On March 28, 2013, as the country was immersed in Holi celebrations, 35 year old Santosh Kumar was shot dead in Devsadih, a village in Bihar’s Sheikhpura district. He died for what may seem like a very strange reason. Kumar protested the playing of lewd Bhojpuri songs during the festivities. As revelers around him drank bhang, splashed colour on one another and danced to music blaring from loudspeakers, Kumar found himself in the middle of a brawl. 10 people were injured. And Kumar lost his life.

On the same day, just 250 kilometres away in the district of Sitamarhi a similar set of events occured. Reports don’t mention the names of the victims or assailants or even the exact location. Just that a man was shot dead. The reason? He had objected to the playing of profane Bhojpuri songs.

Also on the same day, Guddu Rangila released a music album named Chhokari Baaj Holi (A Holi for Womanizers). As expected, it was a smashing hit. Rangila, 38, one of the Bhojpuri music industry’s most well known voices, is famous, or infamous, for the obscene songs he writes and sings. Holi, the festival of colour, is known also to lend itself to a degree of sexual frivolity. Frivolity which appears to challenge, sometimes, ideas that lie at the heart of Indian traditions and society. For instance, some of the most ribald jokes cracked on the festival in the Hindi heartland revolve around the relationship between the devar (brother-in-law) and the bhabhi (sister-in-law).

But Rangila’s forte lies in taking what’s a spot of irreverent fun and pushing it, slyly, across the line that separates it from the disturbing. Last year’s Holi came close on the heels of the outrage that followed the tragic ‘Delhi Rape’ of December 16, 2012. So Rangila recorded for his album a song called Balatkar Hota Hai Rajau (Someone is being raped).

He shot a video too. In the beginning, Rangila is shown standing between two sari-clad women. He delivers a monologue, speaking about how incidents of rape have shot up in the country of late. He talks of love, consent and evil. He sings:

“Ehe haal dekh ke sabke aankh nam ba, sach to ehe ba ki aisan aadmi ke phansiyon ke saza bahut kam ba. 

(Everyone‘s eyes are moist after seeing such atrocities/But the truth is that even death by hanging isn’t punishment enough for such people).”

Then, he gets to it. To describing a wife who’s alone at home because her husband is away. As she watches news of rape cases on TV, the maugi (housewife), says Rangila “Ke kuch kuch huwa ta aur ka kehlas ki (Gets aroused and you know what she says)?” He ruffles his hair, leans towards the woman on his left, smiles salaciously. The dholak, tabla and harmonium begin to play, signaling the impending arrival of a refrain you must listen for.

“Dekhat ho par TV ghare chhod ke biwi balatkaar hota hai aye Rajau. Arre uhe khati Holiya me Dewara ke haathe humaar hota aye rajau 

(The wife’s watching TV, which broadcasts news of rape cases/And she says that during Holi, my brother-in-law does the same to me).”

The two women on either side of Rangila break into a kind of sedate twist, clapping their hands, wide grins on their faces.

There were widespread protests against the lyrics of Yo Yo Honey Singh after the Delhi Rape, to the point of a petition for the cancellation of his concert. But fewer people know, perhaps, of Guddu Rangila.

Rangila has been a Bhojpuri singer for over 16 years. He has recorded, he says, “more than 250 albums” and sung “more than 2000 songs”. He burst into the consciousness of the Bhojpuri music hearing public with his fifth album Ja Jhar Ke (What A Swagger) in 1999. His most successful albums since, Humra Hau Chaheen (I Want ‘That’), Jeans Dhila Kara (Loosen Your Jeans), Hum Lem (I Will Take) and, of course, Rasdaar Holi (A Saucy Holi) are brimming with sexual allegories that are even more vulgar than they sound. In case you think that isn’t possible here are a few examples. A ‘Mango Frooti’ (a popular processed mango pulp drink) in a Guddu Rangila song implies a pair of breasts, as do ‘lemons’. ‘Laal rasgulla’ (red rasgulla) is a euphemism for a vagina. ‘Maal’ (commodity), in Rangilaspeak is a girl and a pichkari (Spray) a penis and so on… Rangila’s popularity mushroomed over the years and in 2004 T-Series—a big Indian music company that has been a huge beneficiary of his rocketing album sales—christened him the ‘Diamond Star’. He is the only Bhojpuri singer to have been bestowed the title so far. He began singing as well as acting in Bhojpuri movies in 2006, and has since played the lead in five of them. His recently released film Ghayal Sher (Wounded Lion), saw him starring opposite Rani Chatterji, one of the highest rated actresses in the Bhojpuri film industry. Around five years ago, he founded his own company, Sanjivani Entertainment, that earns lakhs of rupees a month via both online and offline album sales as well as YouTube revenue.

***

“I think I should wear a shirt.”

Rangila has unruly shoulder length hair and a rotund chubby face. He has just walked into the centre of the living room of a two-bedroom-hall-kitchen flat in Bhayandar, Mumbai, where he is putting up. He wears a grey vest and faded brown knee-length shorts. On his wrist is a red kalaava (a sacred Hindu thread) and a slim bracelet. There are a couple of astrological rings on his fingers. But the most striking thing about his appearance is a long fake pearl necklace that hangs from his neck, stopping just above his navel. The vest is tight for him, especially around his bulging stomach. It also reveals an immense amount of chest hair. Interestingly, he chose to walk in wearing just that and a pearl necklace and thought of a shirt only when he realized there was a photographer in the room.

He looks around the room, hoping for a reply. Besides the photographer and me there is also his assistant, but no one says anything. He disappears back inside the house.

His assistant stares blankly into space. He has shoulder length hair too, only freshly combed. “I am Mritunjaya Mastana,” he says, when I introduce myself. “I am Guddu Bhaiyya‘s (Bhaiyya means elder brother) manager, shishya (disciple), accountant and assistant.” Mastana accompanies Rangila to live shows. He opens for him with bhajans, or devotional songs. “I charge Rs. 10,000 for an hour,” says Mastana. He says Rangila charges Rs. 50,000 for an hour. He performs for about three hours at every show.

“Bhaiyya‘s live shows are something else,” Mastana continues. “People go mad. Someone’s head gets smashed, someone falls from the rooftop. The tickets range from Rs. 100 to Rs. 500.”

Rangila reappears wearing a dark blue shirt with the first two buttons left open. He settles on a black rexine sofa, opens a packet of Miraag khaini (chewing tobacco), pours and crushes some of its contents with his thumb and declares, to no one in particular, “I like eating readymade khaini.” He puts the tobacco in his mouth, dusts his hands and sinks deeper into the sofa.

On a small table to his right is a packet of Marlboro lights and a tall glass with crushed cigarette butts. Under it is a black motorcycle helmet. On its back are printed the words: “Hira Handa”.

This is Rangila’s world, one he carries with him wherever he goes. His wife and children live in Dwarka, in Delhi. But Rangila spends a lot of time outside the city, especially in Mumbai and Patna. Here, stuck on the wall of a rented apartment with uneven adhesive tape is a poster of his film Ghayal Sher. Rangila is at the centre, looking furious, blood dripping from his forehead, his fist raised. “Nayak, Diamond Star, Gayak Guddu Rangila (Actor, Diamond Star, Singer Guddu Rangila),” it reads on top. On the bottom: “Nirmatri: Deepa Yadav (Director: Deepa Yadav)” has been printed in small font.

On another wall are portraits of the Hindu gods Lakshmi and Ganesh and the Sikh guru Gobind Singh. A plaque, larger than any of these portraits, hangs next to them.

“Shree Guddu Rangila ji, Bhojpuri gaayak, Diamond star. Aapko yeh samman samaaj me utkrusht karyakon ke liye sanstha dwara sammanit kiya jaa raha hai (Shri Guddu Rangila ji, Bhojpuri Singer, Diamond Star. This respect has been accorded to you by the committee to honour you for your uplifting social work),” it reads.

On a tiny plastic stool in the room is a VCD Player with a few VCDs lying untidily on it. VCDs with videos of Ranglia’s own music albums—Lahanga Lutayil Holi Mein (She Was Robbed Of Her Skirt, On Holi), and Chhituaa Ke Didi, Tani Pyaar Kare De (Chhituaa’s Sister, Let Me Love You) as well as those of another Bhojpuri singer, Khesari Lal. What sticks out is the only non-Bhojpuri album in the lot: 50 Super Hit Songs of Kumar Sanu.

***

Before Guddu Rangila became ‘Diamond star’, before his risqué numbers began topping all the Bhojpuri music charts, his name was Sidheshwara Nand Giri. And Giri wanted to sing “soft romantic songs. Just like Kumar Sanu”. Sanu, from the state of West Bengal, neighbouring Bihar, was a leading Bollywood playback singer in the nineties, with innumerable hits and awards to his name. Incidentally, he too had changed his name— from Kedarnath Bhattacharya. He has since then faded into obscurity while Giri’s star continues to rise, even if not for “soft romantic songs”.

Giri was born in Chainpur, a hamlet in Bihar’s Siwan district. He went to a co-educational school where, “girls used to sit in the front and boys in the back”. Rangila remembers that only the students who did well in class by studying hard could talk to the girls, on the pretext of “exchanging notes”. Giri wasn’t one of them. “Nakal bhi akal se hota hai na (Even for cheating you need brains, right)? Everyone used to memorize the answers. I used to memorize the pages which contained the answers in the book I would cheat from,” he smiles. “I got decent marks from the first to the tenth grade— solely by cheating.”

Giri started to sing when he was 11. “I began by singing Ashtjaam songs, where you have to continuously sing ‘Hare Rama Hare Krishna’. And even in Ashtjaam, I used to sing like Kumar Sanu. What’s there in your mind is not easy to forget,” he says. “Then I began singing songs for Ram Leela and Shiv Leela (plays held during festivals celebrated in honour of the gods Ram and Shiv). So I slowly started getting offers for bhakti (devotional) songs.”

A few years later, Giri switched to singing kirtan (a genre of devotional songs), but this wasn’t his forte. “Kirtan isn’t just about singing songs. It requires you to act and do comedy. I saw I wasn’t able to do it properly, so I stopped singing kirtan,” he says. Then he sang nirgun gaan— monotheistic devotional Bhojpuri folk songs about one God who is formless. “But I saw I would be ‘medium’ (not very good) in nirgun gaan as well. So I stopped singing that too.”

Meanwhile, his father wasn’t happy he was wasting his time singing. “My father wanted me to become an SP (Superintendent of Police), DSP (District Superintendent of Police) or a (District) Collector.” So Giri enrolled in a college. But he finally left Chainpur for Delhi in 1993 at the age of 17. He wanted to be a Bhojpuri singer who sang for T-Series.

“At that time,” says Rangila. “Swarg me jaana aur T-Series me gaana ek hi baat tha (Singing for T-Series was like to going to heaven).”

“I had hit upon an idea,” he says. “In those days, dholak and jhaal (traditional Indian instruments) were prominent instruments in Bhojpuri music. ‘Musical’ nahin tha us samay (There was no concept of ‘musical’). So I thought, ‘Let’s do a new thing. Let’s sing ‘musical’ Bhojpuri’.” ‘Musical’ is what Rangila calls songs which are composed using contemporary Western instruments “such as the guitar, the keyboard or the mouth organ”.

In 1995, Giri went to the T-series office in Noida on the outskirts of Delhi. He said to the guard at the front door that he wanted to meet Gulshan Kumar (the T-Series’ founder). He wasn’t allowed to pass. “What else would the watchman have said?” says Rangila. “‘Who are you? What are you worth?’ It’s a company where so many musicians would have gone looking a chance to make it. But he didn’t let me enter, so that was the end of it.”

He adds: “On my journey back, Poore raaste gaali dete hua aaye T-Series ko (I kept on cursing T-Series during my entire journey).” Giri didn’t approach any other recording company. “T-Series hi sab kuch tha (T-Series was everything),” he reiterates.

To support himself financially, Giri took up a job in a Delhi garment shop, trimming extraneous threads from clothes. Every day at work, he would “remove threads from 30 to 40 shirts”. He earned Rs. 750 per month. Simultaneously, he kept singing ashtjaam and kirtan songs at local performances. In 1995, at one such show at the Sagarpur Shiv Mandir in Delhi, Giri held his own against a kirtan singer who was notorious for heckling his competitors. At the end of the show, Sharma (Rangila doesn’t remember his first name), an owner of a fledgling music company called Ganga Music, gave Rangila his card. “I thought: Now the company guy himself is calling me! Now I’ll become a star!”

Giri reached the address given on Sharma’s card. He had expected something like the T-Series building and was dejected when he realized that Sharma’s office was merely a section of his modest home. “But I was sure I wanted to sing songs my way. So I told him to do a ‘musical’,” says Rangila. There was a catch. Producing a ‘musical’ album would cost Rs. 40,000 and Giri was a new singer. So Sharma made him sign a bond for Rs. 40,000, which Giri would repay by recording his first four albums with Ganga Music for free.

The means for producing an album were in place. But Sidheshwara Nand Giri, known as Guddu Giri then, needed a new name that would appeal to a younger audience. “Guddu was my pet name back in my village,” says Rangila. “Lekin blood mein jo ho jaata hai naa ki humko aisa geet gaa kar youth ko khush karna hai (But there’s this thing that happens in your blood, right? That you want to sing songs that make youngsters happy).” The big Bollywood hit running in the theatres at the time was Rangeela (meaning ‘Colourful’). “That Rangeela film had done quite well,” Rangila recalls. “Toh lagaa diye (So I took the title for my surname).”

Rangila’s first release was titled Jawaani Ka Toofan (The Storm of Youth). “Log 100% sure hote hain na, main 300% sure tha ki yeh album hit hoga (People are 100% sure sometimes, right? But I was 300% sure that my album would be a hit),” he says. According to Rangila, the album must have sold more than “1.5 lakh copies”. “Uske baad sapna poora hua (After that, my dream got fulfilled).”

Rangila recorded his next three albums with Ganga Music in a span of two months. But they couldn’t surpass the success of Jawaani Ka Toofan. They were all, as he puts it, “medium”. But it was Rangila’s fifth album, Ja Jhar Ke, that was his big ticket. Rangila had already recorded four albums with Ganga Music for free, and now was the time to cash in. But Sharma refused. “Jhagdaa ho gaya Ganga company se (I fought with Ganga company),” he says. “He wanted that I keep on singing for free for him. Par tab tak T-Series ko bhanak lag gayaa thaa (But by that time T-Series had noticed me).”

In 1998, Rangila re-recorded Ja Jhaar Ke with T-Series. He was paid Rs. 25,000. “Back then 25,000 was worth what 25 lakhs is worth now.” He also re-recorded his first four albums with T-Series. Rangila was a singer with T-Series now. “Phir toh kya tha? Phir toh raaj chalne laga humaara (Then what? Then I started ruling the roost).”

***

The story of Bhojpuri music, in our times, is inextricably linked with the story of Bhojpuri cinema. In 2003, the Bhojpuri film industry was enthused with the release of Sasura Bada Paisawala. Made on a budget of Rs. 35 lakh, the film made more than Rs. 4.5 crore at the box-office. Since then, the Bhojpuri film industry has evolved from being a cottage industry to a behemoth that makes more than 100 films a year, hosts its own award shows, and has enlisted big Bollywood stars like Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgn and Hema Malini to act in its films. Avijit Ghosh, the author of Cinema Bhojpuri, examines the coming-into-its-own of the industry in a Times of India article titled Mofussil’s Revenge. “The Bhojpuri film industry’s revival isn’t only about a regional genre finding its market,” he writes. “The [hinterland] audience seems to be telling mainstream Bollywood: We want our own smells and sights in the movies. As in post-Mandal politics, regions and communities are asserting themselves through cinema that suits their aesthetics.” As Bollywood turned its gaze westwards as well as towards a more urban multiplex audience, Bhojpuri cinema took over some of the ground it ceded. It fulfilled the desire of a section of Indian rural and rurban populace for entertainment rooted in the hinterland. Bhojpuri music—both film and non-film music—is the product of a similar demand and an expression that most from its home state can easily identify with.

Also, the market for Bhojpuri music and cinema isn’t just people living in Bihar, but also many migrant workers in states such as Delhi and Maharashtra. These songs remind them of what home sounds like in a foreign land. “Jiska des, uska bhes (A person’s culture is determined by his or her homeland),” says Pankaj Thakur, who hails from Katihar, in Bihar, and works in Pune as a cook. “Maharashtrian people understand Marathi songs. Similarly Biharis understand Bihari songs. Even now I have around 300 songs on my mobile.”

This Bihari diaspora accounts for a more widespread audience for the songs of singer-songwriters like Rangila.  Songs which are now being rediscovered on the internet. In the last few years, aided by YouTube, Bhojpuri songs have re-surfaced online and acquired cult status. For segments of the Indian and international urban audience, comprising both Biharis and non-Biharis, these songs—owing to their sub-standard production qualities and crude lyrics—have become a source of amusement and derision. Surabhi Sharma, the documentary filmmaker whose documentary Bidesia in Bambai explores the lives of Bihari migrants in Mumbai empowered by Bhojpuri music, finds this sort of simplistic outlook problematic. “If you see singers like Guddu Rangila or Rampat Haraami (another popular singer of risque Bhojpuri numbers), I will be still wary of dismissing them as misogynistic,” she says. “Of course, there’s a misogynistic angle to it. There’s a desire being created out of objectifying a woman. That is central. But the reason why a VCD or a YouTube link to a Guddu Rangila song really looks irksome and disturbing is because it exists outside of any context. There’s a lot more that you can listen to in songs beyond the literal text. To pull out the lyrics of the song and try and evaluate the entire musical tradition through it, that becomes a huge problem.”

True. It could be argued, however, that it’s not the VCDs or YouTube videos that place these musical traditions out of context as much as singers like Rangila themselves, simply with the lyrics they choose to pen, which alters the nature of the song drastically.

