2014: The Year of Sheroes

My Mumbai Mirror column, 28 Dec 2014. 

Hindi cinema this year gave its female actors a chance to spread out. Some punched, while others pulled no punches. What matters is that as the audience, we agreed to clap for both.

Madhuri Dixit in Dedh Ishqiya (2014)

The Hindi film industry has been hero-dominated for so many decades now that it's hard to believe that its earliest decades were all about the heroines: Sulochana, Fearless Nadia, Devika Rani. But 2014 might go down in history as the year that Bombay cinema came back round to the idea that there could be hits without heroes. 

This was made possible, in some measure, by the return of Hindi cinema's last generation of big-ticket heroines. It's fabulous that at least some of these utterly deserving divas are landing age-appropriate roles in films designed to showcase their particular charms. 2012 already saw Sridevi bring a lump to every throat in the room as the guileless housewife on a journey of self-discovery in English Vinglish. 2014 marked the glorious comeback of Madhuri Dixit, who played the poetically-minded Begum Para with the perfect air of seductive mystery in January's Dedh Ishqiya, and later in the year, played off her once arch-competitor Juhi Chawla (with Chawla playing against type) in the somewhat anti-climactic Gulab Gang.  

This year also saw a more recent returnee - Rani Mukherjee came back from a longish sabbatical with the immensely watchable, cheer-eliciting Mardaani. Priyanka Chopra had her own no-heroes movie: Mary Kom. The two films couldn't be more dissimilar in theme - a punchy cop drama set in Mumbai and Delhi, and a biopic of the stocky Manipuri woman who is India's most famous boxer - but in very different ways, these were films in which female audiences derived much pleasure from watching the woman on screen emerge victorious from physical battles. Mary Kom's initial attraction to boxing is linked to beating up badly behaved boys; Shivani Roy loves shocking male rowdies with some rowdyisms of her own, and plays gleefully to the gallery as she does so. 

Rani Mukherjee in Mardaani, 2014.

Interestingly, though, both films felt the need to play up their protagonists' nurturing side - a part-explanatory, part-compensatory move to balance out all that unfeminine punching we see them do. Mukherjee's character in Mardaani, a no-bullshit female cop with the ringing name of Shivani Shivaji Roy, is given no children of her own. But she and her doctor husband play adoptive parents to a young niece, and she is moved to eradicate a ring of child traffickers because they've abducted an orphaned girl with whom she has a quasi-maternal relationship. 

Motherhood was also played up in the movie version of MC Mary Kom's life, with Mary shown risking her coach's disfavour when she decides to get married and then have children, all at the peak of her hard-won boxing career. Produced by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Omung Kumar's film devotes an inordinate amount of screen-time to showing Mary being a hands-on mom: singing her twins to sleep, nursing them to health, and so on - one can't avoid the sneaking feeling that it's all in aid of preventing audiences judging her when she does decide to return to her career, while the kids still very young. (It was lovely, though, to see a man on the Hindi film screen play a hands-on dad as competently and believably as Darshan Kumar did as Onler Kom.) 

The parade of rough-talking women continued with Kangana Ranaut's strange and over-the-top outing in and as Revolver Rani (RR). A Tarantino-inspired take on a female Chambal dacoit some two decades after Phoolan Devi and Bandit Queen, RR could have been great but was tragically uneven in tone. Later in the year, we got Richa Chadda in the depressingly awful Tamanchey: another trigger-happy female gangster, like Ranaut in RR, ready to junk it all for marriage and motherhood. 

But Ranaut's film of the year -- and everyone's favourite 'woman-centric' movie -- was Queen. Vikas Bahl's surprise hit had Ranaut deliver a terrific stream-of-consciousness performance as sheltered Delhi girl Rani who, jilted at the mandap, makes the wonderful transition from panic-stricken to determined to carefree. 

Kangana Ranaut (right) in Queen, 2014

The foreign trip as transformatory ritual isn't new (think Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara), and Rani is perhaps a younger version of Sridevi in English Vinglish—but the film wins points for a host of other things, from giggly female friendship to joyful drunken spree to first exploratory kiss with a stranger, and most importantly, Rani's non-vengeful but firm rejection of her baffled groom. Queen opened up the universe a little more. 

Two other films delivered freedom to their female protagonists in surprising guises: Alia Bhatt as the poor little rich girl who finds liberation via abduction in Highway, and Parineeti Chopra as the oddball science geek who runs away from home -- to China! -- in the under-appreciated and charming Hasee Toh Phasee. 

