhood comes interlaced with a bumbling realization of how the years that have passed have passed between them, reversing the hierarchy of elder and younger, leader and led. “He is surprised at his sister. When did she start thinking of him like this – as a problem for her to solve. He feels a faint sense of outrage. ‘I was with her till the end, Maya. That’s not living in the past. Daddy has not been here in five years. I was all she had. I was living with her here. Not in the past. Here.’ ” (All Maya says in response is ‘Grow up’.)
In ‘Jane Eyre’, too, disparate routes to the present drive a wedge between people who have shared a past. The woman who returns to India after years spent abroad is full of unvoiced resentment about the adjustments she has had to make to become the person she now is, wondering continuously if even today “there isn’t, herself still living, having continued with the life she imagines she would live – a girl, a bride, a woman, a wife, a daughter-in-law, a mother of neither winter nor summer, a mother of a pig-tailed, red-ribboned girl, or two, or three”. Grudgingly, she acknowledges that her “friends from the past” have also had to adapt to “lifestyles unlike anything she and they imagined in the pre-infotech era that was the landscape of their childhood.” But the resentment is quick to resurface: “they switched from one life to another as a group. In their possession is a collectively re-imagined and collectively re-endorsed life. They, she argues, have the comfort of having done it together. I was forced to go it alone.”
Koshy is adept at delineating the contours of female friendships: the swinging between immeasurable generosity and petty jealousy, the power wielded over one another’s lives by the single cutting remark, the back-handed compliment. We can only laugh and cry simultaneously at the petulance of the upper middle class Suroma (in ‘Stray Blades of Grass’) who revels in – but will not acknowledge her desire for – the company of the obliging Renu, the presswali’s daughter, or the less subtle machinations of the protagonist’s friend Chinky (in ‘Not Known’): “When Kalyani’s sister got married, Chinky said we have to wear saris to the wedding. I said, ‘All right, but I don’t have a good sari.’ She said, ‘No problem. You can borrow mine.’ Then she saw me wear it one day when we were just trying on clothes to see how we would look for the wedding. She realized how good I look and said, ‘You shouldn’t wear a black sari. You look exactly like a witch.’… After Chinky took the sari back, she said we can wear jeans for the wedding. I knew what she was doing but still I agreed… Then when I reached there she was wearing the same dark blue net sari I was going to wear. But I didn’t care.” She captures perfectly, too, the texture of time spent in girlish pursuits of the non-consuming variety. Story after story (‘The Large Girl’, ‘Intimations of a Greater Truth’) conjures up the dreamy, half-realized sense of eroticism so crucial to adolescent afternoons, where nothing really happens but everything seems strangely possible. That below-the-surfaceness seems part of the sexual frisson of a different time, a time irremediably distant from the bombardment by consumable, in-your-face sexiness that we live with now. But Koshy manages to make both seem believably contemporary, to make worlds co-exist.
And this, when she succeeds, would seem to be her greatest achievement. The piece that sets out to achieve this goal most consciously is ‘Jeans’, an ensemble of monologues or dialogues in the voices of different characters – a girl fretting because she’s left a pair of beloved jeans behind in an auto (“Those jeans made me look tall. The trick is you have to be willing to wear tight jeans. Tighter than tight. And low. That makes you tall, no matter how short you start out.”); a woman whose husband has got rid of her jeans because they reveal the contours of her body too much for (his) comfort (“You should see yourself from the back. Each of your behinds is separate and your underwear cuts each one into half again… Your behind jiggles in four different sections. Disgusting!”); a young man initiating a friend into the pleasures of the city (“You’ve seen the melons on the movie heroines… I got a big surprise for you in the city. The city sisters, you se, they wear these pants – jeans… You get to see a whole second set of melons.’) If the collection is taken as coming together to create a portrait of Delhi, then there are class juxtapositions aplenty: the obviously well-connected wealthy Delhi family of ‘Once in 1982’, its sprawling Tilak Road bungalow and overgrown garden sharply reminiscent of the musty melancholia of Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day, is as far apart as possible, socially and spatially, from the overcrowded, stuffy, privacy-starved Ali Gaanv houses of ‘POP’, where the terrace is fought over as a place to sleep. Here one world seems not to intrude on the other. There are other stories where Koshy attempts to etch more intimate cross-class relationships, with varying degrees of success. The premise of a Panchsheel Enclave inhabited equally by the koodawalla and the elderly gentleman possessively watching his maid’s flirtations is an interesting one, but the voice of the old man never quite persuades us of the powerful emotion his words describe. On the other hand, in ‘The Large Girl’, a surefooted, moving account of the protagonist’s relationship with an old schoolmate called Janet, class is the placeholder for a lasting bitterness, a sense of disjuncture: “How can you understand me?” [says Janet] “You are the little Miss Richie Rich who ignored me all through school.”
Koshy’s language is fine-grained and draws its beauty from the unexpected juxtaposition of images: “Now her pregnant beauty startles him like the fish that rustle and slip past his shins in the flooded fields of paddy he bends over to seed”. Her ability to look at the world through the eyes of children is remarkable, whether it is in the accuracy of responses (“When Renu’s father accuses the malis of “sleeping the day away”, what we hear next is “Renu could not imagine anyone ever willingly sleeping during the day”) or the acuteness of sensations – smells and sounds and feelings – when one is younger. Sometimes, though, the preoccupation with detail becomes excessive, as in the case of ‘Same Day’, with its repetitive description of the internal life of the body/mind: “It’s as if he has been anxious about something, maybe her, maybe the questions of whether he would see her again. He isn’t sure what he’s been anxious about since he doesn’t actually remember feeling that when dissipated should allow him to feel such relief. But the relief is certain, even visceral, more than a mere lightening of his spirit, or the lifting of a burden. Yes, he feels as if he could float, as if a burden has been lifted. But even more strongly he feels light flooding recesses of darkness in him, recesses that he had not known were dark or he had even known were there. It seems to him that if he were to unbutton his shirt and peer down at his belly he would see through the skin to his entrails which, just at present, feel as if they are shivering themselves awake from a long sleep. And now he names the recesses one by one – Charu and ChukChuk, the old school building, the chink of yellow under the door somewhere (where?), the feel of the earth in the evening releasing stored heat, the feel of the earth against his cheek, the feel of the footpath releasing heat which isn’t the same thing as the feel of the earth…”. The tale, such as it is, is lost in the elliptical-ness of the telling. Koshy’s writing is barely invested in plot in any case, so if you’re looking for resolutions or pay-offs, you’re bound to be disappointed. These stories are really all about atmosphere. They do not so much begin and end as they carefully trace the contours of a chosen terrain. If you’re looking to linger – rather than reach anywhere in particular – then these are perfect reading.
Published in BIBLIO, VOL. XIV NOS. 11 & 12, NOVEMBER - DECEMBER 2009
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