Playful irreverence, often bordering on vulgarity, has been an ingredient of folk songs that have been part of the Indian hinterland’s longest held traditions. For example, Gaari (derived from the Hindi word gaali, which translates into ‘swear’) songs are integral to Bihari weddings. One of the many rituals in such a wedding is a Dwar Puja— performed to welcome the groom as he arrives with his baraat (the groom’s family) at the bride’s door. The bride is led to the mandap by her friends and cousins and they sing cheeky, coarse songs, flouting ideas of conventional familial propriety, to taunt the groom and his family. The songs are quite unsparing and target especially the bride’s future father-in-law. In fact, the 1986 Bhojpuri film, Dulha Ganga Paar Ke, contains one such gaari song, Chala Sakhi Mil Ke, which opens with the lines: “Swaagat me gaari sunayin, aa chala sakhi mil ke/ Inka ke langte nachayin, aa chala sakhi mil ke (We will welcome with swearing/ Come friends, all together now/ We will make them dance naked/ Come friends, all together now)… ”

This tradition helps see the gender roles in a renewed light—here the women are assertive and vocal—and cautions one against the easy sanctimony listeners often adopt while hearing anything that’s even remotely bawdy. Gaari songs are examples of how perceived vulgarity can function instead as an agent of creativity, possibly, and even social cohesiveness or simply great fun.

What becomes unsettling, however, is when the explicit content has sprung up not purely out of tradition or a creative urge, but from a need to pander to the base demands of as large an audience as it is possible to usurp— for profit.

Manoj Tiwari, a prominent actor and singer in the Bhojpuri film industry (he played the protagonist in Sasura Bada Paisawala), has often lashed out against obscene Bhojpuri songs. “I have always maintained that our state should have its own censor board,” says Tiwari. “So that if there are people who are singing vulgar songs then someone will stop them. I feel such songs must be banned. Songs can make you laugh but they should not shame someone. And if there are people who are singing those songs, then they should be punished.”

“I am not in favour of banning anything,” says Avijit Ghosh. “Banning books, music, films… Once a culture of ban starts then you don’t know what to ban and what not to. So this whole trajectory of debate goes into a different realm.”

Talking specifically about Rangila, Tiwari says, “He has also sung some good songs. But he couldn’t understand which songs of his were liked the most. 1998, 1999 was a good phase of Guddu Rangila, when he had sung Ja Jhar Ke. It was that song that made him big. Ja Jhar Ke didn’t have any vulgarity as such. But the problem was he saw it is a vulgar song— so he couldn’t understand what made him successful.”

Tiwari also feels that such songs project an image of the state and the language that is misleading. “These songs cause a lot of harm to the Bhojpuri region. For instance, I was doing a show on Life Ok, Welcome – Baazi Mehmaan Nawazi Ki, which had a lot of actresses like Ragini Khanna, Negar Khan. And whenever I used to talk about Bhojpuri and whenever someone wanted to put me down, people gave me examples of those (vulgar) songs,” says Tiwari. “But, the fact is, there are also many singers (in the state) such as Bharat Sharma, Sharda Sinha, who have sung many great songs, and their fans are all over the world.”

Kalpana Patowary, who hails from Assam, is another famous mainstream Bhojpuri singer. Like other mainstream Bhojpuri singers, she also began her career by singing a lot of songs with overt sexual connotations. But, unlike others, she didn’t get stereotyped and managed to diversify her oeuvre. One way she did this was by singing different kinds of songs in various languages— Hindi, English, Marathi, and a host of other regional languages. She’s appeared in Coke Studio’s Season 3 and has performed for music festivals such as the Rajasthan International Folk Festival and the NH7 Weekender. In 2012, she released The Legacy of Bhikhari Thakur, a Bhojpuri folk album based on the songs of the celebrated Bhojpuri playwright, Bhikhari Thakur. But, today, 11 years later, Patowary finds herself disillusioned with the very music industry that catapulted her to fame: “Today the state of (Bhojpuri) music is such that often I have to leave the studio, refusing to perform. I have to return the money. I have to leave a lot of songs just because of the lyrics,” says Patowary in the documentary, 50 Years of Bhojpuri Cinema. “Recently, there was a song where the lyrics were about a crooked button on a blouse and it also mentioned the word petticoat. I felt that was cheap. Later they changed the lyrics though. If you want to show sexual pleasure then of course you should, because it’s a part of our life, but it should be shown in an aesthetic manner.”

What is the reason for such songs continuing to flood the market then? One answer could be that the social, economic and cultural realties of more affluent and educated Biharis have little in common with their poorer counterparts. “Do you think the white-collared Biharis—the IAS officers, the management executives—identify with Bihar at all? They are not very comfortable with their Bihari identity,” says Ratnakar Tripathy, Senior Research Fellow at the Asian Development Research Institute. Tripathy believes the “white-collared Biharis refuse to support Bhojpuri” as a language and culture, and “when someone does it, they rubbish them”. He says: “It’s a very strange relationship between the lower classes and upper classes in Bihar. The Bihari elite doesn’t patronize Bhojpuri and the ones who patronize Bhojpuri tend to vulgarize it, at times. So this is a cultural dead-end.”

Patowary adds: “I have seen in the towns of Bihar that the younger generation says: ‘In our homes, we speak Hindi. We don’t know Bhojpuri.’”

In 2009, when Sneha Khanwalkar and Varun Grover went to Bihar to research sounds and music from the state for Gangs of Wasseypur (Khanwalkar was the music director, Grover the lyricist), they did so, according to Grover, “with a blank slate”. While digging, they discovered how the local popular culture had shaped and dictated the aspirations of Bihar’s youngsters. Grover has an interesting story.

When Khanwalkar and Grover met the 16 year old Deepak Kumar for the first time, he was a “very simple kid, very timid. He wasn’t even sure if he could sing. He had come with his Guruji, and was carrying a harmonium,” remembers Grover. “In fact, he wasn’t even a chela (disciple), because his Guruji had said that, ‘He has just started singing. It would take him years.’” As Guruji’s more experienced disciples auditioned in front of Khanwalkar, Kumar stood quietly in a corner. Despite his Guru’s reservation, Khanwalkar persuaded him to sing. He said he would sing a song of Pawan Singh (a popular mainstream Bhojpuri singer, known for a song named Lollypop Lage Lu or ‘You Look Like A Lollypop’). Khanwalkar liked his voice and Kumar ended up singing two songs in Gangs of Wasseypur I: Moora and Humni Ke Nagariya Chhoda Re Baba.

Khanwalkar and Grover met Kumar six months later for another recording, when Gangs of Wasseypur I’s music had already been released. By this time Kumar had become a ‘star’ of sorts in Bihar. “He came with the CD, and he said, ‘Bhaiyya mera na apna CD, apna album aa gaya hai (I have got my own CD, my own album released).’ The first album he got as a 16 year old was called Petticoat mein… some Bhojpuri word, I don’t remember,” says Grover. “So that’s what, no? The moment you become popular, you get to do this kind of lewd stuff. He didn’t get to do another album like Gangs… though he had proved himself in that kind of genre, that kind of music. All he still got to do was this kind of crude stuff. And he grabbed that opportunity.”

***

Naigaon is one of Mumbai’s Northern suburbs but the ease with which it flouts most Mumbai rules makes you wonder whether it’s a part of the city at all. For instance, all the auto-rickshaws at Naigaon station ply on a ‘sharing basis’. When you hail one, the driver refuses to budge till he has three passengers seated at the back and two at the front, including himself. As you drive off, cramped, you see many open spaces— mostly lush green fields. The buildings, just a few storeys high, are nowhere near Mumbai’s skyscrapers, but they look as though they’ve been around for a while. The roads are rocky and uneven. There are not too many people or cars around. In fact, Naigaon could easily pass of as suburban Patna.

It’s here that Guddu Rangila chose to buy a flat. It is a modest space with just one bedroom, a living room, a kitchen and a bathroom. It’s been over a month since my last interview with Rangila who’s still asleep even though it’s late in the afternoon. Instead, eyeing me suspiciously from his perch on a couch in the living room is a man wearing a white vest that clings to his protruding stomach and a pair of blue baseball shorts. Mritunjaya Mastana keeps bustling in and out of the room, looking busy, putting things in order before “Bhaiyyaji” wakes up.

Rangila has moved in recently. The furniture in the living room seems awkwardly arranged. The couch with the man in the blue shorts is at one end while another similar sofa is placed as far away from this one as possible— so that people seated on each would have to yell at each other to be heard. A table with a glass top is sandwiched between this other sofa and a TV set. Huge posters of new or upcoming Guddu Rangila movies take up most of two of the walls: Sasuro Kabhi Damaad Rahal (Because The Father-in-Law Was Also Once The Son-in-Law), and Piritiya Kahe Ke Lagawla (Why Did You Fall In Love With Me?).

“Aap kyun aaye hain yahan? (Why have you come here)?” asks the man in the blue shorts.

“Interview ke liye (For an interview),” I say.

“Usse humara kya fayeda hoga (How will it help us)?”

While switching on my laptop, I say something about the importance of knowing where an artist comes from and what bearing this may have on his work.

“Yeh Apple ka sign mein light jalta hai kya (Does the Apple sign glow)?” He stares intently at the laptop. “Shining bahut hai ismein. Lagta hai radium laga hai (It shines a lot. I think it has radium).”

I nod.

A few minutes later, he asks for my laptop and notices that I have jotted down our conversation on a word-file. He seems uncomfortable with this at first, but eventually this gets us talking.

His name is Deepak Mandal. He heads a “tours and travels” company in Mumbai. Before that, he says, “Main naacha karta tha (I used to dance).” He smiles slightly, stealing a quick glance at the bedroom, where Rangila is sleeping. “In Kalpana Patowary’s group.” He had wanted to act in films, but had learnt that it would cost him Rs. 20,000. So he decided to try his hand at the transport business instead.

A few minutes later, Mastana runs into the living room, looking very harried. “Bhaiyyaji uth gaye hain. Unko cigarette chahiye (Bhaiyyaji has woken up. He needs a cigarette),” he says. Mastana manages to find one and rushes back out. Ten minutes later, Rangila enters. Mandal vacates his couch for him and sits next to me. Rangila’s eyes are puffed. He looks out of the balcony and lights a cigarette.

An odd silence floats through the room. The interview begins. Mandal remains sitting next to me like a watchful bodyguard, peeking curiously at times into my list of questions, often answering, out of turn, questions put to Rangila.

But this isn’t the only thing that makes striking up a conversation with Guddu Rangila difficult. Rangila has three ways of dealing with tough queries. Either he remains non-committal, like a politician, and says: Apni apni soch hai (Each person has his or her own point of view).

Or, when feeling more verbose, he comes up with bizarre non-sequiturs. Here are a few of the most commonly employed:

Mard ko dard nahin hota (A man doesn’t feel any pain).

Dulhan wahi jo piya mann bhaaye (An ideal bride is the one who pleases the husband).

Chalti ka naam gaadi hai, nahin chala ton kabaadi (If it works, and moves, it’s a car, if it doesn’t then it’s rubbish).

He utters such sentences, often out of context, as if they’re the smartest one-liners on earth, then sinks back into silence.

As a third option, as if this wasn’t enough in itself to make you flee, he loves to reinterpret Hindu mythology. He frequently cites absolutely irrelevant tales of the gods Shiv and Parvati or—and this is an obsession—how we are living in the wrong yug (age), and how kalyug is utterly rotten, to validate his actions and beliefs.

We begin by talking about his detractors. “People who are above the age of 50 don’t like my songs,” says Rangila. “In fact they shouldn’t even be alive. They should all die. They are just a burden on this planet.” That simple. “They would like all songs related to Gods,” he continues. “But they won’t have anything to do with girls. So, I tell them that in your age, you would have also played a lot of gilli ganda, done a lot of things. Now you should sing bhajan and earn punya.” Gilli danda, a popular Indian game akin to cricket, is a euphemism for sex for the purposes of this conversation.

I plod on. Rangila’s songs and videos are obsessed with a woman’s physical attributes. She is an object to be in awe of, possessed or lampooned. There are constant references to her body parts, how she’s being a tease, or how the male (in most cases this is Rangila himself) will win her over finally. But that could be just Rangila the performer, playing to the gallery. What does Rangila, the person, believe in, really, when it comes to the opposite sex?

These pearls of wisdom:

“A girl and a boy can never be friends. If there has to be friendship, then it should be either between boys or between girls.”

“You fall in love only after you are married. Anything that’s before marriage is meaningless.”

“You should love whom you get married to. What kind of love is there before marriage? I didn’t even know of something called a girlfriend before marriage. Anyway, it’s a wrong system. What’s the need?”

For someone who writes and sings the most lewd lyrics imaginable, Rangila’s personal outlook is surprisingly conservative. He was married in 2002. “It was an arranged marriage,” he says and appears reticent when I ask him for further details. He has two children.

“I fall in love every day,” he says. “I had closed pyaar ka (love’s) factory in 2002. There’s no love in this world. There’s only selfishness.”

‘Closed love’s factory’? I ask him to elaborate.

“In 2002, in my album Humra Hau Chaheen, there was a dialogue: Tell me one relationship, which doesn’t revolve around selfishness? When a girl is born to parents, they are not that happy as opposed to when a boy is born to them. Why is it like that? Isn’t that selfishness? Because a girl will get married and go away while the boy will take care of them even when they are old. The love between a husband and wife is also centered on selfishness. Why don’t a boy and boy get married? See, when it comes to husband and wife, if you don’t earn do you think the wife will care about you? She wouldn’t. You would have to earn. Isn’t that selfishness? If you won’t earn, what would she eat? A girl gets married to a boy because she can’t earn. There’s selfishness everywhere.”

I ask Rangila about his own marriage again, and whether he believes it follows this principle. “When you get a lot of love and respect outside, you won’t get the same at home, and vice versa,” is all he says. “Because if you’re getting a lot of adoration from outsiders you won’t have time to devote to your family.”

When I ask him about the obscenity in his songs, he comes up with the strangest suggestion. “Recently, I sang a song, Ghus gayil, phans gayil, adas gayil (It went inside, got stuck and stayed there),” says Rangila. “People would think that it’s vulgar. What do they know what I have written? I have actually written this song about Asaram Bapu. It’s absolutely clear.” I stare at him, puzzled. Rangila has a smile playing on his lips.

I ask him about another song. The lyrics go: Khol ke dikha de gori laal rasgulla, toh ke karayeb hum dudhwa ke kulla (Show me your red rasgullah/ Then I will make you gargle with milk).

“What does that mean?” I ask him.

“This song is not mine. I don’t think I remember this song,” says Rangila.

I tell him the video of this song on YouTube features him and also the vocals are unmistakably his.

Rangila’s reply: “No song is bad. The kind of sunglasses you wear determines the kind of song you will see. If you wear red sunglasses and think you will see black, then that’s not possible. If you wear green, you can’t see white.”

Rangila’s songs are disturbing not simply because they are hyper-sexualized and cater to his audience’s baser instincts, but because they eschew any female participation. In most of his songs, there are no female vocals. The only role for a woman in a Guddu Rangila music video is to evade the advances of a plethora of men. She is on guard, and never voices her opinion. An unsettling power equation to say the least. We never really know what a woman is thinking about when Rangila talks about her body parts, expresses his discontentment about the fact that she might not be a virgin, or points towards her clothes and demands that she takes them off.

This absolute absence of consent—or conversation—in his songs is telling. Take Ae Tengra Ke Didi (Hey, Tengra’s elder sister), from his album, 80 Na 85 Humra 90 Chaheen (I don’t want 80 or 85. I want 90), Rangila places his fingers close to the girl’s breast and sings: Nibuwa gotail bate ras khacha khoch ba, gadrol jawani dekhi man humar gach ba (The ripe lemon has enough juice, and seeing your nubile body makes me happy). The camera zooms in. All this, while the girl makes it quite clear that she’s not interested— resisting his advances, rolling her eyes. Rangila appears to acknowledge this for a moment. He sings: Jabbe hoi man tor tabbe chahi (I want it only when you are ready).

But, soon after, he changes his mind: Prince guddu maani nahi chahe hoi phaansi, ihe baate pahile tor ijjat ke naasi. Guddu ke jab mann hoi tabbe chahi (Prince Guddu will not listen to you even if that means he’s hanged, he will be the first one to ravage your honour. Guddu will get it when he wants it). At the end of the song, the girl finally lets herself be heard. And she says, “Jab na maanbe tab chal (If you don’t agree, then what’s the point. Let’s go)”. A thought here. What if she had refused?
I ask him about this and the recurring imagery in his songs and videos— of a woman hounded by him or by hordes of men, trying desperately to resist their advances, then yielding. “It might be the thinking of people who criticize me. The world doesn’t revolve around what some people think about my song. Don’t you think?” Rangila retorts. He is opaque, calm, his face almost expressionless.

Then, his voice booms: “Ladki cheeze aisa hai, sab koi dekhta hai (A girl is such a thing, everyone looks). Is there any harm in looking? God has made something good so that it may be seen. Of all the pleasures in the world the most beautiful is nain bhog (the pleasure you get from looking at things). If I don’t see, then that means I am insulting her. God will feel bad. He will think, ‘I made someone so beautiful and no one is looking at her’.”

It’s not so much the outburst that’s disturbing as the way he says it. I wait for Rangila to break into a chuckle at the end. He doesn’t. He is staring at me with great sincerity, with an almost grim demeanour. His manner resembles that of a priest at a sermon.

In the last couple of years, Rangila’s songs have begun featuring a few female playback singers at times. He is unhappy about this: “When I used to sing everything by myself it was better. I used to sing the female parts as well. Now, people’s points of view have changed,” says Rangila. “Lekin woh faaltu hai (But that is rubbish).”

“I have written a line on this too,” says Rangila, when I bring him back to the subject of his portrayal of women and women’s issues. “Original balatkaari ke yadi ye duniya me talaasi huile to sabse pahile dewara sabke phaansi bhaile (If there’s a search for the ‘original’ rapists in this world, then brothers-in-law will be the first ones to be hanged).” He hates brothers-in-law apparently. I mention that he has a similar reference in his song Balatkaar Hota Aye Rajau for last year’s Holi. “Shuraat toh wahi sab karta hai (They are the ones who start it),” He says.“Now, a bhabhi (sister-in-law) is like a mother. But people of kalyug are such that they think that the bhabhi belongs half to them. This is wrong. This system is wrong. How can you have fun with your bhabhi?”

Kalyug and brothers-in-law. And the system. That’s what it boils down to. “I merely sing about what’s happening in kalyug,” says Rangila. “Accha hotaa hai to accha gaate hain, kharaab hotaa hai to kharaab gaate hain (If good is happening then I will sing about good things, if something bad is happening then I will sing about bad things).”

He orders an assistant to get him paan (betel leaf). The assistant, who was listening at the door so far, breaks out of his reverie. He goes into the kitchen and returns with a glass of water. “I had asked for paan not paani (water)),” says Rangila. He shakes his head, distraught. I wonder if he will bring up kalyug again. He doesn’t. The minion, flustered by now, runs out to find paan.