Vidya Balan in Bobby Jasoos, 2014

My pick for independent woman character of the year, though, is probably Vidya Balan's Hyderabadi detective in the comic mystery caper Bobby Jasoos. Perhaps because there's nothing grand or heroic about her loose-plait-and-dupatta persona. She loves her family, but will risk their ire to fulfill her dream of her own detective agency. Since she's not in the realm of myth, she neither beats up any men nor has to prove her femininity. But when personable young men open car doors for her, they encounter a brisk dismissal: "Mereko aata hai gaadi ka darwaza kholna." For me, that's more than enough.

The Gods Must Be Crazy

My column for Mumbai Mirror, Dec 21, 2014:

With PK, Rajkumar Hirani has pulled off his most remarkable feat yet: a mainstream Hindi film that takes on the question of religion, and is neither abrasive nor apologetic.

There's a great scene in Rajkumar Hirani's new film where a shopkeeper outside a big temple (the wonderful Brijendra Kala in a far-too-brief appearance) sells the eponymous PK (Aamir Khan) an earthen idol of a Hindu deity. PK, a green-eyed alien on whose planet there's no such thing as God, wants to know whether there's any difference between the larger, more expensive statues and the smaller, less pricey ones. Having been told there's none, PK buys the smallest and cheapest murti in the shop, and is overjoyed when his first prayer -- for something to quell his hunger -- appears to be met instantaneously: a samosa drops into his hand. When his second prayer doesn't meet with such an immediate response, PK returns to the shopkeeper, and demands that he either recharge the idol's batteries, or give him another one. "This God isn't working!" he says. 

We laugh, as we are meant to, at his frustration and confusion. But we're also laughing at ourselves, because aren't those people lining up to put money in the divine donation box hoping for exactly such efficacy? 

Our idea of the divine isn't quite working -- and that is the properly serious concern at the heart of PK. Like all Hirani's previous films, this one, too, wraps up an all-too-real problem in a frothy fable perfectly engineered to win over audiences unlikely to spend their evening (and their money) on a 'serious movie'. Here, Hirani and his co-writer Abhijat Joshi create a cleverly repurposed version of that hoary old trope, man's search for God. 

What makes this oft-repeated premise funny rather than serious here is that PK isn't looking for God for the usual human reasons -- because he's tired of the world, feels cheated by his fellowmen, or needs an emotional anchor that won't fail him. He's just looking for him because he's lost his interplanetary transmitter, and every time he asks anyone where it might be, they say, Bhagwan jaane. 

Like Umesh Shukla's OMG: Oh My God, (2012), Hirani's film seems to start by challenging the very idea of belief. But like in OMG, by the time the climax rolls around, it's clear that the filmmakers have changed their minds. The basic question of whether God is real, and thus whether any appeal to him can ever be efficacious, has been set aside in favour of a strongly-worded critique of those who have set themselves up as his earthly managers -- masterfully embodied in PK by Saurabh Shukla as the large and unctuous figure of Tapasvi. 

But unlike OMG, where Paresh Rawal's atheist Kanjibhai had to swallow his cynicism when God himself (Akshay Kumar as Krishna on a motorcycle-chariot) came to his aid in the worldly battle against His self-appointed representatives, Hirani doesn't insist on pushing the real presence of divinity down our throats. His point is gentler, and harder to argue with - if having faith makes people feel better, gives them strength in difficult times, we have no right to try and deprive them of it. 

What the film does, and somehow does with sparkle, is to draw our attention to the nasty things that are done in God's name -- as PK says, if God is asking you to do these impossible things to solve your problems, he can't be real, he must be a fake 'duplicate' God, a wrong number. The remarkable thing is that Hirani and Co. are able to take these things we all know perfectly well -- that the dharm ke thekedars are making money off our fears, or that if we are all the children of God, rich people shouldn't get to jump the queue -- and weave them into an effervescent piece of cinema. 

The strange ways of earthlings seen literally through the eyes of an alien -- the premise has been used to comic effect in countless Hollywood films, and yet it is put to such charming use here that you cannot but smile. 

And it isn't just organised religion that PK holds up to ridicule. From the 'dancing cars' that supply his oddly mismatched clothes, to the conventions that prevent people from holding each other's hands, PK finds human beings mystifying. 