Rangila carries on: “I just say what happens. Even Manoj [Tiwari] sang a song… I think the lines were Goriya Apna Dupatta Sambhaal (Fair girl, Mind Your Stole)… I don’t remember exactly. So, he’s saying what’s happening,” says Rangila. “What’s wrong in this? If there’s an odhni (stole), you should cover yourself with it. You are sending a message.”

I ask him what message he had intended to convey with the lines: Bada jaldi badh gayil goriya tohaar mango frooty re, jaldi batawa hum se ki ras kab choosi re (Girl, your Mango Frooty has grown too soon. Tell me quickly, when will I be able to suck its juice)? “There’s a lot of message in that song,” he says. “Now everything can’t be explained. Paani paani ka dosh hota hai (A Hindi idiom that roughly translates into: Every kind of water has its own unique fault).”

“Explain?” I ask him

“It’s better that you don’t understand.”

I coax him. Finally, he says: “You can understand it like this: “Umar ke hisaab se sab kuch badhta ghatta hai. Usi ke anusaar badhna ghattna chahiye. Usse zada kuch bhi badhega ghatega toh wo bura kaha jayega (According to one’s age everything increases or decreases in size. And things should increase or decrease according to age only. If things increase or decrease more than one’s age entitles them to, then they will be criticized).”

There’s that saintly expression again. Rangila is now smiling benignly.

There’s more. “For the festival of Holi, girls should only put colours on girls, same with boys. If a boy puts colour on a girl, it’s wrong. I don’t like that system,” he says. This, despite the fact that almost all his Holi songs milk the sexual flippancy that’s synonymous with the festival. In one of his most curious videos, Kutta Pos Diha (Domesticate a dog by my name), a man is on all fours, barking like a dog while Rangila has a leash around his neck, and is patting his head. There’s also a girl, naturally, surrounded by a bunch of men. In a matter of seconds the music kicks in and everyone begins to gyrate vigorously (except, well, the man on all fours). Rangila sings: “Holi me personal maal bhi ho jaala sarkaari. Abki Holi chahe chale goli, Likh ke kahin khons diha. Taara haun me na rang lagawni tah, mora naam pe kutta pos diha (During Holi even personal belongings become public. In this Holi, even if bullets fire, write this down somewhere: If I don’t put a colour right ‘there’, you can domesticate a dog on my name).”

Mandal, unable to hold himself any longer, interrupts the conversation with his two bits: “If people didn’t like his songs, then how did they become such huge hits?  What Bhaiyya said was right— that if you think about the song Ghus gayil, phans gayil, adas gayil (the song “about Asaram Bapu”) in some incorrect way, then where will your mind wander? If people don’t like the song then why are they watching it? They should ignore it.”

This idea, that Rangila sings as he does not for gain but for the people, has been asserted by the singer himself. In song, no less. Rangila sang Bhaasa Bhojpuri Ke (The language of Bhojpuri) which had the line: “Bhaasa Bhojpuri ke uthayi kaise ho? Sabbe suna ta hi oohi to sunayi kaise ho (How do I uplift the language of Bhojpuri? If everyone listens only to those [profane] songs, then how can I make them listen to something else)?”

But today he contradicts this thought. In all these hours spent with him, there has been only one brief moment of honest exchange.

“I wanted to sing like Kumar Sanu,” says Rangila. “But I saw this wasn’t possible, so you have to find a way somewhere. What matters is what the public likes. Public is janta janardhan (almighty). You sing for them, not for yourself.”

But did he ever try to sing those soulful romantic numbers he had dreamt of singing as Giri? To sing “like Kumar Sanu”? “To produce a another album like Bewafa Sanam (‘Unfaithful Lover’, one of Rangila’s rare successful romantic albums) it would take me anywhere close to 6 months,” he lets out. “On the other hand, if I need to make a ‘double meaning’ album, even 15 days are more than enough. In 15 days, I can write around 8 such songs, record them. Bewafa Sanam took around 3 months to write. Because every line has to be powerful. No line can be less powerful than the previous; it has to come from the heart.” He isn’t sermonizing now. He falls silent after this.

Then: “Till 2010, the trend of ‘double meaning’ songs was okay. But now it has become too much. In fact, kalyug itself is ganda (dirty). If we were really pure we would never have been born in kalyug.”

I ask him to define kalyug. “Kalyug is the yug when what we planned doesn’t come to be, and what happens instead is something we didn’t think of in our wildest imaginings,” he says. “It’s the yug where what you’re seeing isn’t really taking place. And what’s happening actually— you cannot possibly see. Don’t you think this is unfortunate?”

It is. As is Rangila in kalyug. Stuck between Kumar Sanu and his ‘double meaning’ songs, between his khaini and his Marlboro Lights, between himself and Sidheshwara Nand Giri.

Our conversation comes to an end. He leaves. Mandal follows him to his room to discuss some business. Mastana enters the living room and plops down on the sofa where Rangila was seated. Dusk has settled in. Since no light was turned on during the interview the living room has grown steadily darker and through the darkness I hear Mastana’s voice: Har kalakaar ka alag alag rutba hota hai, khwahish hota hai (Every artist has his own style, his own forte, his own desires).” I nod silently, still jotting down Rangila’s definition of kalyug.

Then:

“Be it Manoj Tiwari or Pawan Singh, no one has been marked ‘Diamond’ yet in the world of singing. But he’s a ‘Diamond Star’.”

There is a pause. Then Mastana asks me pointedly: “You understand what a diamond is, don’t you?”

An edited transcript:

What do you think of when you think of your childhood the most?

What do I think? I think of my sports days, you know. Because I am a sportsman. I have been a sportsman so I remember that I used to wake up at 4.30 in the morning, even in winters, and I never missed my morning workout and my evening nets. So my life was around sports only.

Okay. You know, your dad wrote lyrics for a couple of Hindi films. I believe your brother also wanted to work in cinema in some capacity. When you saw the Hindi film industry through their eyes, what did it look like? What were the impressions? And did that either deter you or spur you to go and explore it?

I mean, cinema from outside or from someone’s eyes always looks glamorous.

No, no, not cinema. I meant the industry. Log kaise hote honge (How would the people be)? You know, when you are a child you imagine something.

Not imagine, because I used to come over here. I used to accompany my father. Every summer holidays, we used to be here for a month in that heat. So, we all were cinema crazy people and my father was friends with Laxmikant-Pyarelal (popular composer duo Laxmikant Kudalkar and Pyarelal Sharma). And, at that time, we were all vegetarians. So, on Tuesday, we used to go to his house for dinner, and see lots of film trials. So, it was like a glamorous world. Jitne logon ke contact me aaye toh door se toh sabhi acche hote hain (From afar, everyone appears to be nice). Because this was not my father’s first profession. So, this was fine, we used to come here for a month or so and my brother— he wanted to be a film producer without money, so that was the most difficult thing to do. You don’t have money and you want to be a producer. So he also struggled here for a long time. I remember watching trial shows of many big films like Taxi Driver  of Dev Anand and Hema Malini, then Aetbaar  I saw with Smita Patil. So, those kinds of memories are there.

And I remember seeing a film called Damaad. In that, I remember Mithun Chakraborty sitting down because there was some old lady. So he gave his seat to that old lady and he sat on the floor and saw the whole film from the floor. So, it was an exciting world. I was like a child.

Vishal, I wanted to ask you. A lot of things happened early in your life. You lost your father; you lost your brother. I believe your father was also involved in some kind of a land dispute jahan aap log rehte the (where you used to live). You chose… you had to make a critical choice between cricket and cinema— well, cricket and music at that point. Do you see these as turning points in your life?

Turning point? Actually I think the turning point, you realize once you achieve the success and you look back. Then you see it as a turning point, and at that point it could be a very disappointing turning point. And then you realize some kind of a screenplay is there, some kind of a destiny is there. So, that’s why I am a big believer of this thing called destiny. That whatever happens, happens for the best. I seriously believe in this because when I came to Delhi University to study, it was not planned. I was to play for my state. And I was selected. I was actually the Vice-Captain of my team. Somehow, some objection came because of some eligibility issue because I was repeating my 12^th (standard). So, some stupid rule was there that those who were repeating their 12^th couldn’t be a part of the state team. So I couldn’t play and I dropped the whole year. And then I was so pissed off that I (thought), ‘I don’t want to stay in this state. I want to play for some other state.’ And that’s why I came to Delhi. And when I came to Delhi, my life changed. Suddenly I was exposed to the metro life, the people definitely behaved differently in a small town and in a metro city. My life changed, my friends changed. And because of that my taste changed. I discovered myself. So that was the main turning point, and everyone in my family was against that event, that I should go to Delhi and study. Everyone— my mother, my brother, it was only my father who was supporting (me). And financially, we were not in a very good position to send me, but somehow things happened and I landed up in Delhi. I was not a good student either but I got admission. I think that was the first turning point in my life. Yeah, that was the turning point because that’s where I met Rekha (Bhardwaj); I met lots of friends who were into music, poetry. And in those days, in 1980s, India was going through a very unique phase when ghazal was being rediscovered by the youth. It was the days when (Mirza) Ghalib was the rock star, and Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Sahir Ludhianvi, so it was a very unique period and one of the best periods of the last 60-65 years after Indian independence. I think that the eighties was a very unique period where the ghazal came back. And with ghazal, a lot of Urdu culture and the traditional things that came back to the youth of which I was a part of.

And theatre also, you were involved in theatre also.

Theatre was always there, but today’s youth, unko toh pata bhi nahin hai ki ghazal kya hai, Faiz Ahmed Faiz kaun hai, Ghalib kaun hai. Shayad hum bhi aise hote, humko bhi nahin pata hota (They don’t even know what’s ghazal, who is Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who is Ghalib. Perhaps we would have been like that too. We might not have known either). Jagjit Singh was a huge thing, or Pankaj Udhas, they were like… So, I think wahan se, uss ghazal se, uss poetry se, uss culture se meri grooming shuru hui. Aur wo agar main Delhi na aaya hota to shayad nahin hota wo mere saath. Toh Delhi aana meri liye bahut bada  turning point tha (So I think from there, that ghazal, that poetry, and that culture started grooming me. And had I not come to Delhi then that wouldn’t have happened. So, I consider coming to Delhi as a huge turning point).

No. I was just smiling because of the conversation we were having before, and now you are giving Delhi so much of credit after…

And leaving Delhi was a bigger turning point. That’s why I was waiting for you to say this so I could say that leaving Delhi was the bigger turning point. Because had I been in Delhi, I would have been so stagnant because there was no scope for musicians in Delhi. Even now, I don’t think there’s scope for musicians in Delhi. Even the good recordings are done in Bombay and there was some kind of unprofessionalism in the Delhi music circle. I remember in one studio where I used to record, after seven o’clock, the recorder used to make his drink and he’s recording and drinking, even if you are recording Gita ke bhajan (devotional songs from the Bhagwat Gita). So, he’s having his drink. And I have no problem with that. Somebody can have a drink—Gita ke bhajan ho ya (be it the Gita’s bhajans or anything else)—but I am against that approach of unprofessionalism. So, I mean leaving Delhi was, and it was very difficult for me to leave because Bombay is very brutal. I remember when I first landed here, my brother had a small flat at Yari Road— Zohra Azadi Nagar, it’s called. And we were in that one bed and hall— if you say one bed and hall, the hall is smaller than your bedroom. But they say ‘one bed-hall’. It was a two room apartment where me and my mother and my brother with his girlfriend, they lived inside. And they… they don’t give you work. In Bombay you have to close your eyes and jump from the 120^th floor, then only the city accepts you. Otherwise you have no place over here.

I believe the first thing you composed, I mean professionally, as in it was put out, was when you were 19. Was that true?

Yeah. Actually in a way this is my 29^th or 30^th year as a film composer. Because when I was 19, my father’s friend, his name was  A.V. Mohan. He was a big producer, he produced many films including Damaad, of the time I’m telling you about.  So he was planning a film at that time called Vahem. And my father was arranging some kind of finance for him, which he couldn’t later. Out of that favour, that producer agreed to take me as a composer. Not agreed to, I mean he showed as a gesture, he was a nice man. But my father couldn’t arrange the finance. But he was a nice man. He said, “So what if you’ve not arranged it? He’s going to be the composer of the film.” And in 1984 I recorded my first song when I was 19 with Asha Bhosle. And that studio, there was a very big, famous studio called Famous Tardeo. Now they have an Axis Bank over there.  A few days back I was travelling to Tardeo and I saw now they have a big Axis Bank branch over there.

When did you start taking it seriously? Being a composer, when did you start taking it seriously?

My father was writing songs for a film called Yaar Kasam. Funny names of the films, when I look back. He had written one song which I composed, you know ghar mein aise rehte hue. Sabhi  tune bana lete hain, toh maine bhi  tune banayi (you know, when I was at my house. Everyone composes tunes. So I composed some too). So then I came to Bombay with my father because that film ka mahurat, vagera hona tha (that film’s mahurat was taking place).  Usha Khanna was the composer of that film. So we were sitting at the director’s place, his name was Chand saab. He was, again, my father’s friend. So they were having drinks in the evening. My father said, “He’s also made a tune, that song I wrote.” So like a kid, they were having drinks and (said), “Okay, gaana sunaao, tune sunaao (Sing that song; sing that tune).” So I sang my tune and they all loved it and immediately he made a call to Usha Khanna ji  to listen to this tune. And I sang that tune to Usha Khanna and she said, “It’s so good.  So meet me tomorrow.” And she said, “I’m going to take this tune and now I’ll develop on this. Do you mind?”  I think I was so encouraged with that, and so was my father. For the first time I got the confidence that yeah, if a person, an artist of Usha Khanna’s calibre and stature is liking my tune and taking my tune, then maybe I’m good. That’s the first time I took myself seriously.

Aap ki kya umar thi uss waqt (How old were you at that time) ?

Around 18.

Did you have any formal training in music? Did you train in music at all?

No.

Who or what did you learn the most from when it comes to composing? Who taught you the most about composing?

Actually mostly self-taught.  But as I told you when I was in Delhi University, there were a lot of musician friends that I had. There was a flute player who was a very good friend of mine called Thakur, who’s now no more. Being with him I learnt about Mehdi Hassan. I was not exposed to Mehdi Hassan. Then there was a friend of mine whose name is Deva Sengupta. He sang a few songs for me in Anurag’s film Paanch and later in No Smoking  he sang one song. He was like the star of the University and he used to do professional shows even at that time. He was a ghazal  singer, classically trained and he knew western classical as well and very good in both western and Indian classical.  And I didn’t know anything about western classical. Indian classical, I had an idea because my sister used to learn sitar and there was something… Bhatkhande ki kitaab se main khud hi sa re ga ma pa dha ni sa, raag-vaag kar leta tha. And paagalon ki tarah main laga rehta tha toh mujhe idea tha (from Bhatkhande’s book I used to sing sa re ga ma by myself, and like a lunatic I used to keep at it, so I had an idea). But I knew nothing about western (music). So he taught me writing a chord chart and exploring a chord or understanding a western chord in one night. Because he had devised a method where he mixed both Indian and western things. And it was so easy for me, in one night I understood it.  And in that one night I knew the western method of chord deprecation. So then I kept on learning, jo bhi mila main use seekhta raha (whatever I got I learnt from it). And it’s still going on.

Yeh toh learning ki baat hui (This was about learning). I wanted to talk about influences. You know you spoke about coming to Delhi in the whole phase of ghazals. I’m sure that must have been an influence in the way you compose your music. How have the influences changed? What are the new influences that you have allowed in to the music you have composed, over the years up to now?

It’s not the question of allowing. If something is good, it comes in and overpowers you. You are overwhelmed by those things. I was a great fan of Jagjit Singh and a great fan of Mehdi Hassan. Then Rekha…

Matlab their compositions also you mean?

Their compositions also. I mean Mehdi Hassan’s style of singing and Mehdi Hassan’s style of composing, is so, so good, so unique and so beautiful. The way he expresses a word, a line, a whole ghazal, it’s out of this world. Jagjit Singh’s expression of words, his simplicity. Then R.D. Burman’s chord applications, his whole approach to tune. So I’m a mix of all these things— Mehdi Hassan, Jagjit Singh, R.D. Burman. Then I loved Madan Mohan. Unki jo emotionality jo thi gaane ki, jo jis tareeke se sur lagaane ke tareeke the, jo unke notes ka combination hota tha, jo unke raagon ka jo combination hota tha. (The emotionality of his songs, the way he applied sur, the combination of his notes and raag). Then Salil Chowdhury, S.D. Burman and yeah, I think I’m a mix of all this. And then I devised my own thing. Somehow I explored myself and I made my kind of music. But I remained open. I still remain open about this.

I was a big fan and I am a big fan of Gulzar saab and I grew up on his poetry. In fact, my father used to tease me. He used to take some of Gulzar saab’s nazm (poetry) or some song and then criticise it purposely in front of me ki  “What is this? Aankhon ki kya khushboo hoti hai (what fragrance do eyes have)?” And I used to fight with him, fiercely fight with him. And then I later realized that he teases me and that’s why he does it. But after this death, the ghazal  was just emerging, then I read one poet and his name was Dr. Bashir Badr. He’s a great poet. The greatest poet of this century. And I realized that he lives in Meerut where my family was at that point. So I read his poetry and I remained with him. Even now I’m in touch with him. He has been the greatest influence in my life as far as poetry, culture and sensitivity is concerned. Even now when I’m lowest or down in my life emotionally, I just open his book and I feel calm. And every time I open his book I find some new line in that. That’s where I developed my taste for poetry and I discovered Gulzar saab. And his films songs suddenly I started hearing it and listening to it in so many points of view. Mera dost tha, uska naam hai  Ankur Gupta. Gupta ji. Toh usko pata nahi  kahaan se itna accha taste tha songs ka. Toh woh mujhe rare songs sunaya karta tha Gulzar saab ke jaise— Auron ke ghar mein rehta hoon, kab apna koi ghar ho? Usme ek expression tha ki— Kiraye ke ghar mein aisa lagta hai ki jaise main apne aangan mein moze pehen ke baitha hoon. (I had a friend, whose name is Ankur Gupta, Gupta ji. I don’t know how he had such good taste in music. So he used to make me listen to rare songs of Gulzar saab such as, ‘I live in someone else’s house, when will I have a place of my own?’ There was an expression, in that song which went like, ‘Living in a rented house feels as if I am in the courtyard of a house wearing socks)’. I can’t feel the floor because I’m wearing socks. These kind of expressions-

‘Din khali khali bartan hai

Raat hai jaise andha kuan

Sooni andheri aankhon mein

Aansoon ke jagah aata hai dhuan

Jeene ki wajah toh koi nahi

Marne ka bahaana dhoondta hai’

(The day is an empty vessel

The night like a bottomless well

In vacant, dark eyes

There’s smoke instead of tears

There’s no reason to live

I look for excuses to die)

Iss  poetry ne mujhe itna zyaada affect kiya hai ki meri zindagi ka sirf ek hi dream tha ki main  Gulzar saab ke saath at least ek gaana kar loon. Doosra dream tha ki  Lata Mangeshkar mera ek gaana ga dein. With this dream I was living in Delhi. Aur Dilli mein ek recording studio tha. Uss waqt Gulzar saab Amjad Ali Khan saab ke upar ek documentary bana rahe the. Toh main uss  studio mein apne chhote mote  jingles record kiya karta tha. Woh [studio ka] owner Punjabi tha. Toh woh kisi din phone pe bola, “Haan Gulzar aa raha hai raat ko yahaan par”. Toh unhone jab phone rakha toh maine poocha, “Kaun aa raha hai raat ko?” “Arrey, woh hai na Gulzar, woh film director, woh yahan par aa raha hai raat ko Amjad Ali Khan ki  recording karne.” Kisi ke liye bhi izzat nahin thi uske dil mein. Toh bajeere shaam ko aur sardiyon ki Dilli, December ki raat. Kadaak ki sardi pada karti thi December ko. Ab toh nahi padti utni. To main wahan baith gaya ki main aaj Gulzar saab ke darshan toh karke jaaonga. Toh nau, sadhe nau baje aana tha. Toh sardiyon mein log chale jaate hain idhar udhar. Mere session main baitha hua tha. Toh phone baja. Maine phone uthaya toh Gulzar saab the, bhaari awaz mein bole, “Hello, main Gulzar bol raha hoon. Mujhe rasta nahi mil raha hai.” Bada odd si jagah tha studio, Safdarjung Enclave. Toh  Bengali sweets ki dukaan hai, Safdarjung Enclave mein. Toh unhone bola, “Main Bengali sweets se phone kar raha hoon.” Uss waqt toh  mobile bhi nahi hote the. Maine bola aap wahin khade rahiye, main aapko lene ke liye aata hun. Aur maine kisi ko bataya nahin aur main unko lene ke liye chala gaya. Wahan se paanch minute ka walk tha. Uss walk me maine unhe bataya ki, you know, “I am a composer. I am a big fan.” Aur bahut log unhe aisa bolte honge but he was very nice and polite ki, “Bombay aao toh milna.” Phir yahan aa kar milne ki koshish ki toh badi mushkilon se… phir main toh yahan aa kar pehle do saal main job hi kar raha tha as an Area Manager. Finally I met him through Suresh Wadkar, jo mere dost hain, jo singer hain, unke kehne se Gulzar saahab ek T.V. serial ka gaana likhne ke taiyar hue jiska naam tha Daane Anaar Ke. Chitrarth (Singh) uske director the aur do log hain Delhi mein – Vinod Sharma and Mohan Paliwal – uss waqt Doordarshan se serial pass hua karte the na, bahut badi baat hua karti thi, ki humaara 13 ka serial pass ho gaya, humaara 26 ka pass ho gaya, humara 52 ka pass ho gaya. Toh unka 13 ka ek serial pass ho gaya tha aur unlogon ko mujhse gaana karane ke liye bola and maine somehow chakkar chalaya ki agar Suresh Wadkar Gulzar saab ko bol denge toh woh likh denge.

(This poetry affected me so much that I only had one dream in life that I record one song with Gulzar saab. Another dream was that Lata Mangeshkar would sing one song for me. With this dream I was living in Delhi. And there was one recording studio in Delhi. At that time Gulzar saab was making a documentary on Amjad Ali Khan. So I used to record some of my jingles in the same studio. The owner [of the studio] was Punjabi. So, one day he said on the phone, “Yes, Gulzar is coming in the night.” So when he put down the phone I asked, “Who’s coming in the night?” “You know that Gulzar, that film director, who’s recording Amjad Ali Khan.” He never respected anyone. It was the night of December. And Delhi used to be really cold in December. Now, not so much. So, I was sitting there thinking, ‘No matter what, I will see Gulzar saab and then leave’. So he was supposed to come at around 9 to 9.30 p.m. So people, in the winters, go here and there. I was sitting during a session and my phone rang. I picked up the phone and it was Gulzar saab on the other end. He said in his deep voice, “Hello, this is Gulzar. I can’t find the way.” The studio was at an odd place— Safdarjung Enclave. So there’s a Bengali sweet shop in Safdarjung Enclave. So he said, “I am at the Bengali sweet shop.” At that time there were no mobile phones. I told him, “Stand there. I will come to pick you up.” I didn’t tell anyone and I went to pick him up. From there, the studio was a five-minute walk. During that walk I told him, you know, “I am a composer. I am a big fan.” There might have been a lot of people [who would have told him this], but he was very nice and polite and he said, “If you come to Bombay, do meet me.” Then when I came to Bombay I was working as an Area manager in a company for the first two years. I finally met him through Suresh Wadkar, who’s a friend of mine, a singer, and Gulzar saab agreed to write a song of a TV serial, which was called Daane Anaar Ke. Chitrarth (Singh) was the director and there were two more people in Delhi— Vinod Sharma and Mohan Pahliwal. At that time, serials used to be approved by Doordarshan. It used to be a big deal – “that my [serial of] 13 episodes got approved by Doordarshan, my 26 episodes got approved by Doordarshan, 52 episodes.” So, similarly, his 13 episodes were approved by Doordarshan and they told me to compose a song and I somehow, through Suresh Wadkar, made Gulzar saab write a song for me).

That’s how I met him. We did that first song. Then he developed some liking for me and he got me my first successful song. That was for serial called Jungle Book, Chaddi pehan kar phool khila hai. So, that song became a hit and the company I was working in, which was a recording company called Pan Music, R.V. Pandit was the owner of that company and he saw my photograph with Gulzar saab in some recording studio and he called me, “What are you doing with Gulzar?” So, I had said I am becoming a music composer now, I have recorded a song with him. So he said, “Can you arrange a meeting with me and Gulzar?” I said, “Of course. But, for what?” He said, “I want to make a film on 1984 riots, whatever happened in Punjab.” So, I asked Gulzar saab, “Can I arrange a meeting?” And that’s how Maachis happened. And I got my first break. Such a long story.

Vishal, other than the films that you’ve done for yourself, films that you’ve directed, what would you say were your most exciting films as a music composer? Most exciting projects.

I think, Maachis, still remains my most exciting work because I had so much energy within me. I wanted the success so badly that I just blasted in that. So I think that work was very good. To an extent Satya was good. But I think the same kind of energy I felt again in Omkara.

You know, I also found your work in Paanch very exciting and I just thought it was, for lack of a better word, different from… like I remember hearing the cassette and then having to check who had done the music. Because my natural conclusion wouldn’t have been that it was you. I mean other than Akhiyan Chipki. Did you feel like that was departure for you in any way? Or little freer as a project in some way?

More than freer, I was very excited about it because it was not my kind of work. And it was Anurag’s first film and he showed me The Doors. And he said, “I want this kind of music.” And I was so excited to make a rock song and it was so ahead of its times that Main Khuda, that song, I feel so pained for that. Good you reminded me. That music, that film never came out. But it remained a cult film. But it’s available only to those people who… But I think, yeah…

Okay, I also wanted to ask you, before you made Makdee, you were doing a lot of films as a composer. Did you feel somewhere ki  you were getting stagnated as a music composer? Or did you feel that you just weren’t getting the opportunities to grow as a music director? Which one of the two did you feel— if any of them?

I think the second one. Because I was not getting the kind of films I think I deserved. I was feeling stagnant also. And one thing apart from these two factors, which I felt, was I’ll be very less important in the industry if I don’t do something really out of the box. So that was the reason. Because I knew that I’ll be out of work in some time. And I’ll have to go back to television or advertising. And I wouldn’t be in the mainstream of this industry, of this media and I always wanted that. I always wanted to be in the limelight. I always wanted to be in the front. I always wanted to lead. Wanted to, not now.

Not now?

Yeah, not now. So that lutf  (enjoyment) was at its peak, right? And that fire was… I’m a sportsman, I knew that if I don’t do something extraordinary, I’ll be out. I’ll be out of the team. I’ll be resting in the pavilion for the rest of my life. That’s how it started.

Tell me about the struggles about making Makdee. Particularly with the Children’s Film Society of India (CFSI). And do you feel now that you look back it was a blessing in disguise, that things didn’t work out very well with CFSI?

This is what I said at the beginning of the interview.  When you look back you see the turning point as, “Oh that was the turning point.” When you’re going through that, you think that you’re in a mess. And this is the worst situation you can be in your life. Yeah because they rejected the film I showed. I think they didn’t even see it properly because the way they used to see the film is like on a 24 inch T.V. with windows open behind. And if you’re trying to work in shadows and darkness, less light… They didn’t get it; it was a rough cut. They didn’t get the film. “Poor chap”, they said, “This is not a film, this is not what we expected.”

So there’s a friend of mine called Krishna and he really turned out to be Krishna for me. That he gave me 24,50,000 (rupees) that time. I paid that money, bought that film back, for a year I kept working and somehow had it released and then everyone appreciated it.

Vishal, do you feel that the attitude that the CFSI had at that point that’s also part of the reason why we don’t, despite being one of the largest film industries in the world, don’t make enough children’s films? Is that part of the reason why, you think?

It’s the attitude with which they approach cinema. I don’t think… I think it must be happening with every government organization. Because the kind of material that they produce, it’s so boring, so bad. And the government doesn’t have that kind of drive in it. Government and politicians, they don’t have time to do something good for public interest. Bichare apni kursi mein, apne problems mein itne phase huey hain, apne scams mein itne phase huey hain ki  (Poor things, they are so entangled in their own problems, scams that) they really don’t have time to do anything for the public. Parliament sits for one quarter of the time it’s supposed to sit. Toh kya kaam hua iss desh mein? (So what work really happened in the country?) It’s useless, in our lifetime we’re never going to see good governance for this country. So to talk about poor Children’s Film Society, it’s a very small thing.

Okay, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about screenwriting. Again, like you’ve not been to film school as such. What were some of the ways in which you taught yourself screenwriting?

Screenwriting is a… you can never learn. I mean you have to keep learning. I mean, it’s the most dicey form of cinema. You can never learn it. Every time you think that you’ve learnt it and you’ve failed next time.  So I read lots of books like a book called The Art of Dramatic Writing  by Lajos Egri. And just three days before I read a book. I still keep reading. I read a book called Backwards and Forwards  by David Ball. And suddenly I realized that what I was missing in my life. I mean, if I had got this book 10 years back, I would have made my films better. So it’s a very difficult thing to learn and understand and express, screenwriting.  Because it’s like the story telling and then you don’t know where you fail. Character establish karne mein  time nikal jaata hai, kabhi  conflict aane mein der ho jaati hai, kabhi  climax kharab ho jaata hai, kabhi  plot point one kharab ho jaata hai, kabhi  two kharab ho jaata hai. Kuch samajh mein aata nahin, jo kabhi achcha ho jaata hai, woh kashmas achcha ho jaata hai. Isiliye maine aaj tak hamesha collaborate hi kiya, writing mein (You need a lot of time in establishing a character, at times conflict arrives too late [in the plot], at times the climax is botched up and at times the plot point. Sometimes the plot point one hasn’t turned out well, sometimes the plot point two. It’s difficult to understand, and if at all things turn out to be well, it’s by accident more than anything else. That is why I have always collaborated in writing).

Because I’m so scared of writing alone. I think only my first film, which I wrote, Makdee, because usmein itna kam paisa tha, co-writer professionally aata nahin. Aur jo dost toh sab log  busy the. Mera paas kuch chaara nahin tha. Toh main socha bachon ki  film hai toh koi dekhega nahin. Main khud hi likh leta hoon (It involved such little money that I could not have afforded a professional writer. And all my friends were busy. Also, I thought since it’s a children’s film, no one will watch it anyway, so I might as well write it myself). Uske baad (After that) the more you work, the more you realize how illiterate you are in screenwriting. So that’s why I depend on Shakespeare, because I take his structure and I adapt it my way.

No but tell me something, is it something you enjoy? Do you enjoy the process of writing your films?

I mean there is no other choice because I enjoy making films. So if I have to make a film, I have to write it.

Why is that?

Because…

You’ve been a co-writer in all your films. But why do you have to be involved in the writing?

Otherwise I can’t direct. If the film is not internalized, the only way to internalize a film, the only process I know, is to write it. Otherwise I won’t know, if somebody else has written a character. I’m still not that mature a director where I can take somebody else’s work and internalize it. For me the process is that I have to internalize it and that process starts with when I sit and write it with my own hand and with my… or bounce it with my co-writer. But that’s the only way I know. I feel confident.

You’ve always… I mean after Makdee, like you’ve said, you’ve always worked with co-writers. How does that process work for you? Does it change with every writer?

With every writer, you know, you h­ave a different style but one writer friend of mine, his name is Matthew Robbins. He’s from L.A. And I met him in one writing workshop in Kampala, where Mira Nair had arranged a workshop. We all were mentors. He was head of all of us. He has written a film for Spielberg also, called The Sugarland Express, very early films of Spielberg. He has written films for the guy who’s made Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo Del Toro. So we became friends in Kampala. And he came to India. And I wrote a film with him. With him actually I learnt a lot, the methodical way of approaching a screenplay. Still you fail in that also, but at least you know how to approach this beast. That you have to start by catching it from the horns or by its tail. Earlier you just go and just uska sar bhidaa ke aap lad gaye. Ya toh aap gir gaye lahu luhaan ho kar ya script gir gayi. Pehla toh ye hi nahin pata tha. Ab yeh toh pata hai  at least light bujhake aur  torch uski aankhon me dal kar poonch se pakad kar deewar par marna hai. Toh ho sakta hai ki aap jeet sakein, toh uss tarah ke kuch gur aur, ya  how to approach. (Lock horns [with the beast] and either you fall down completely bloodied or the script turns out to be no good. Earlier I didn’t know all this. Now at least I know that I can switch off the light and flash the torch in its eyes, hold it by its tail and then bang it on the wall. If I do that, maybe there’s a possibility that I can win). Then I realized it’s like when you want to become a doctor, you go to a medical school. You want to become an engineer, you go to engineering school. But in cinema if you want to become a writer-director, you don’t have to do anything, just come. Hum toh bachchpan se, dil se writer hain, bahut bade writer hain, hum toh bahut bade director hain. Toh yeh jo cinema ko leke, jo logon ka approach hai, jo mera bhi raha. Main bhi toh aake seedha ghus gaya ki main  director ban jaaoonga, main  writer ban jaoonga  (Most people think that they are born writers, directors. So a lot of people approach cinema like that, and even I used to think the same that if I just come to Bombay I will become a writer and director). Fortunately for me things… because I was intelligent enough to understand that I’m a fool.  Some fools don’t understand that they’re fools, they are actual fools. So I’m very intelligent that I understood that I’m a fool. So I always had intelligent people around me, working with me, guiding me. So that’s how, you know, still, I am learning.

I have a bunch of questions on adaptations but I’ll start with this. There are so many forms of… Shakespeare ko har tarike se, har jagah, har kone mein adapt kiya gaya hai (Shakespeare has been adapted in every manner, everywhere). Two questions here. One of course ki, was there a sense of, did that make you a little wary or did that liberate you? Ki yaar sab ka ek alag Shakespeare ho sakta hai, mera kyon nahi ho sakta? Ek yeh sawaal hai. Dusra yeh ki what did you feel you had to add to that? Because it can also become a yeh sab toh kaha ja chuka hai? So what was it that made you want to adapt Shakespeare?

Actually to tell you honestly the truth, I thought nobody’s going to notice that I’ve adapted Shakespeare. And that was what I was made to feel by the industry people when I wrote Maqbool. So one of my financier friends, he told me, “If you want to make this film, please take out Shakespeare’s name. Because nobody will come to watch because literature is boring.” And I was somewhere, you know… and even I didn’t care for Shakespeare to be honest. I didn’t know who Shakespeare is, what his writings are. Because Shakespeare to me was a scary writer who haunted me in my school with The Merchant of Venice. And to me also, like anybody else, I thought that literature is boring, there’s going to be no drama in this. And in school you don’t even look at the drama, you look at the question-answer, what is this character doing, for what. So you miss the drama in school. When I saw Angoor  and in that, in the last shot Shakespeare winks. And I realised, this is a story by Shakespeare, this is very dramatic. That was in my subconscious. I wanted to make a film on the underworld and I was looking for a story. I happened to read in a child’s book, in a very abridged version form of Macbeth. And I thought it’s a very good for an underworld film, so let me adapt it to… And I think somewhere it was Angoor  I had in mind. So that’s how I started. And I didn’t realize that what kind of liberty I’m taking with such a great writer till my film was screened in Toronto (International) Film Festival on that premiere night when I was attending to the Q&A with the audience and the world press. And there were big filmmakers like, I knew Deepa Mehta. Like Deepa Mehta stood up and said, “Today I’m proud of India that a filmmaker has made such a beautiful film from my country. I’m so proud to be an Indian.” That really struck me. And then the kind of questions the press asked me. Fortunately they had loved the film and I realized— what if they had not liked the film? Toh mera kya hota? (Then what would have happened to me?) And I realized ki I mean Shakespeare ko leke, main aisa kar raha tha, jaise mere baap ki story hai. Maine kuch bhi change kiya uss mein (I was adapting Shakespeare’s story as if it’s my father’s story. I changed whatever I wanted to). I’ve made Lady Macbeth into the king’s mistress. But I think somewhere, I was very me. When I say I, I include Abbas Tyrewala. He was my co-writer. That we were very true to the soul of the film rather than the text. Soul of the play rather than the text of the play. And that encouraged me to do Omkara— Othello.

Do you sometimes miss that, for lack of a better word, a sort of carefree unknowingness? Do you sometimes miss that now? Because you can’t have that now, where you already know every film that you do will be scrutinized?