The Hindu-Muslim love story is sweet and simple and impossibly pat, and yet Hirani (and the under appreciated Sushant Singh Rajput) manage to make it work, allowing it to function as the urtext for the million ridiculous rules we have devised to divide ourselves from one another. As PK's paan-stained grin makes clear, the joke is on us.

Bitten by the film bug

My Mumbai Mirror column:

The funny, warm indie Sulemani Keeda shows us a world of Bollywood aspirants, but it isn't so much a film about that world as a voice from within it.

Last month, Bollywood gave us Happy Ending, a self-proclaimed takedown of rom-coms in general and happy endings in particular. In it, Saif Ali Khan's bestselling writer hero — assailed by the worrying thought that he might have actually fallen in love —was urged out of the house by his imaginary alter-ego, in pursuit of the departing girl. The film's 'airport scene' (as the film's makers labelled the cliche they were making fun of) was allowed to end in the girl leaving—but only to create room for the real, apparently inescapable, happy ending: the boy flying to India to convince the girl. It was a glib, unconvincing claim that they'd avoided the cliche. 

Last week, in Amit Masurkar's Sulemani Keeda, I watched as the protagonist Dulal, having confessed he's in love with a girl he met three days ago, was urged by his friend, housemate and screenwriting partner Mainak to go to her house and stop her leaving for America. "Bahut ho gaya ye chori chori pyar. Daaku ban, daaku!" exhorts Mainak, and even though we, the audience, know better than Dulal that Mainak is far from being sincere, we can't but egg the boy on, towards the distant possibility of a happy ending. But equally, it's impossible not to be charmed by what follows: let in by a surprised Ruma, the lovestruck Dulal first begs her not to go. Then, before she can say anything in response, her parents emerge from the other room to see who this boy is, and Dulal falls to his knees, declaring his love for their daughter. 

This is the scene as it ought to have been played; a moment that captures both the intensity of feeling that Dulal has built up in all sincerity, and the insane filminess of it—reflected in Ruma's parents' quiet bemusement (casting Uday Chandra as her father is a stroke of genius), and in Ruma's own gentle but firm refusal to change her carefully laid-out plans for a boy she thinks is sweet, but whom she barely knows. 

The funny thing is that Sulemani Keeda doesn't set out to rewrite 'romedy'. In fact when the Ruma angle begins to take over, Masurkar manages to sneak in a funny line about how she was supposed be the side track, not the main track. 

The film has been described in the media as a "bromance", and its opening moments—the two young men asleep in their unkempt apartment, and the camera moving from the magazines upturned on their stomachs to the posters on the wall and the books in their bookcases, until a girlfriend calls and wakes one of them up—reminded me of Delhi Belly. Plenty of films have used this young-men-living-scruffily-together setting since: I can think of Pyaar ka Punchnama and Go Goa Gone. But the film to which Sulemani Keeda seems to truly doff its hat is the original bachelor comedy, Sai Paranjpe's Chashme Buddoor. Mainak is the Rakesh Bedi-cum-Ravi Basvani to Dulal's sincere Farooque Shaikh, providing comic relief, trying to woo the ladies a little too obviously, and throwing in some amusing untruths along the way. There's even a scene where Mainak drives 'Oona from Poona' home in a hopeful horny haze, and we see him ascend her staircase, doing the ridiculous almost-jig that Baswani made unforgettable. And his quick-footed retreat at the sight of her muscley boyfriend immediately brings Deepti Naval's threateningly large brother to mind. 

The film is self-aware without being smart-alecky and warm without being mushy. It experiments with form in zany animated sequences and slow-mo black and white interludes, yet is consistently well-observed, whether in the male-female dynamics of its chilled-out house party or the hilarious interactions with Pokhriyal, the landlord's poet-aspirant son. Perhaps this is because of how close its director and actors are to the world they're recreating here. Masurkar, whose 30-lakh-rupee directorial debut this is, has spoken in interviews of how he came to write a film about two screenwriting hopefuls doing the rounds of Bollywood's important people in the hope of a break. "Generally what happens when you're writing is that you write with a director in mind. This was something I wrote with people in mind," Masurkar said. Many of these people are real: famous people like Mahesh Bhatt and Anil 'Gadar' Sharma (though their cameos as themselves I thought were the film's most amateurish sections), as well as Dulal and Mainak, played by Masurkar's friends Mayank Tiwari and Naveen Kasturia, both working their way through Bollywood in real life. Himself a film and television writer who moved to Versova in 2009, Masurkar's film is an unvarnished, wry, but not quite bitter look at the world of culture industry aspirants he inhabits. 