Yeah it is a problem because people come with their own screenplay in their head. They expect something. Then you’re told that your audience needs this, wants this, they expect this out of you, they take you so seriously. When I announced, when it was announced at one point I was considering doing Chetan Bhagat’s 2 States. I mean the kind of mails I got from that Facebook page I had for two months. And on my friend’s Facebook page that, “What has happened to him? He has come down from Shakespeare to Chetan Bhagat.” I mean this is stupidity. Chetan Bhagat has… he can write well, that novel is good. And I wanted to explore that frothy side of mine but it was such a strong reaction to my selection of that material. So I think obviously it’s a curse and this is very natural also.  When people love you, they love your work, equal amount of people hate your work. So it comes in a package.

What is your approach to adaptation, one? And if you could quickly explain how the two (Ruskin) Bond processes have been different from the Shakespeare? Because you know, Bond is a living writer, he’s working right now, you know, again our milieu. So one or two quick differences that you can tell between the two adaptations. 

Shakespeare, I mean his work is timeless. Therefore it is so relevant even now, every filmmaking country makes one or two films in a year about Shakespeare. So his dramatic sense is definitely very unique and timeless. So it’s very easy to adapt Shakespeare. With me fortunately, especially in Maqbool and of course with Omkara  also, I never felt the burden of Shakespeare. I treated him as my co-writer, my invisible co-writer who has given me material and I say, “Thank you very much, but I want to change Lady Macbeth to the mistress of the king.” Because he is invisible, even if he is getting disappointed with it, he can’t tell. So I never looked at him, at Shakespeare like that. I looked at him like a friend who was…

The guy who winks at the end of the movie…

Yeah.  And who has done a very good, decent job in his story. I treat him like that. But I’m the director finally. That’s why that burden was not there and now I feel little burdened. But the day I’ll make another Shakespeare, I’ll again be treating him like that, “Come back, we haven’t met for so long, let’s have a drink together and talk about the story. Do you have anything new to offer?” So that way, you know, I was fine. And that’s why if you talk to Gulzar saab, his point of view is that my films are not adaptations of Shakespeare. He says, “Just for cheap publicity, you say Shakespeare and because you want to have (the) publicity of Shakespeare, you want Shakespeare’s name attached to your work. Therefore you’re saying. But otherwise they’re not adaptations of Shakespeare, they’re original films.”  So I don’t know whether it’s a compliment or it’s not a compliment. I don’t ask him because I don’t want to know. I take it ki  okay it must be a compliment. But he says that.

As far as Ruskin Bond is concerned, Ruskin is actually like a friend. And I told you, I have a house in Mussoorie, where we share the same wall. And most of the time, you know, he’s… Sometimes on a wintry evening, he’s standing on his window and I go on my terrace for a smoke. So he says, “What are you doing?” I said, “I have a good malt.” He says, “Why don’t you offer it to me? I’m coming to your house.” So we actually sit and have a drink and we discuss. And even sometimes, when I’m not doing his stories, I bounce off my work with him. He’s like an encyclopedia of storytelling. Sometimes he takes out a book which is like 72 years old, printed in 1942 or 1946 and he just presents it to me ki, “ I think, I have marked this story called Cocaine, you go and read, you’ll get a good inspiration for your work. The kind of film you are doing, the kind of script you are writing.” The Blue Umbrella  had a problem because it was a very short story and there was not enough material to turn it into a film. So some day a friend of mine, Minty Tejpal, who co-wrote that film with me, he came out with this idea ki…

What if it was actually stolen.

Stolen and the person comes with a red chhatri  (umbrella). And then we made it like jo hamare folktale hain, ki wo seeyar pani smarang mein gir gaya aur aa gaya toh (in our folktales, where there’s a jackal that falls in the pond and then came back), we took that route. And in 7 Khoon Maaf  he wrote it specially for me, before that was a short story called Susanna’s Seven Husbands. Then I asked him, I want to make it into a film can you write a novella for me? Toh  it was specially written for me.

Okay Maqbool, you set it in the underworld, the Mumbai underworld. But it was not like the underworld films that were being made. It was still your underworld film. It was not… for us underworld films are… it was not Satya, it was not… How much research did you do and how much of it was… Was it a real Mumbai? How did you balance the real and the sort of ‘inspired’ Mumbai underworld?

It was not at all real underworld. In fact I was amazed that nobody noticed that. Because it was the underworld of the 1960s. That Abba ji  kind of figure, was like a reference to Karim Lala or Haji Mastan. I had met Haji Mastan once, long back when I came to Mumbai around 1988-89. I happened to meet him. I went to his house, so I had that image. Then I met few police officers who did encounters, like that. But I think, what I did and what I generally do is I take a fantasy and treat it very really, in reality. That is what I keep doing. I take a fantasy and treat it in reality. That is what Maqbool’s underworld is. That is why Omkara is politicized the way it is. That’s what actually happens. It’s not that it’s totally fantasy. Like Omkara, there’s one scene where police is being frisked by the gangsters. And actually it happens, in one of the villages, if the police had to go in, the gangsters actually search, frisk police.

No, but in Omkara  there was a lot more… Also, that was very real.

Yeah because that’s where I come from so I know it. But the Mumbai underworld you don’t know, it’s a fantasy for you.

Actually Mumbai underworld is a fantasy space in any case. You know the gangsters mimic their own screen versions and their screen versions. You don’t even know what is…

Yeah, you don’t even know who’s whose mirror.

Who came first, it’s a chicken and egg thing. Okay, now tell me a little bit about the choices of making Lady Macbeth, not Lady Macbeth but the mistress of the king. And the other one, of making the witches more active than passive. Just handing them more power.

Lady Macbeth, the reason was, because I thought, in a married relationship with a man and woman, which Macbeth had, I thought it’ll be so boring. Because it’s only being done for money. It’s only being done for power or for the lust for power. Because Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, they must have been married for a long time. And Lady Macbeth wants that power, that throne. So I thought that it’ll be so dry. So what if Lady Macbeth becomes a throne herself for Macbeth? He has to kill his father to get that throne and there will be a lust. A real lust, a romance hidden with lust. So I thought that will be so good to explore. That was the reason, to have romance, otherwise there’s no romance in a married relationship of 12-15 years and where they’re planning to kill their father. So it’s a different zone, a different tone, a different genre. So I didn’t want to treat it that way. I wanted to have a little passionate romance, throbbing romance between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. And the only way was to avert the obstacle of the king. The king is the obstacle. Which is… I thought that, because I was looking at the contemporary parallels of all the things in Macbeth. The first thing was witches. So I thought the cops in the contemporary world will make the best witches.

Yeah but what about making them more active? They’re not just predicting, they’re also in a way making it…

They’re making it happen, yeah. Again I told you, that I treated it as my story. That after a point I forgot about Mr. Shakespeare, that I thought the basic material is his, I’m… like Gulzar saab says, ki main uske zameen pe apni  building khadi karke bol raha hoon ki yeh Shakespeare ki  building hai. Toh Shakespeare ki toh sirf zameen hai, building meri hai, toh (that on Shakespeare’s land I am constructing my own building and I am saying that it’s Shakespeare’s building. But only the land is of Shakespeare, the building is mine) this is what he says. But I don’t like that. I want this building to be called Shakespeare Apartment. So I can sell it well.

Okay Omkara. How quickly did that choice of the adha-brahmin come to you, how quickly did that…

Because again I was finding it parallel to the Moor.

But there are lots of other parallels. I mean yahaan pe aur bhi parallels ho sakte the, jo aap explore kar sakte the (there could have been more parallels, which you could have explored). Of that psychology, of that…

Kyonki iss mein ek… Nahin! Nahin hota (Because there could have been one more… No! It wouldn’t have been possible). You tell me what is the parallel of a Moor? What will be a parallel of a Moor? I mean… there I think with a Moor, which I very smartly avoided is that he’s a… it’s to do with a skin colour. And the person who is complexed with his colour, with his looks and he’s more complexed with the beauty of his wife. So that’s where I realized okay, he is jealous of his wife. He’s jealous, not jealous of his wife, he’s a jealous man because he is complexed with his wife’s beauty. Because he doesn’t see himself as beautiful as he should. Which I think the beauty has got nothing to do with your looks. I think it is your inner looks which make you beautiful or not beautiful. So for that, I think that adha-brahmin where uski maa…father Brahmin tha, he’s…

You grew up in U.P (Uttar Pradesh). You are a Brahmin yourself. How much did your own… what you actually witnessed, how much did your own experiences and things that interested you about the politics of U.P., go into this film?

The characters actually, more than politics. Politics sabhi jagah ek si hai, but wahan pe (the politics is the same almost everywhere but there) politics has a muscle wing. So every political party has or had a muscle wing. One big gangster is affiliated with one party. That is what the politics was. Aur uske bahubali hote the. Ki ek bahubali yeh hai, uska bahubali kaun hai (They used to have chiefs. That he’s one chief, who’s the chief of that group)? Matlab they had their muscle wing. But what I used with my experience of living in western U.P. were the characters. Like Langda Tyagi ka character. That character was a senior to me in my school because I studied in a government college. And there we had students from all classes of society. So I’m very fortunate. At that time, I was very… later I was very angry, that I should have gone to some English medium and you know, where high class, people from the high class of society were there. But now I thank God, thank God I was there, because I could see so many people. Which I would have never experienced in my life. So Langda Tyagi was there, he used to carry a knife in his pocket and he was a gangster and later he became a very big gangster. And when I went to research, I came to know that he is a professor in a college now. So this was his growth. Then Ajay’s character, there was again a gangster called Rampal. When we were kids we used to go through Tyagi Hostel which was there in the film also. So all those characters I had seen in my childhood.

I want to talk a little bit about the… see Shakespeare’s universe has a very distinct moral universe also, very in tune with the Victorian times, right? How different is the moral universe of your films from Shakespeare’s? And what other things influence the moral universe of your films? Because morality and how you interpret that changes over time. The drama doesn’t but the morality does.

I don’t think morality changes. I don’t think morality changes because… and morality has a very strange point. I have a very strange point of view for this morality. When we are watching cinema we all become very moral. We must be doing the same wrong thing in our real life, but when we watch a film, we actually become very moral, that good should win. He is a bad guy, why did he do this? And it’s very natural that, it’s very strange that we become so moral. When we are watching film in a theatre or with bahut logon ke saath baith ke dekh rahe (a lot of people). We become very moral. So I think morality never changes. And the morality you are talking about, it has got to do with the filmmaker. Uski jo morality hogi, wohi screen dikhayegi (Whatever his morality is, you will be able to see it on the screen). What he thinks about women, what point of view he has on relationships, what way he treats kids, whatever he is in his real life, is shown on the screen.

Whatever he is or whatever he is interested in exploring?

He explores only those things which he is interested in. You keep going back. It’s like a domino thing, you keep going back and you’ll find the filmmaker only. He’ll only… because nobody will give his life for…

Something that he doesn’t…

Something that doesn’t interest him.

There were lots of ways in which Susanna’s Seven Husbands could have been interpreted. What was your first attraction to the… what was it that “Mujhe yeh explore karna hai (I want to explore this).” Kya tha usme, story mein (What was in it about the story)?

Usme  I think the character Susanna, and the characters of the husbands.

And the idea of love? The very strange idea of love?

Uh…Yeah. I think what attracted me [was] the black humor part of that, that she kills her husbands. I liked the streak of that character, which actually attracted me. And it was so unusual, and it was based on a real character, Ruskin told me about that.  So, I found it very fascinating that a lady who can kill, get married seven times, and kill her husbands.

Why did you think that the film didn’t do as well as should have really?

I think what I was hoping that, I was actually following Hitchcock’s line that thrill is better than the suspense, that we know that she is going to kill a person but how she’s going to kill a person, that process is interesting. And I think that didn’t work with people, that they knew that he’s going to be killed so they weren’t interested in the process, they wanted him to be killed as soon as possible. So, I think that episodic feel, which came, that didn’t work with people. For me, I think I still love that film. I think it was a very literary work of mine, where I put in the history of India through her husbands, and you see the Pokhran (nuclear explosion), you see 1984, and I think a doctor who makes killer mushrooms, so I think it was a very literary work of mine. The only thing which I am ashamed of in that is the makeup of Priyanka’s (Chopra) older look, which I hated and I was cheated by a foreign company who promised, we did tests in L.A. six months back, but the people who did the test didn’t come. It was a different team, which came, and there was so much at stake and we were in flow. Then I was promised by the special effects guy that we’ll do it in the post—that’s the easy way to get out, so don’t worry—but finally it couldn’t be achieved. But I think that wasn’t the reason that the film didn’t do well because it must be something else.

Was it also, did you feel that because you didn’t explain Priyanka’s character that people didn’t understand this character somewhere. They wanted a more directly moral tale for a woman. They didn’t get what was driving her? It wasn’t a black and white moral tale. Yeah, I mean she does turn to God in the end and all that but…

Yeah, I think because, two things for that. One is, there were explanations about her character but people don’t pay that kind of attention. It was very subtle…

It was. Ped ke neeche baith ke (sitting under the tree), when she’s saying why not just divorce them, why kill them, and she explains that. It’s an almost poetical explanation; it’s not a spoon-feeding explanation.

Yeah, and there was an explanation for that, where one of the servants, the three stooges, one of the… Jab wo bachpan mein school jaati thi to ek kutta bahut bhaunkta tha, jis galli se jaati thi. Toh usne apna raasta nahin badla, toh usne apne  father ki  gun le kar kutte ko uda diya. Toh Sahib raasta nahin badla karti hain, Sahib kutte ka bheja uda diya karti hain. (As a child, when she used to go to the school, a dog in one of the gully on the way used to bark a lot. She didn’t change her route; instead she used her father’s gun to kill the dog. So, Sahib doesn’t change her route, she kills the dog instead). So, she was like that, that was she had in that. She wouldn’t change her way; she would rather get rid of the person. And, she was looking for love, every time she was deceived in love. If you see all those marriages, she was betrayed in love every time and I think after one point, she became, to me, a psychopath. After the third murder, when after John’s character, I think she became a psychopath because when she kills the Russian husband she had a… she didn’t have to kill him, but I think by that time she had just started enjoying the killing. So, to me, she became a psychopath killer. And it was supposed to be black humour, which people didn’t get. So, it was supposed to be… and maybe Ruskin also blames me for that. Ruskin said that you have made it so intense that the black humour went out of the window.

Okay, I want to talk to you about Kaminey. What did you start with? It was a caper film, it was a sort of take on a very Tarantinoesque genre, it was a sort of… whatever, it was a hat doff to Bollywood clichés. What did you start with, where do you root those characters, where do you find those characters in the world that you wanted to root it in?

Again, it was like a fantasy put into reality. But, my starting point was to make a caper. To make a Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, Pulp Fiction, those kind of influences, so the starting point was that. And, then I wanted to have a little depth that why did these two brothers are at war… and yeah, I think that was my intention and that remained my most successful film so far.

Okay, Matru (Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola) intrigued me even more. Where did you find, again, there was that fantasy, there was this bi-plane out of Tintin, the cow, the socialist politics, the whole land grab thing? Where did the characters in Matru… come from?

It comes from Brecht’s play called Mr Puntila and His Man Matti. And Brecht took those characters from Charlie Chaplin’s film called City Lights, in which a drunkard man takes Charlie Chaplin home and he’s drunk and treats him like his best friend, and when in the morning he’s sober he kicks him out, forgets that who is this guy, why is he sleeping next to my bed. So, that was a starting point and of course, I think there was a left side of me politically, so it was an expression of my left…

So you were also trying, was it also something, like did you also want to explore (Emir) Kusturica’s idiom?

Yes, yes, Kusturica, because I gave homage to Kusturica at the end because I loved his films, Underground…

But, that’s how he treats politics, right? There are these characters that he’ll create but the way…

Yes, it’s treated like farce. Black Cat, White Cat; Underground; those films were a big influence on me.

I wanted to quickly talk to you about dialogue writing. Because that is something, you know, you do for all your films. Tell me about some of the pitfalls of dialogue writing? Tell me two secrets of good dialogue writing?

One secret you can acquire, you can achieve. The other you can’t. First is, which you can acquire and achieve is, never let two people agree in a scene. Even if they are saying the same thing, never let them agree. So that’s where the conflict comes and that’s where the fun comes. If there’s a conflict, people are interested, and if there’s no conflict, they are not interested then. If two people are fighting, they are interested, so, this you can acquire. Okay, three things. Second thing is, never, which I learnt, I’m not giving you a gyaan, but this is what I do. The second thing is, never say things directly, say it through some object. If I want to tell you something, I will tell you through biscuit— that why don’t you have this biscuit. I will start my conversation, I will say through, I will say it indirectly, not directly. That always has an impact. And third thing, which you are either born with it—you either have it or you don’t have—which is sense of humour. If you don’t have humour then you can’t be a writer and you have to be… the more wicked you are, the better dialogue writing you can do.

Casting. Especially when you have casted for smaller roles, character roles, it’s something you are really known for. Something that’s widely discussed about your films. One, is there anybody you consult or take advice from, when it comes to casting? Secondly, is there a director that you admire for their casting?

Now, we have good casting directors, who weren’t there before. In my case, that guy, Honey Trehan, he has been my assistant the day he landed in Bombay, he has been with me. And over the period of time, he became a big casting director. And, as far as my casting is concerned, I am never excited about stars who are working in my film. I am always excited about the side cast, who are working. So, I get a kick out of their performance not by the stars’ performance, so that’s why they become very important for me. Like Deepak Dobriyal in Omkara, or Chandan Roy Sanyal or the Bengali brothers in Kaminey, or like Bhopey Bhau. So they give me child like excitement. So that and the one director I admire for it, I think, (Quentin) Tarantino. His casting sense is out of this world. If you see the Kill Bill, that Bill’s casting, I mean, such a great casting.

Two things, like I said with dialogue writing, that you have learnt along the way with directing actors, be it stars or actors? Two things that you have learnt on the job, or three things that you have learnt on the job about directing actors? Some tricks that you have picked up.

Yeah, never ask them to repeat what they have done in the shot. If the shot is okay, and for some reason you have to do it, never ask them to repeat the same thing. And, I never spoon-feed them about what they should be doing. In fact, and that I came to know, because they have worked with many different directors. But when they work with me, am told again and again, especially many times by Priyanka, that when an actor comes and asks me that this is the scene and you have to go and sit over there, there’s a biscuit plate lying over here, and I have to come and sit over here. So, this is the scene. So, they ask me, if they ask me, that, “What should I do? Should I come from this door or that door?” I never tell them. I say, “It’s your character, you should tell me where your character should come from. Don’t ask me to think for yourself. You think and tell me. If I don’t like it, I will tell you.” So, if I do my first rehearsal, I tell no one what to do, I tell no one how to do, I just tell them, let them weigh themselves, and that’s where they get thrown off. This director is not telling us anything! This is my style of working. I never give directions. If I feel they are going wrong, I will tell them, “This is not the way. Your character should be doing this.”

Tell me, why did you turn producer? What was one big reason that you turned producer?

To have the power for the final product. Because I saw Gulzar saab suffering in Hu Tu Tu, then that producer after the release of the film, he went to the theaters and edited the film, the way he wanted. And, I saw him in pain, and when I became the director, then I realized that that’s the way you can kill the director. So, to avoid that day in my life I became a producer.

How much creatively… you know the kind of films you produce, which you are not directing yourself, how much do they have to be a piece of your own creative sensibility? And, how far would you say that, okay…

Yeah, it’s a very difficult thing to produce and I am stopping to produce anymore now.

Really?

Yeah.

Are you taking a break or stopping?

I mean, stopping for the time being. I don’t know, right now I am not in a mood to produce forever for anybody. Because it’s a pain.

What is it that gets to you about producing?

Because you are wasting your energies, you know. I can make my own films. Why am I doing it for others? This is the first feeling that came to me. Because I don’t do it for money. I never get money back. My films don’t make money, so then why should I be doing this? I should be creating my own work, why should I be doing it for others?

Have you gotten better at understanding marketing, or selling a film?

No, I don’t understand because even if I understand marketing better than the marketing people, the marketing people think that they’re understanding the marketing better. So it becomes a very difficult situation when it comes to marketing because they have preconceived notions about a film because they have set patterns that so many hoardings, hero should be there, the masses should come for this. So, it’s very bad, marketing, I mean, should be left to a filmmaker, which doesn’t happen because of the co-production thing. And the corporate has its own marketing wing— a bunch of fools, who know nothing about it.

What kind of aesthetics are you drawn to, when it comes to cinema?

Excellence.

I mean, I am not going to ask you to even explain that. You know, a lot of filmmakers have a thing for creating a partnership with a cinematographer. You know, whether it was (Jean-Luc) Godard or whether it was (Satyajit) Ray, they did that. You have not. You have worked with different cinematographers, you have repeated one. But you have worked with different cinematographers at different points of time. Why is that? I mean, is that because you did not find the partnership, or making the partnership doesn’t interest you?

I want to remain in a live-in relationship in my creative world. I don’t want to marry, so this is one thing. And because the problem with cinematographers is that they think that actually they are directing the film, the director knows nothing. This is the basic problem with most of the cinematographers because they are either failed directors or they didn’t have the courage to become a filmmaker, or they don’t get a chance to become a filmmaker. So that kind of arrogance, because they have a kind of power on the set. Because the scene has to be lit and then they say that, “I am not getting my meter correct. I need so much time.” They have that kind of power. So I have had a very bad experience in my first two films with my cinematographer, that’s where I thought I am not going to repeat my cinematographer. One reason because that cinematographer, he was a friend of mine, that he kept saying to everyone that he has directed those first two films, he (Bharadwaj) knew nothing about it. He knew nothing about the lens. True, on the first film I knew nothing about the lens, but by the second film, I knew everything, everything, but… and I felt very offended, I felt very offended with that, and to prove him wrong and prove to myself that I can work with any Tom, Dick, and Harry, and get my job done, and that’s why I started doing this. Now I enjoy… because it’s a very boyfriend-girlfriend, husband-wife, kind of a relationship between the director and the cinematographer. By the end of the film, he knows all your weaknesses and you know his, but the problem is he knows your weaknesses. So, the next time he knows how to manoeuvre you, how to manipulate you, and I just don’t like someone manipulating or manoeuvring me. So when you get on the set with a new cinematographer, by the time he realizes your weaknesses or problems, the film is over. That’s why I don’t and I won’t.

Do you allow yourself flourishes as a director? You know, like a painter, as one of those flourished strokes, which may not be needed but it’s a flourished stroke. Do you allow yourself flourish, just purely indulgent, as an artist, as a director, strokes in your films? I mean, indulgent in a way that would not spoil the story but your own, jaise keeda kehte hain, kuch bhi kehte hain, jaise bhi…?

Yeah, I think, all the creative people do that.

Not all, I think.

Yeah, but if you realize that it’s an indulgence then… you know, that’s why I am very conscious about what I do. I don’t like to do anything for the sake of intelligence, but now I think I feel I should have in few cases.

But why Vishal? I mean, the whole reason why you are doing this is because you have to enjoy it, right?

Yeah, yeah, but you know when the film comes to your final stages you become very insecure that whether it’s reaching what you wanted to say, whether it’s reaching or not, and I am very scared of one thing, which is boring people. Because I get bored very easily. Like if I am talking to you or if I do not like being in someone’s company, I feel that’s the most horrible thing. And I don’t want to do that to people, so sometimes it happens. But in few cases I am saying I should have been indulgent, like Irrfan’s (Khan) story in 7 Khoon Maaf, I think that’s the best work I have ever done in my life, but I butchered it because of my editor and I will remain angry with him all my life. Because that section was 20-25 minutes, 30 minutes long, or 25 minutes long and there was total poetry, no dialogue in that. The whole relationship was translated on the screen in poetry, using music and poetry. Still there’s no dialogue in the film in that story but that was long, and I should have gone with that.

Do you ever self-censor while making films for the fear of running into censorship problems?

 No.

Never?

The thing is, I am always morally right when I am doing a film.

Haan, but phir bhi hassles bhi bahut hote hain na? (But still there would be a lot of hassles, right?) You are also a practical director, and a producer, so is there something where you say, I don’t need this yaar, forget I am not going to…

Nahin, ab problem aane lagi hai kyunki satellite deals mein woh maangte hain (Nowadays, there’s a problem because satellite deals need) U/A, so broadcasters have started blackmailing. That’s where the cinema is feeling a big hurt and we will realize it after five years. Because of that the filmmakers are forced not to do certain things, which is very wrong for a creative man.

You know, Vishal, I am very intrigued because you had an anti-smoking song, you had an AIDS awareness song. How do you feel about the regulation that says that you have to put a warning? Where do you think the line needs to be drawn? Do you feel like it’s fair game to say that there should be a warning every time someone, a character, smokes on screen? Or, the long ad that happens before…

Mera mann karta hai main jaa kar parda phaad dun (I feel like tearing the curtain). It is so inhuman. It is so stupid. It is so unnecessary. It’s like a fascist thing the health ministry is doing to us, the filmmakers. Because it’s not treated like fine arts, no? It is not treated like (one of the) arts at all. Abhi bhi nautanki tamashe ki tarah liya jaa raha hai cinema ko. (Cinema is still treated like a gimmick). Seriously lete hi nahin hain, kuch bhi ho cinema ke saath yeh kar do. Jaise har cheez film galat kar rahi ho. (They don’t take cinema seriously, whatever be the situation, cinema will be on the receiving end. As if cinema is responsible for everything wrong). Now this is really, really stupid. Isse bura aur kisi filmmaker ke saath ho nahin sakta hai, filmmaking community ke saath isse bura kaam nahin ho sakta hai. (That’s the worst that can happen with any filmmaker, with the filmmaking community). Now they are trying for alcohol also. That anytime if somebody has a drink, that (a warning will appear that) ‘Alcohol is bad’. I think kuch dinon ke baad yeh bhi karna padega ki kuch acchi cheezein jo kha rahe hain ki biscuit khana accha hai. Nimbu toh zada nahin khao (After some days, they will start showing that eating biscuit is healthy; don’t have too much lemon). That was my retaliation when I did the smoking song. That’s the way I retaliated to what they were doing ki zyada nimbu khaane se daant kharaab ho jaate hain magar cigarette peene se aap mar sakte ho (your teeth will be spoiled from a lot of lemons, but cigarettes can kill you). So, it is… I mean, I was feeling frustrated.

Vishal, you are a composer but the trend today is not to have songs as a part… matlab item numbers ho sakte hain, (you can have item numbers though) but songs as part of narrative, in a way they take the story forward, brings out the inner conflict that is becoming… Is that something you would regret if it went out of our cinema entirely?

No, no, I think I would rather like it. Because mostly, songs are not required in our films.

So, then what happens to the rich, absolutely rich treasure of lyric songs woh bhi toh chala jayega na uske saath (even that will go with it)?

Haan toh maybe uske saath non-film music upar ayega jiske liye (So, in that case, the non-film music will shine more), you were regretting. Delhi guys will have much more fun.

Yeah, but I don’t mean to have my life without Sahir Ludhianvi, without Gulzar..

But then Sahir Ludhianvi or Faiz Ahmed Faiz ne kaunse filmon ke gaane likhe? Ghalib ne kaunse filmon ke gaane likhe? Uss waqt toh Ghalib poetry kar rahe the…Toh aur cheezein upar ayengi na? Filmon ki wajah se aur cheezein upar aa hi nahin paati hai na. Film sab kuch apne andar absorb kar leti hain. Aap bahut bade poet hain, apne koi filmon ka gaana likha hai? Nahin likha. Toh aapke upar glamour hi nahin ayega. Dr. Bashir Badr ka naam bhi suna hai kisine, Dr. Bashir Badr jaisa poet nahin hua pichle sau saal mein. (What film songs did Ghalib write? At that time Ghalib was writing poetry. So other things would shine, right? Because of films, other things are not able to come up. Film absorbs everything. You are a renowned poet, have you written any songs for films? No, so you would not be glamorous. No one has heard of Dr. Bashir Badr. A poet like him has not been in our country for 100 years).

You touched upon the cinematographer, what about the editor? What is the balance? What is the secret of that relationship? What is the ideal relationship between an editor and a director? And have you ever found it?

No, I am still finding it. Yeah, editing ka bada hi tricky hai, woh donon hi confuse ho jaate hain aapas mein baat karte karte ki kya theek hai aur kya nahin theek hai. But, I think usme apne gut ke upar jaana chahiye. (Editing is very tricky. A director and an editor often get confused while talking to each other about what’s right and what’s not. So, in that case, one should go by his instinct). Which I will try in my next film. Sometimes it’s not working as a whole story. I mean, you come across with very strange choices when you are going for your final cut. Very strange choices. Some moments you would want that is not adding to the story, so it’s very, very strange, the choices that you have to make. And you would realize your mistakes after six months or one year, like I am realizing about 7 Khoon Maaf.

What would you want in an editor, ideally?

I am telling you it’s a very strange relationship between an editor and a director. But, what I want? That he should not contradict me. He should listen to me whatever I say. Not come with justifiable logics.

Come on! You know you also want that because otherwise you have no counterpoint at all. You are living with one film for so long. Clearly, you haven’t made your wish to Santa Claus about editors yet…

No, I am very happy with the editor I am working with right now, A. Sreekar Prasad. But one thing you hate about editors, when they read the script they don’t realize that it’s not needed. Once you have shot it, they say it’s not needed, so what were you doing? Were you sleeping when reading the script? So, this is one thing I hate about editors. They say it’s not needed. But, you read the script? Yeah. But now it’s not needed, so…

You know Vishal, the way we make political films in India, either it is a backdrop of politics or it’s a moral film disguised as a political film. Do you feel we have a mature political cinema in India? And, what kind of politics woven in cinema attracts you?

We can only make farcical cinema, as far as politics is considered because politics is farce in our country. Either we can make farce or we can make (it) very dark because there is no middle road. Most of the institutions are corrupt. Which good political films we have made? Koi bhi nahin. (Nothing).

What has shaped your politics?

I think social justice. I mean, if you are an artist, you can be an artist only if you are left. If your left is strong, only then you can be an artist, otherwise how will you take the injustice happening in society? If you are taking that, and you are still happy then you are not an artist. And only left provides you that window, which makes you see okay, that’s why you keep reacting with your left.

Why did you take a break from Shakespeare?

Because I am very scared of being slotted in something, and again, you know the fight within me, with myself, why can’t I say original stories? Why can’t I say original stories? For that I tried Kaminey so it’s because of that.

Why did you drop 2 States? You mentioned earlier that there was some opposition, but why did it not work out?

There were many reasons for that. One thing is that Shah Rukh (Khan), he developed cold feet, and then I thought it will be very insensitive of me to go and make this with somebody else. This was the main reason. Because we planned that film together, but then both of us, we thought that…then he thought that he shouldn’t be doing this, then I thought I don’t want to do this.

What attracts you towards romance? How would you like to explore romance? What kind of romance in cinema attracts you and how would you like to explore… Is there any way in which you would like to explore romance in your cinema?

I think the Ijaazat kind of film I want to make, because that is one of the most romantic films ever on Indian screen. Very beautiful film and that went unnoticed. That kind of romance where hawaldar ne ulta ek athanni de kar karke lautaya tha, usme meri ek chavanni padi hai, woh bhejwa do. Mera kuch samaan tumhare paas pada hai wo bhejwa do. I think that is one of the best romantic songs an Indian film has seen.

You know, you have explored your Kusturica’s idiom, your Tarantino kind of medium, (Krzysztof) Kieslowski, where you started off, you have always said that’s one big push you got towards cinema. How would you like to explore that idiom? What is it about that idiom that you would like to explore, if in future?

You know those kind of quiet films he made, which looked quiet on surface but they were screaming from within, that kind of quality of cinema I am really excited to make, and want to explore because Kieslowski’s films had this quality. To explore extraordinary conflict in an ordinary life is the most difficult thing and that’s what Kieslowski did in all his films. You see his (The) Decalogue, you see his (Three Colors:) Blue, White, Red— extraordinary conflicts in ordinary life. Otherwise, it is very difficult to create gangsters, it is very difficult to create politicians, or you know farce, or those kinds of films, very easy to make. But to explore that conflict in normal people, that’s the most important thing.

What is your ambition today as a filmmaker?

To create a very, very honest film, which (it) has always been.

An edited transcript:

Okay, so we are going to start from, obviously the beginning.  You grew up in Bombay?

I did.

What were those times like? When you think back to your childhood, what is it that stands out the most in your memory?

I grew up in a large extended family. Went to an all girl’s school, Queen Mary School next to Kennedy Bridge, and I guess what stands out is that I had a really happy childhood because I had a very large extended family. I am an only child myself but the extended family was pretty large and we did everything together, like large groups going for holidays and everything, so I think that stands out for me.

Did a lot of people live together as well?

Yes. I grew up with my parents, my grandparents, my father’s two brothers. Unmarried brothers.

Okay, okay. So that’s a fairly large group. And you went to college here as well?

I went to Xavier’s (St. Xavier’s College) for a few months and then I got very ill and could not attend college and then applied to a lot of American universities, got admitted and so never went back to Xavier’s.

How did Harvard happen?

Just by chance (laughs ). Fluke. Luck.

Yeah it was undergraduate studies. It was not very common for…

It was not at all common and in those days, you know, no undergraduates went, actually. And everyone severely discouraged me, not my family, but everyone else. The USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services), people who knew, they said, “Don’t be silly, you will never get in.” I just wanted to try and I just tried. I wrote to forty universities; that got narrowed down, down, down and then Harvard was the only one where I got admission as well as a scholarship.

Wow! Not a bad choice.

It was an amazing thing. I still can’t believe it actually, so many years later. I don’t know. It was one of those amazing things.

This was the seventies, right?

This was… yeah… I went in 1975.

What was Harvard like in 1975?

It was kind of… You know, it still had shades of the sixties when I was there, but kind of fading. I was there through the mid-seventies in America and the eighties. The eighties were very much an era of (Margaret) Thatcher and (Ronald) Reagan and all that, so in comparison the seventies were much more like the sixties.

At least the shadow of the sixties. What did you major in?

Literature but did a lot of film and photography courses as well.

Which is also very interesting to me because this is photography, this is not when digitization had come in such a big way. And you were at the centre of lot of intellectual discourse being in Harvard. What were the kind of conversations that were happening around photography, anything that you can remember? I am sure there was a lot going on because that was also the time when someone like Susan Sontag was writing On Photography. On Photography was published, actually, I think in 1975 or 76.

You know I never really took part in any intellectual conversations about photography.

Anything that you remember of how people were thinking of photography then or what was trendy?

What was prevalent in those days, I think, was street photography, documentary photography and it’s something that I also was very interested in and went into as opposed to commercial advertising or things that were set up. Which is also, I think, kind of leftover over of the sixties, because that was what was really prevalent in the sixties as well, that kind of photography. But my photographic education was very different in the sense that I took mostly independent courses so that I could use the facilities and the dark rooms to do my own work and projects. So I was always very…. I did a lot of independent studies which was basically fashioning my own projects and my own courses and I didn’t really learn photography, like, I never really learnt screenwriting. So I approached both of them kind of indirectly. And I was taught photography by a fellow student who was a stringer for The Boston Globe at the time, who was also a student at that time. And he taught me the basics— how to use the camera, how to print etc.

So you took more technical….

I took help for technical stuff and then developed my own kind of style and my own eye. I didn’t really do courses that taught me how to see or what to see.

 What did Harvard leave you with? What was your takeaway from Harvard?

My takeaway was huge. It opened my eyes; it gave me an entire world. It’s impossible, actually, to describe it because I went from Xavier’s to doing one text in an entire year to doing courses like Shakespeare’s tragedies. All his tragedies in one semester, all his romances in the other semester. Three thousand courses to choose from. Every semester you had a week where you could shop for courses— that’s what it was called, it’s still called that. Sort of a mall, you went into lecture halls to see which courses you wanted to take. It was huge— the breadth of knowledge, what you could study, how intensely you could study it. It was really amazing.

What about after Harvard? You stayed on in the US for a bit after Harvard.

Yes. I then went to graduate school at NYU (New York University). I was, actually, at Columbia’s film school but I transferred out to NYU because NYU had a dark room and I did cinema studies at NYU and, again, did a lot of independent courses in the photo department.

Okay. I have read that your decision to come back to India was more an emotional one, but didn’t you want to stay on for a little longer in terms of your work? How did you reach that decision? I read somewhere you quoted, actually, a very beautiful (T.S.) Eliot verse in some interview about coming back, about making a journey and then coming back and discovering a place anew. What were your concerns? Were they purely emotional or were they also professional? I mean, at that time was it easy for someone like you to do what you wanted to do there in the US as well?