These young men have come to Bombay (in this case from Delhi) to become 'writers', and they appear torn between an aspirational literate milieu of bookshops and open mics, and a Bollywood world that will seemingly only reward them for not pushing the envelope. There's also an all-too-real moment where the aspiring young filmwalas come to blows with TV-walas they're in the process of insulting for having sold out. The film doesn't make a big hoo-ha about it, but the tug of war between making it and being true to yourself is definitely its "main track". One hopes all its protagonists can stay on it. That really would be a happy ending.

The Lions of the Trees

A piece I did on the lion-tailed macaque, for Smithsonian magazine. I had a brilliant time reporting this, though it was chopped drastically in the end. The magazine decided that the photographs were the point, which isn't that surprising if you look at them: here, in a slide-bar on the website. (The two below are taken by me). 

Back when the forest was thicker, it was difficult even to catch a glimpse of a lion-tailed macaque. Small, shy and quiet (nearly silent by howler standards), the monkeys are so habituated to the shadow-filled canopy that some scientists consider them the only truly arboreal macaques on earth. And they only live in the Western Ghats, a mountain range along India’s western coast. Because counting the furtive creatures isn’t easy, the best guess is that only 3,500 or so survive. Whether that number is greater or fewer than decades ago isn’t certain, but the more scientists know about the monkey, the more they fear that road-building, logging and other human encroachments pose a serious threat to the glossy black primate with the arresting mane and tufted, leonine tail. 

A small village in the state of Kerala, in southwestern India, Nelliyampathy is among the best places to see lion-tailed macaques in what looks like a relatively intact habitat. Many nearby coffee and tea plantations have been abandoned and have begun their slow return to wilderness. My guide, Joseph J. Erinjery, a gangly 27-year-old graduate student at the University of Mysore, spots a group of about 40 animals feasting in jackfruit trees and brings his truck to a halt. The slapstick scene before us pits one of the world’s smallest macaques, maxing out at some 20 pounds and two feet tall, against the world’s largest tree-borne fruit, which can weigh as much as 100 pounds and reaches three feet. I watched a monkey balance between two branches, use its forelimbs to immobilize a jackfruit larger than itself and proceed to tear into it with sharp front teeth. I also saw a young male teetering on two legs as he carried one off to eat on his own.

About a three-and-a-half-hour drive southeast of here, in and around Indira Gandhi National Park, in the state of Tamil Nadu, the photographers Anup Shah and Fiona Rogers spent four weeks observing the daily rhythms of another troop of macaques. “Feed, rest, feed, rest, feed, rest, move to another site, feed and rest,” Shah says jokingly of the monkey’s lifestyle.

Lion-tailed macaques live in groups of, on average, 15 individuals. Groups often have a dominant male, and while adult females remain in the group they are born into, males tend to leave at the age of 5 or 6 to find another group in which to mate. This puts the primates at added risk when habitat is broken up, as it is near the town of Valparai, in Tamil Nadu. Roads not only pose a direct threat—some animals have taken to begging for snacks from tourists, and a number of monkeys have been run over—but also roads, reservoirs and other development make it tougher for roaming males to reach new groups. And that can keep them from breeding or lead to inbreeding, which causes health problems in the long run. Mewa Singh, a primate researcher at the University of Mysore who has spent two decades tracking lion-tailed macaques, said human encroachment’s most dramatic consequences “may show themselves only in several generations.”

Conservationists in the region are working with plantation owners and the government to support the remaining lion-tailed macaques. One approach is to limit forest-cutting and restore habitat. Another is to connect tree canopies with canvas bridges that span busy roads—to help these charismatic primates overcome the obstacles we’ve placed in their way.     

Published in Smithsonian magazine.

Post Facto -- Unforeseen effects: Why I love film festivals

My Sunday Guardian column (written after IFFI 2014):

Queuers, conferrers and posers: Outside the INOX complex, at the 2014 IFFI in Goa.

It's hard to describe the lure of a film festival to people who've never done one. And yes, it is something you do. Like a drug. I'd never quite thought about it before I started to write this column, but clearly my subconscious has known all along — I often call myself a film festival junkie.

A film festival isn't somewhere you show up for an evening because you're bored, or something to which you make an obligatory social visit, politely applauding the efforts of the organisers. No, you plan for it in advance, having taken leave from work and from all social responsibility. Sure, you meet people, but the bright light of day soon begins to feel like something to scurry away from. It's in the velvety darkness, as the screen flickers to life, that you do, too. And as you go from one darkened theatre to another, cinema seeps into your veins.