See the thing is Mira’s (Nair) father’s nickname for me was ‘rudderless ship’. I had no clear career goals or plans. Itwas purely an emotional decision. I didn’t even know what I was going to do because I graduated in cinema studies. I knew I didn’t want to teach and I didn’t want to be a film critic. Everything I did I did because I wanted to do it. I liked studying films but it had no practical kind of consequence in terms of… and I might add that I only did all that because I was on a scholarship. Had my parents been paying high fees I would have probably been more practical. But I was lucky that I didn’t have to be practical and that I could, actually, follow my heart and do what I wanted, which is what I did. But at the end of those two years I said, “Now what am I going to do?” And so photography was almost… being a professional photographer was almost like a default kind of thing to do.  I love photography, it’s not that I didn’t, but to make it my career was because I didn’t want to teach and I didn’t want to be a critic. And I didn’t think I had the personality to be a filmmaker because at that time I thought, and rightly so, that filmmakers really have to go out there be extroverted, sell themselves, sell their projects, be kind of mini army generals putting together crew, putting together money. I just didn’t feel that I had that kind of personality and photography was just myself with one camera and a few lenses.

Tell me, you didn’t study screen writing, right?

No I didn’t study screen writing.

You mentioned that it was something you taught yourself, like photography in a lot of ways. How did you go about that? Did you read a lot of books on screen writing or…

No, no. Actually I didn’t even know that such a thing like the three act structure exists when I wrote Salaam Bombay!. My education as I said was very indirect but I am glad that it happened that way. For instance, literature taught me a lot of things about character, about point of view, about narrative. Studying films taught me a lot about how you construct a film, how you make a film and photography taught me about the visual world. So I approached screen writing through all those three strands when I wrote Salaam Bombay!.

Did you ever, at some point, go and read the different theories?

I did, and I am so glad that I didn’t start out that way because had I done it I would have not continued; because a lot of them are very confusing and very scary, in a way. Everything is so like, you have to reach your turning point at this page and that and that and that. It was all very complicated so I would not have made it as a screenwriter.

Have you ever referred to any of those theories?

Sometimes when I am stuck, I do but I have never actually gained much from it. Sometimes I wish that I had learnt it that way because sometimes it would be easier rather than trying to forge your own quirky path but it is what it is.

Mississippi Masala and Salaam Bombay!, I want you to talk a little bit about both the processes and how they might have been slightly different. I know that research was involved for both. And the director was the same. So tell me about how the processes were different for you.

Sorry, I will have to think about this because it has been so long… but I suppose when I wrote Mississippi Masala I was one film old but otherwise it was, I think, pretty much the same in the sense that Mira and I were working at it together.  What was really different is that we had this huge star, Denzel (Washington). Sorry, actually there were lots of differences. What was also very different was that I was writing about the African American community and that I felt very responsible about getting it right and very scared about not getting it right. Though having said that, Salaam Bombay!  had the same kind of responsibility of not being part of that world but representing that world and wanting to get it right.

Actually that was my next question. Salaam Bombay!  is based in Bombay but it’s the Bombay right outside where you lived, where you grew up and this is completely different. Is it important for you as a writer to find certain connects to the story you are writing? Even if only in your head?

As a writer you always I think unconsciously or consciously, most often unconsciously, bring your personality and everything into it, into the character.

Of course. So where did you find your points of connects for both these?

With the characters. It would sound strange to say because I am so different from Jay. I am so different from Mina in Mississippi Masala but made her an only child like I am. When you are writing you bring things in from your own life. I think everyone kind of does that.

 Did you work with Mira at the scripting stage, a lot, as well?

You know, we were friends before we started working together.

You guys met at Harvard, right?

Yeah we were both college students there. We were both undergrads there. We both got there, in this near miraculous way and we both couldn’t figure out how we had got there. So there were lots of points of contact, lots of similarities. We shared a lot of things. My process with her is very different than if it was a purely professional kind of thing with a director. We can’t rule out the friendship part of our lives together.

Which is probably the best part. Tell me what the success of Salaam Bombay! meant for you guys. It might have seemed like… you guys did make a great film but it was your first time and it was 25 years ago. How did the Oscar nomination happen?

I don’t know how it happened but it happened. At that time, because I was not a screenwriter and it was my first script, I didn’t really realize the import of what had happened. It didn’t really strike me as how amazing it was. It was fun and it was great but it was not like earth shattering like it would be now; because now I have been in the industry for 25 years, so if an Oscar nomination happened it would be a completely different deal than what it was in those days. In those days also nobody in India knew or cared about the Oscars. So Mira and I were there in L.A. and as Mira jokes, “The Indian government didn’t even send a telegram saying congratulations.” We were completely out there. Nobody knew. They used to broadcast the Oscars on Doordarshan early in the morning. Nobody knew, nobody watched. It is very different now, from when we were there.

How did you process that? How did you guys process that success?

Well, it gave me a career for one thing. Salaam Bombay!  gave me a career. I was always really surprised. I knew it would do well, but not as well as it did.

Salaam Bombay!  also gave you a lot of other things. Lifelong friendships, a lot of people in a production house you guys went on to form, the trust that came out of that. Tell me a little bit about those journeys.

The trust Salaam Baalak Trust is still running very successfully in Bombay and Delhi. Sorry, what else?

The friendships and the production house. Lot of people from the Jigri Dost production house are also from Salaam Bombay!.

Mulchand Dedhia who is the most famous gaffer in India now started out with Salaam Bombay!. A lot of people started out and stayed friends. The late Hassan Kutty became India’s most well known continuity person and assistant director; he started out with Salaam Bombay!.  Lots of friendships— Dinaz Stafford, Anil Tejani. And when Dinaz and I started Jigri Dost Productions to make Little Zizou, my debut film a lot of the same people came on board and that was lovely.

Where did the name come from?

Jigri Dost Productions is actually a name that Mira was thinking of calling her production company; which then became Mirabai Films. I had always remembered it and so when it came time I said this is the name I want.

It’s a lovely name, I am glad you used it. You have worked on two adaptations.

Actually more.

Yeah, but I wanted to compare these two: The Namesake  and Such a Long Journey. Both very popular books, read by lots and lots of people. I just want to understand how both these processes were different. The novels are different essentially.  How are the processes different? How were the challenges different? Did you work with the writer in either?

I didn’t work with the writer in either. Both of them stayed away from the script process and actually went and came down for the filming, for part of it. Jhumpa (Lahiri) was there in the America part of it not the Calcutta part. Both of them were very hands off with the script and I didn’t really work with them at all. Such a Long Journey  was my first adaptation and so I was very, very nervous about it, I had never done it before. It’s a very different book from The Namesake. It is full of incident, detail, plot, character. It is extremely dense and long and rich and amazing.

The Namesake  is almost the polar opposite of that because it’s a very sparse sort of novel. Almost something that would be thought un-filmable.

Absolutely.The Namesake  is much more interior. Though The Namesake  also spans generations and continents.

And journeys.

So they both have a sweep but I remember Such a Long Journey  being much, much harder to kind of condense into a 100 pages. The Namesake  was hard for other reasons. Finding out whose story it was, how to convert something that’s so interior into something that’s exterior, that’s cinematic. So those were the challenges of The Namesake.

Can you remember couple of things you changed for both?

I don’t think I changed much in Such a Long Journey. The Namesake, a couple of scenes were added that were not in the book. One is, after his father dies, Gogol’s father dies, in the film he goes to this barber in a black neighbourhood and gets his head shaved. It’s a lovely scene because Mira put this great rap music over it and then he comes back and at the airport his mother and sister are surprised to see him with his shaved head and his mother says, “You didn’t have to” and he says, “I wanted to.” That scene was new and for me it was a way of showing that he had come round to the Indian side of his life, that he felt a certain regret and a certain kind of… almost feeling guilty about his father’s death because he had not been great to his parents. He had kind of favoured his girlfriend’s parents over his own so that scene was new. I can’t think of what else.

There was a place. You guys changed the place.

Mira wanted to make it New York instead of Boston. Yeah, that was changed. And of course, also she (the character of Ashima Ganguli) is a singer in the film where she is not in the book.

Why was that?

Again Mira wanted it so that we could do things with music and just give her more of a personality rather than just being a housewife.

You studied literature. You are familiar with so many books. Can you, at the top of your head, think of some book that you feel like, ‘That would be a really difficult novel to adapt’?

You know, some novels are really about style, about the way they are written. For example, The God of Small Things. You could make a film of it but you would just be making the plot, you would not be translating the language and so it would not really be a true… it would not really be in the spirit of the book. I think novels where the writing is as important as the story, the way it is written, those are harder to translate.

Can you think of a couple of adaptations that have worked for you, which you haven’t written? Can you think of any that you liked and any one that you feel like was couldn’t live up to the book?

I have seen a lot of adaptations which I think are good films but I haven’t necessarily read the books that they were adapted from. I loved The Last Emperor and I remember actually studying it because I was actually doing Such a Long Journey  at that time and I actually watched that film and tried to study it to see  how they went from past to present etc. I remember really liking that adaptation. Of course Pather Panchali  is one of the most well known and most well beloved adaptations but again I haven’t read the original.

I want to come to Little Zizou, which given that  you felt for the longest time that you did not have the personality of a filmmaker, you started to make a film quite late in your career. What was the first idea, what was the first seed of idea? How did you start with the…

You know I came back from shooting. Not shooting, I came back from visiting the set of The Namesake  and I had some time on my hands and at that time there was a lot going on with fundamentalism around the world and it was (George  W.) Bush’s America— there was Osama (bin Laden) on one side and Bush on the other side. And in my own little Parsi community, there was someone very junior to both of them, trying to aspire to that level. It was out of a sense of frustration at the state of the world that I started on this. I also had never embarked on a Parsi kind of film before because I thought that, you know, the reality could never really match up to whatever I would put on film. But when I started I said, “Hey, you know, actually…” and then I made a list of everyone who could act in this film and there were lots of people at that time and I actually wrote parts for specific actors, including my two kids. I wanted to address this business about patriarchy, about religious fundamentalism. But I wanted to do it with humour and I wanted to make a local tale have universal resonance. So those were the ideas that went into Little Zizou.

You’d already documented your community in a book, which we will come to later. Was this, part of the impulse for this, also a sort of documenting your community or just the ways of your community, not documenting your community itself?

No, no. I don’t think that I think I could have made the story in any other community. The reason I did it in my own was two reasons. One is that I think that basically first you have to look at yourself before you can point fingers at others and secondly, for my first film I wanted something I knew really well in terms of a world. I didn’t have the confidence to make a first film like Mira made Salaam Bombay!  about a world that was actually out of our comfort zone. I didn’t want to do that because I didn’t think that I could. So I stuck to what I knew best, which was this community that I grew up in.

Tell me about where some of the characters came from?

I don’t know actually.

How many of them were amalgamations of people you knew and how many were direct translations of people you knew?

Well, the two antagonists, the newspaper editor and the religious nut were based on real people. My kids, I used a lot of their sibling rivalry and many things that I heard them say and do I put it into the script. Tknow Francorsi, one of the friends, I met him at a party and I loved the way he looked and when I found out he was half Parsi, half Italian that went into the script. The flight sim came out of a real situation, and I am not allowed to say the name but a dear friend had actually made a flight simulator like that. I think what was enjoyed most by the community was watching who was going to come next on screen.

That was practically enjoyed by even Bombayites who are not part of the community.

My husband used to say, because whoever I’d meet I would say, “I am making a film, you ought to be in my film.” My husband Firdaus would say, “Are you crazy? What kind of film are you making? ‘Anyone, come on, come on. Be in my film.’” Anyone and everyone was in it. It was made with a great deal of love by the crew and the cast and it really was a very pleasant and great experience making the film.

What I also found interesting was, Such a Long Journey. I know you didn’t make your films to portray the community in any way or to document the community but how would you say the portrayals of the community were different in Such a Long Journey  and Little Zizou?

For one thing, I think, Such a Long Journey ‘s characters are more middle class. The building and everything is different from Little Zizou. I mean, no one is practicing black magic in Little Zizou . They are listening to ‘Hey Mambo’. Such a Long Journey , the main characters are about a family that has seen better times but are now facing hard times. Little Zizou  is not about hard times, in that sense. It’s more about a psychological hard time that the characters go through. So I think that’s the main difference that I would say.

I want to start talking about the book now. The first question I want to ask you is that, I believe that the exhibition that you are having, an exhibition of your photographs on the community, I believe that your edit for that is slightly different from the book.

Yes it is.

Two things I heard you mention. One is that—but I want you to explain more because I didn’t understand what you meant— that this edit is a little more courageous, if you will. Basically what you said was that you were not afraid of courting controversy with this edit and the other was that you also said that this was more about contextualizing the community in the larger social space, which perhaps the book was not. I wanted you to talk a little about both.

You know, when I did the book there was no visual documentation about the Parsis at all and when I did the book, also the first edition, the kind of issues that are confronting us today were not really at the forefront. So my book was a kind of non controversial document of the community. Also when I did the book I felt responsible to portray not every aspect, but as wide a breadth as I could. My mentor Raghubir Singh who started me on this journey was very eager that I document as much as I could, that I don’t stay in one area, just make it as broad as possible. When I did the exhibition, I was not concerned about representing the community; I just wanted it to be a visual journey. That’s it. So I chose photographs that I liked visually and that I thought would look great on a wall and that I wanted to see blown up. So the show is really a photographer’s show. It’s not really a Parsi photographer’s show. It’s a photographer who photographs Parsis putting up a show. The book is really about the community. It’s not about me, it’s about the community.

Tell me how you started, a little bit on how did the journey begin to…

For the book?

Yeah. For the book.

It began a long time ago when I just came back from NYU. Before that I had come back, I had taken a leave of absence, I’d bought a camera and I was photographing. Among the pictures I took, I took pictures of my family— aunts, uncles, grandparents. I met Raghubir Singh in 1982 and he is the one who saw my pictures and said, “Concentrate on this because you have a feeling, you have unique access etc.” That’s the time when I started out actively working towards the book. Then Salaam Bombay!  happened. I was a screenwriter. Photography kind of took a back seat. I got married and Firdaus, my husband, said—and his name is Firdaus Bativala, he hates it when people call him Firdaus Taraporevala. My husband said, “What are you doing with all this? Do something with it. It’s all going to just catch fungus and disintegrate if you don’t.” So then I started again putting it together and the first edition was published in 2000. Unfortunately, Raghubir Singh passed away a year before and so never saw the book, which I really regret. I hope he can see it from where ever he is because he was a huge, huge help to me.

Of course the access, the feeling is there and all of that but it can be very tricky for an artist to document their own community. It’s so common for photographers now to work with communities, they look for communities to work with. They go out find a community and document them. I am sure you have seen a lot of that work. For example, even someone like Ketaki Sheth, she has done work with the Siddi community. I could think of so many. Karan Kapoor has done work with the Anglo Indian community. How is it tricky in ways for you to be documenting your own community? How did you see your own journey vis-à-vis theirs?

I am just trying to think. I think the tricky part is not the photographing; it’s what you choose to show afterwards. That’s the tricky part.  Because I have such an affectionate feeling for my own community, at heart, I really don’t want to offend anyone or hurt anyone. Other than that, I can’t think of any kind of land mines that I negotiated.

What about the access? You spoke about it, how much access did you get from your own community?

I got fantastic access. Everyone was very warm and welcoming and open.

And you also shot in the Agiarys.

You are allowed to actually, except you are not allowed to shoot the central fire which I didn’t ever do. At that time, I was also allowed to shoot at the Towers of Silence. Now it’s a complete no-no. I would never be allowed.

Why is that?

Now people have become very paranoid about Towers of Silence. It has become a very contentious issue and so now I would never be allowed. There are certain things that have divided the community very bitterly. One is the issue of who is or is not a Parsi, and the other is how we dispose of our departed. These are very emotive issues that people feel very strongly about one way or another.

What about the response from the community? Has it been uniformly…

Even when the book was out, because we are such a… (laughs ) you know we love to fight, we love to argue. So I was expecting anything after the book came out. But I was very pleasantly surprised that it was received so warmly and so well. Same with the exhibition.

Tell me something. What are some of your continuing concerns about the community and would you want to continue to document the community? If yes, in what ways would the journey be different? What else would you like to explore?

You know, I will always continue photographing. Whether it will become anything or not, for my own, for myself I will continue photographing because now I do have a document that spans 35 years so there would be no point to my stopping it. If I continue, it would become even richer. So I will always continue. I don’t know if I will do a book or show or anything else. I might just do it for myself. So that will continue. I don’t think I will make any more movies on Parsis, now I am going to move on.

Tell me something, what has being a writer brought to your photography? Do you feel like it helps you to build a narrative or tell your story, in any way?

No because I don’t do photo stories that well. All my photographs are like single shots but within those single shots, when I first started photographing I did them only for myself. I did these five pictures from India. I had printed them small and I wrote a story around each one of them. It wasn’t a photo story or photo essay. It was a single picture but within that single picture I created a story of the people in that picture. So in that way I can spin stories, imaginative stories of people in photographs. In that way maybe it helped but I don’t know how else.

You actually spoke a little bit about it earlier; how has photography helped in writing? The other way round.

A lot, in terms of screenwriting because it helps me to think visually which I think is essential if you are a screenwriter.

What about film making?

Same. I am not saying cinematography for film and still photography are same. Not at all. I could never operate a film camera but I do know my lenses and I do know what I want it to look like and I do know light and things like that.

How do you edit your work? Your photography work, how do you edit it? Do you take help from other people or do you take opinions from other people for your edits?

I pretty much do it on my own. Though of course Ketaki is a very old friend and a very dear friend, so I show her. I show my husband. But basically on my own. It’s just a question of getting it down, down, down. You start large and then you edit, and it’s smaller and then you edit and it’s smaller. That’s the way I do it. That’s the way I did the show.

Raghubir had a very studied approach to photography whereas someone like Raghu Rai always spoke about it being in the instinct of the moment and being very… where do you stand on this? What is your approach to photography?