In close to two decades of film-festivalling, I've often been asked how I can possibly absorb five films a day, or even four. Don't they start to bleed into each other? Don't I zone out by the third film, or fall asleep in the fourth? Doesn't every [worthwhile] film I watch make me want to pause for the day and analyse it, instead of rushing to grab a quick lunch and hurtling into the next film? In short, these people want to know, isn't the film festival the very antithesis of the ideal film-watching experience?

The answer to most of these questions is yes, of course, sometimes. Sometimes I zone out, sometimes I decide a particular film is the one to take a nap in, sometimes all I remember from a hectic festival day is a single climactic scene. But the films you remember are ones that have managed to stand out in a sea of images. And anyway, does the leisurely, sit-down, one-film-at-a-time mode really give a film its due? Of course films need free time — but doesn't the multiplex visit, with its absurdly powerful popcorn-and-soda ritual, muffle every film we watch with the unvoiced expectation of sameness? The film festival might seem frenzied, but it rescues film from the domesticated tedium of packaged leisure — by turning it into something a little like work.

And by juxtaposing all kinds of narratives, from all kinds of places, it reinstates some of the unruliness and unpredictability of cinema. Where else but at an international film festival could I go from watching a Russian postman on his rounds of a sleepy lake-edge settlement (The Postman's White Nights), to experiencing the joys and sorrows of a group of sightless Chinese masseurs (Blind Massage), and then on to Iran in the 1990s, waiting endlessly with a mother whose son never came back from the Iran-Iraq War (Track 143)?

Of course, I understand that there is such a thing as a festival film. Capitalism being the sophisticated thing it is, it has built the so-called "niche" into the market. If you've ever looked up films on the internet to decide what you're watching at a festival, you've read those Variety and Hollywood Reporter reviews with their pithy summing up of the film's chances. Here's one such evaluation of a Greek film I fell in love with at this year's IFFI: "It should appeal to festivals and distributors with a mainstream or more female-oriented sensibility as well as broadcasters of classy European fare." 

This film, called Mikra Anglia (Little England), is an atmospheric period piece set in (and shot on) the craggy island of Andros. The plot centres on two sisters who fall in love — unwittingly — with the same man. But this is no generic love triangle: after a point, we barely see the man. And then he dies (somewhere off-screen), and it is his death that tears the sisters' lives asunder. If this is a women's picture, it is so in the most gloriously literal way: Andros in the 1930s and '40s is almost entirely female, because most men are sailors, out at sea, sometimes at war, while the women hold the fort at home — often for most of their lives.

A festival can paint a portrait of a country you've never been to. The other Greek film I saw this year, for instance, would seem to have nothing at all in common with Mikra Anglia. Set in present-day Athens, Xenia is about two brothers who dream of winning a national musical talent search. The film uses their marginal status — poor, orphaned, half-Albanian, one of them queer — to highlight the fascist, racist intolerance of contemporary Greece: in one early scene, we hear street thugs harassing some unseen people with the line: "This is not your Bollywood".

But placing Xenia next to Mikra Anglia, one sees a country that remains recognizable in many ways — a place where family still counts for a great deal, where high drama is normal. Watching random films back-to-back can make you see patterns — a Chinese murder mystery and a Turkish romantic thriller emerge as unlikely partners in neo-noir; you begin to notice how often filmmakers in cold countries use snow and ice to create a sense of emotional desolation.

In a world of torrents downloadable at will, the film festival is no longer about enabling access. Choices, in fact, are limited by the programming. But what you end up watching at a festival can create unintended, powerful effects. It's as close as one can get to fate.

Published in the Sunday Guardian, 7th Dec 2014.

Straight-faced, not strait-laced: Remembering Deven Verma

My Mumbai Mirror column: 

Perhaps Deven Verma didn't get a chance to fully explore his range, but he was still among the most subtle comic actors Hindi cinema has ever produced.

Deven Verma did several non-humorous roles: from his first cinematic appearance in Yash Chopra's Partition drama Dharamputra (1961), to playing Sharmila Tagore's proposed husband in Anupama (1966) and a mental asylum inmate in the high-octane tragedy Khamoshi (1969). But he began his acting career as a funny guy – he had had some success with comic stage acts before Dharamputra – and it is as a comedian that he will be remembered.

Within the comic realm, Verma's characters seem at first glance to have been fairly varied. He was a good mimic, with a talent for accents and language, which he put to use in several films. In Thodi si Bewafaii (1980), for instance, he played Rajesh Khanna's good-hearted employer, a Dakhani Muslim optician with the jokily accurate name of Noor-e-Chashmis, and “Shaan Khuda ki” as his endearing takiyakalaam. Two of his three Filmfare-award-winning performances had the Kutchi actor playing a Gujarati-speaking seth: he was a book publisher called Parvin Chandra Shah with zero financial sense in Chori Mera Kaam (1975) and a businessman (again called Parvinbhai) saddled with a stolen idol in Chor ke Ghar Chor (1978). There were other repetitions in his career: he was a mamma's boy desperate to get married in Basu Chatterjee's Khatta Meetha (1977) – but he had played a version of that character earlier, in Anil Ganguly's Kora Kagaz (1974), where as the doofus Dronacharya, he worshipfully attempts to woo a half-amused and wholly dismissive Jaya Bhaduri.

So Verma did get typecast to some extent. But he was always immensely watchable—and very funny. His bhondu persona, played with a deadpan face, halting dialogue delivery and a deliberately bemused manner, is probably his most lasting legacy. It reached its acme in Verma's celebrated double role as twin servants (both named Bahadur) to twin masters (two Sanjeev Kumars, both named Ashok) in the charmingly funny Angoor, Gulzar's adaptation of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors.

Who can forget him as Bahadur 1, faced with the prospect of being shown up as an imposter in the house he's in, throwing its rightful resident Bahadur 2 off the scent by barking and growling like a dog from behind the front door? In this scene, as in several others, he made the ridiculous sublime. My most vivid Deven Verma memory from childhood is also from Angoor: the memorable bhang-addled 'Preetam Aan Milo' song, where he watches with glazed eyes as a ball that he hasn't thrown seems to bounce up a staircase, and emerges into a balcony to find a toad in rhythmic symphony with his song.

Angoor was a marvellously poker-faced take on the identical twins theme so ubiquitous in both Shakespeare plays and Hindi cinema—first it doubled the number of twins, and then in the climactic scene, had one Sanjeev Kumar say to the other one, deadpan: “Do you have a mole here on your shoulder? You don't? Oh, then we must be twins.” This is one of Sanjeev Kumar's funniest performances, but there are some scenes where Verma absolutely steals the show with his mastery of body language and timing. One such is a moment where he fails to stop himself from eating what he knows to be bhang-laced pakodas. “Nahi maanta?” he says to his hand as it moves stealthily towards the plate and starts to stuff pakoras into his mouth. “Toh phir kha. Kha ke mar!” At that moment, Bahadur 1 is himself split into two: the self that's dying of hunger, and the self that can't afford to get stoned. There is something fantastic about Verma's rendition that transforms the film's otherwise un-profound use of doubles into a momentary philosophical riff on the self.

As the two Bahadurs (one with rolled-up sleeves, the other not), Verma switches unerringly between being befuddled and trying to be crafty under duress. But even when carrying out one of his schemes -- like putting bhang into the pakoras he's made for the women of the house, or pulling a key out a sleeping Aruna Irani's cleavage – he is never sleazy or threatening.

This quality is also crucial to my other favourite Deven Verma role: as the comic mastermind Ravi Kapoor in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Rang Birangi. In a pre-NRI era, he played an America-returnee who decides to spice up the marriage of his boring friend Ajay (Amol Palekar) by getting him to flirt with his secretary (Deepti Naval). Ravi Kapoor specialises in hilariously bad lines: “Kill the cat on the first night, bacchu”, or “America mein pata hai secretary ko goad mein bitha ke dictation dete hain. Aur shorthand hi nahi, underhand bhi karte hain”. What makes this role remarkable is that Verma plays against type, and does so masterfully. The chubby-faced childishness that usually gave him an inoffensive, almost asexual air was here used as a kind of camouflage for the sexual chalu-ness of the man-about-town.

Maybe that was Deven Verma's secret—that you could not take him seriously. But perhaps that was also to do with the mild middle class comedies of which he was an indispensable part. Much as I love them, these sunny '80s films weren't beyond showing annoyingly stereotypical marriages, or everyday sexist jokes, say, about about working women taking away men's jobs. But it was still a time of innocence: men might be incorrigible flirts, but you knew they didn't have it in them to be truly slimy. Deven Verma died only last week. But the world he stood for died long ago.