I think more instinctual because Raghubir, you are right, it wasn’t a studied approach but Raghubir was very into that you need to know the history of photography, you need to know the traditions, you need to know (André) Kertész, you need to know (Eugène) Atget, you need to know this that and the other. Which I actually kind of glanced through but I don’t know it as well as I should. I instinctively like certain works and I instinctively don’t like certain work. That’s how I approach photography. The work that I instinctively liked very much and still do is the work of (Henri) Cartier-Bresson because for me the way he used the medium, for me, it’s the way… What is so unique about photography for me is that it can really capture a moment in a way that films can’t do and books, words can’t do. So for me that is the joy of photography, is capturing a moment and capturing it and rearranging the world to make it make sense stylistically. All of it comes together to form content, that is what I find exciting about photography.

Other than Bresson who are some of the photographers who have either influenced or..

Robert Frank’s The Americans. (Robert) Doisneau, who again did a lot of street work in Paris. Atget, Kertész, Brassaï. A lot of French photographers.

Have you ever, consciously, paid a tribute to any picture that you really loved or any photographer that you really loved with any of your work? Okay, I will give you an example. A friend of mine who is a photographer, went to shoot a film in Benaras and the first shot that he took was of a boy leaping from…

Like Raghubir?

Yes. So I was wondering if you’ve done tribute somewhere or emulated something.

I am too uneducated to do these tributes (laughs ).

Pictures are for the uneducated really.

Yeah. I would be thrilled if I could actually do a tribute to someone like Bresson, to Raghubir, but the situation hasn’t arisen.

I wanted you to name a couple of films that have either professionally or, simply, personally really moved you.

All the films of (Federico) Fellini. I saw his films when I was an undergraduate at Harvard and they really spoke to me, they really moved me, they really touched me. The characters I felt I knew, they were like Parsis to me. So, I would say Fellini.

I can see that. Little Zizou  was about your concerns, of course you wanted to speak about the themes of the film, the community which was a second layer. I also felt like—I don’t know if you tried to do that—it was also a sort of portrait of a much lesser seen Bombay, at least to a viewer. I don’t know if that was the intention.

Yes, absolutely it was an intention that these were locations that were usually not seen on film.

Also the locations, which perhaps is great because they’ve been documented. I don’t know long they will look the way they look. You came to Bombay, it was an emotional decision but the city has changed so much in the last 20 odd years. Have you taken well to the way it’s been changing?

Not really. No.

What are your concerns about the city today?

I am concerned that we don’t have any sense of heritage, that we are breaking everything down for money and very soon there is going to be nothing left and these are buildings that once they are gone we are never going to get them back. I think it’s very unfortunate that even the ones that we say are heritage… It’s the most ridiculous thing that you keep a facade and then you will have some skyscraper shooting up from the middle of a beautiful old bungalow, that’s our idea of heritage. Everything is about development and everything is about money and its going to be a horribly ugly city in a very short time if we continue this way.

Do you think its character is changing in other ways as well, not just architecturally or externally but its character is changing internally as well?

I think so. From what I read in the papers, there is horrific stuff going on. I don’t know if it’s just Bombay or all over India. I don’t know, maybe you didn’t read about it when I was growing up but it just seems to be… every day is more horrific than the next in terms of what comes in our newspapers.

But it’s also interesting for us. Do you feel that in the last 20 years or 25 years… has there been any incident that you feel the city has changed around? In the way that 9/11 changed New York, in a lot of ways, not just the fact that the towers are no longer there but it’s a slightly different city.

Of course I think all the bombing and the riots completely changed the character of the city. The city that I grew up in was very different in terms of tolerance. I mean there were riots but now people have really closed themselves into their various communities. I grew up in a different city which was genuinely cosmopolitan, Bombay was.

What endures? What is something that survived through the years in Bombay?

All those gyms at Marine Lines. Parsi Gym, Hindu Gym, Islam Gym, Christian Gym, Catholic Gym.

I don’t know if they are the same anymore but they have survived. Final question— what’s next for you? Are you going to make another film, I know it’s not going to be about Parsis. You said that.

I am hoping to. I’ve been working on something for the past few years but it’s a very large subject, it would be a large film. I want to get the script right before I take it out. So that’s something I am doing. I am also writing something for Mira and an American studio, that I can’t talk about right now.

Have you found the personality of a filmmaker or have things changed?

I think I have adapted the personality to suit my own personality and I have realized that you don’t have to be a certain way to be a film maker, that’s what I have realized.

Also things have changed. A lot has changed for filmmakers. It’s not so difficult anymore.

That’s true. I have certainly become an addicted filmmaker and I certainly want to do it again.

I hope you make a lot of films. Tell me, I know I said that was the last question but I’ll ask you one more, why did you never think of writing a book?

I have thought of it and it’s something I want to do. It’s on my bucket list.

It’s on your bucket list. Will it be fiction or non-fiction?

Fiction. That’s a huge commitment. I don’t know how writers do it, it takes years and you’re completely isolated and you have to have so much confidence in what you are doing. At the end of it, it may never be published. It’s a very courageous thing to do.

But it’s also a fantastic journey. It’s a lonely journey but once you take a few steps, it’s also a fantastic journey. Well, I hope you write that book and make that film. Thank you.

Thank you.

Little Zizou by Sooni Taraporevala is available to watch free online on Hulu

(Geographical limitations apply, not available in the Indian sub-continent)

An edited transcript:

WHAT IS A PRODUCER? 

I’m going to start with asking you how you define the term ‘producer’? Also how has the Indian definition been different from the West and how is it changing now?

Sure. I think the best way to define the term producer, really, is a creative catalyst. I think it’s someone who doesn’t get in there and do the writing or do the directing themselves but ensures that the creative people have got the wherewithal and all the means to do whatever it is that they need to do.

So I’d say that’s probably the best way to define it, you know, someone who makes things happen from the outside rather than sort of, rolling their sleeves up and doing the creative work themselves, but understands creative, has a point of view, has a commercial hat on and a creative hat on, is able to manage relationships, is able to manage crisis, is able to manage situations that need managing so that the creative people can just focus on getting the movie made. And then give the film the platform it deserves, market it and distribute it in the right manner and really take it forward and give it the scale that it deserves. So I think that would be the best way to define a producer.

And how, traditionally, has the definition been different in the West and in India?

I think the term producer in the West really refers to… In India you have got a combination, like we (Studios – Disney UTV) are, of a studio-cum-producer. I mean we’re a little bit of a unique model in that sense, where we’re a production house as well as a studio. Whereas the way it works in the West is really you’ve got individual producers who do the job of, firstly, raising finances, getting the whole creative team together, putting the whole package together of the film, talking to talent, talking to directors, talking to technicians and then going to a studio and selling it to a studio and then working on the best deal possible. That model does exist in India as well. But we follow a model where we produce our own movies and then we go out and market and distribute them. So, effectively, we are the producer as well as the distributor, or the studio. But when we’re doing co-productions with other talent or probably with another producer then it follows pretty much the same model as it is in the West.

Okay. Name three qualities that you think a producer must have.

Perseverance and tenacity. I think that’s one, sort of, joint quality. I mean, each term is different in its own way but it really talks about the same thing, which is going forth and doing what you need to. Also I’d say definitely a creative bent of mind where you’re able to understand creative people and able to understand creative work. And an understanding of the way the commercials (the commercial elements) would work where filmmaking is concerned. So I think it’s really these three things that might define what would make a successful producer.

WHICH FILM TO PRODUCE

How do you pick a script? And what at stage do you usually pick a script? What are the factors? Is trends one of the factors?

You know I think things like trends etc. come into the picture later once you’ve reacted instinctively to a script. I don’t think you can start off reacting to trends. You really react to the creative work. You react to the story. We actually come in early in the process where… I mean, one could be, of course, someone’s done a final screenplay draft and we’re reading it. The other could be that we really like a story, or we’ve read a newspaper article that we really like, there’s just a one line story idea that we really like and then we work with the writer to develop it into a screenplay. So it really depends.

You know, a lot of people have been talking about the aggregator-to-aggregator model. Is that something you guys are using as well? And how do you approach it?

What exactly is… I mean I haven’t heard that term before.

Basically when you pick a portfolio of films rather than picking up one film. Each one sort of feeds of the others, economically.

Right. Well, you know, we actually call it our slate of movies for the year. So when we’re building a slate for a year we’re pretty genre-agnostic. We make romance, comedy, horror, drama, historicals— any sort of film, as long as it’s entertaining and it moves us creatively. Sometimes we’ll go right, sometimes we’ll go wrong, but hopefully we’ll go more right than wrong. So that’s how we define our slate. We don’t define it by budget or genre or star cast or… you know… But we know that we’ll be making approximately 10 to 12 movies a year. We know roughly that maybe four will fall into what you call your ‘tent-pole films’ which are your big ticket productions. Four might be in the medium zone and four in the small zone but we’re pretty flexible about four becoming five or three or whatever. And that’s really how we do it. And then when we are going out on a business to business basis—if you’re going to broadcasters, you’re going to exhibitors, you’re going out to distribute your movie—I think the strength of your slate, as a combined entity, is really what they react to. And they’re like: ‘Okay, I’m getting all this great content from one studio. So obviously the commercial terms that I’ll negotiate with them will be in accordance with understanding that they bring a certain heft year after year.’

Okay. So you’re saying it’s roughly divided into big, medium, small films but you don’t say ‘Maybe this genre or that genre… ‘ Everything else is wide open?

Well we do and there may be a time when we realise that, you know, we don’t have any romantic films in our slate. But we’re not going to make one because we have to. We’re going to make one only if we come across a great script. But we will actively then try to develop one. And if we really like it, then that would be a priority to do. But it’s really defined by the sort of material that we are able to react to and…

So you’re a lot more open. So, for example, if you had already had a horror film and you were more inclined towards a romantic film but you came across a fantastic horror film you would go ahead and make it.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely.

You know, there used to be a way of talking about films which was ‘pre-Friday films’ and ‘post-Friday films’. I’m talking about way back where this depended on whether you could sell the film before it was released or not. Is that an outdated concept? The second question is, of course, the changing equations between distributors and producers and producers, like you said, turning distributors themselves. Of course, there are advantages. You don’t have to undersell, you get a lot more revenue. Are there any cons to it? Is there something to watch out for as well? What are your thoughts on that?

So, to your first question actually, where you talked about the pre-Friday and post-Friday, I wouldn’t quite say it’s an outdated concept. I’d say that probably still exists. You know, stars have a value and at the end of the day if your film is a film with a star, then you’re more likely than not to be able to pre-sell it. If it’s a film without a star and if it’s a high concept movie that is really being made because of your courage of conviction in actually making it then you’re more likely not going to find someone who backs your vision in the way you are backing it and you’ll be out there on that Friday figuring out whether you made the right call or not, not being able to de-risk. But the benefit of being a studio is, like I said, when you’re going out into the market with your slate and you’re going to broadcasters, they’ll invest in your slate of movies. So you might actually be able to de-risk in that sense. But if you’re an individual producer with a smaller film that doesn’t have a star cast you either might have to undersell because someone is only going to react to saying, ‘This is the genre of the movie, this is the director’s track record, your stars don’t have much of a track record. If you want me to buy a pre-release, this is all I can offer you.’ And then you’re probably better off, if you have the ability, financially, to withstand it, to go ahead and take the risk. You have made the movie, right? So you might as well take the risk all the way through.

To your second question, regarding producers turning distributors, the studio model in India used to be around in the twenties and thirties and forties. And after that it got fragmented once again and you had individual directors and then producers for those directors and then 14 distributors across the country paying you an advance so you could get your film made and then… But it has changed over the last decade or 15 years where you had Yash Raj really developing a studio model. You’ve had us developing a studio model and now we’re The Walt Disney company which is a studio. You’ve got Fox, you’ve got Viacom, you’ve got lots of players out there today who are effectively studios. So a few years ago, the fragmented distribution model was undergoing a change because there weren’t that many movies out there for individual distributors to go out and acquire. Having said that, today I think the water’s reached its own level where you’ve got smaller individual distributors in various territories who go out and acquire movies from studios at a price that the studio is happy to dispose it off at, because they’re able to de-risk at that point of time. So I think that’s something that every studio looks at tactically, on every film, where you’ve got a certain estimate of what you’ll do theatrically and if someone’s willing to offer you more than that pre-release you’d rather sell and repent rather than not sell and repent. That’s just the way that I think the studio would look at it.

EXHIBITOR ISSUES

Okay I’m going to talk to you a bit about exhibitors. I will come to the commercial end of it but this is purely on the creative level. How have the attitudes of the exhibitors changed, if at all, when it comes to films? Because, of course, a lot of studios, a lot of production houses, like your own, are making very different kind of films now. In your experience, the exhibitors here, in tier one, tier two cities— how have their attitudes changed? Have they changed enough? Have they kept up with the way production is happening today?

I think the multiplexes are pretty much on the cutting edge of knowing exactly what is going on. I think when it comes to single screens, of course, you have some people who might be old school and might think in a certain manner and some who have moved with the times and digitized their cinemas and are now looking at much more movies being released in their cinemas because of digitization. Whereas earlier, because physical prints were involved, studios or producers had maybe stopped sending physical prints to certain cinemas because the returns from there didn’t justify the cost of the print. So it’s a mix. But, having said that, today 60 percent of your revenue, whatever type of movie it is, is coming from multiplexes across the country. So the term that had been coined a few years ago, that it’s a ‘multiplex film’ is really irrelevant today because every film is a multiplex film in that sense. More than 50 percent of revenue of even a Rowdy Rathore is coming from multiplexes, which means that even your massiest film in that sense is still getting more than half its revenue from the multiplexes.

See that might be for several reasons, which we’ll come to later. One is digitization, which you mentioned. One is, of course, the screen density which is abysmal. But I’m talking about purely on an attitudinal level, on how they perceive cinema. Is that not changing? Because that can be a block in itself.

Well, it’s changing to a certain extent. But having said that, if you’re asking about whether they are open to looking at a smaller film, having reduced ticket prices through the week, being given a platform release and being allowed to grow and therefore being given terms in subsequent weeks which will be equivalent to the previous week’s terms because it’s the first week in that particular centre… things like that haven’t happened and I think you can’t blame them also, to a certain extent, because they’ve invested a lot of capital in building these massive multiplexes. The returns have got to be justified. They’ve got an installed capacity of ‘X’ number of seats and they’ve got to basically juice as much as they can from those seats. Now if they had to do that they would rather give more screens to a bigger film rather than giving it to a smaller film in its fourth week of release where they’re not that sure what’s going to happen. So, I think it’s a bit of chicken and egg and it’s really baby steps we’ll be taking as we go along making cinema like that towards everyone realising that cinema like that can also be commercial— which I think we’ve seen last year. Last year was really quite a watershed year in that sense. And I think it’s going to take its own time. So as long as everyone’s appreciating everyone’s challenges. I think it’s very important to do that because we can bemoan the fact that it’s not happening but the reason we’re able to distribute our films so widely today is because these people have invested hundreds of crores in building these massive multiplexes.

Now coming to the commercial side of it, INOX, PVR, BIG (Cinemas), they own almost 75 percent of the screen space in India today. Is an exhibitor’s strike like what happened in 2009 likely again and how far have the negotiations that happened in 2009 gone?

No I don’t think a situation like that is likely again. I think everyone today is dealing individually. Every studio is dealing individually with every multiplex operator and striking a deal that makes sense for them. I think it’s going to be dictated by supply and demand at the end of the day. And depending on how badly each one needs a deal, as I said, really water is going to find its own level, and a deal will be dictated by one studio talking to one multiplex chain and sort of doing a deal with them.

So you’re saying that this sort of stand-off, which is them versus us, is not likely.

I think it came to a flashpoint at that point of time and then there’s been a cooling off period after that and naturally when there are commercial terms involved there is going to be some friction, right? But that’s in any deal. I think you ultimately realise that they need to screen movies and you need to get your movies screened. So you will reach an understanding.

You know there has been a lot of talk of exhibitors wanting a base revenue of 30-35 percent. Distributors are not very happy with that, nor are producers. So what you’re saying is that this is not going to be a joint struggle anymore? This is more going to end up playing out on an individual level?

I think everyone is going to be negotiating individually with everyone, which is the way it should be in any free market. Really, the intention is not for any one side to join together and cartelise and start negotiating as a group because that’s just not the way it should work in any market dynamic.

And there are pitfalls in that as well. I mean you may be able to pull off a deal that a smaller producer may not be able to pull off. But if you are setting that standard. I mean there can be…

Except that’s the way a free market needs to work.

Sadly, yes.

There’s got to be competition. Otherwise, if you’re talking about everyone coming together every time, then you are talking about two monopolistic entities negotiating with each other which, I think, is against any rules of free market economy. So I think we’re all very clear. Everyone’s got their own scale and based on that scale if you’re able to reach commercial terms which are better than someone else, that’s just how it is.

Okay. Now a lot of exhibitors have also tried to go into production instead of going up. PVR has tried it. BIG has tried it. PVR hasn’t done as well as BIG has. But are tie-ups and consolidations like this the future or do you feel like there could be a stagnation if there is too much of consolidation of power? Maybe it’s too early to tell but…

You know, we haven’t even scratched the surface of how wide we can go with the number of screens in the country. So I think there has been a period of consolidation within the exhibition space but that’s only going to fuel the next level of growth. It has to. And things have to grow from here. And you’ve got other players. You’ve got Cinepolis which has come in and which is also making strides. You’ve got, as you said, you’ve got BIG, you’ve got PVR, you’ve got INOX. You’ve lots of other smaller multiplex players as well. You’ve got a whole plethora of single screens. So the consolidation has happened, there’s no doubt about it. But it’s happened in order for them now to be able to invest in future growth. So I’m pretty bullish about that happening actually.

REGIONAL FILMS

Okay. You know there is a notion that regional films tend to be more experimental. Do you feel one of the reasons is because the production costs are low or that they run longer windows at the box office— perhaps because they can be released in stages as Hindi films used to be released earlier. Do you think any of these factors contribute or do you feel it’s actually maybe not even true that regional films are more experimental?

You know there might be some truth in it when it comes to the more marginalised regional cinema. If you look at the big commercial regional cinemas like Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, they’re doing pretty hardcore commercial cinema and they do have the odd experimental film as we do, but I don’t see that much of a disparity. But I suppose if you’re looking at Bengali cinema, if you’re looking at cinema of that nature which has got a lot of crossover with Hindi cinema… Because you’ve got to look at cultures where Hindi is also a second language. Most Bengalis do also understand Hindi whereas in South India it’s just not where anyone would want to go watch a Hindi movie, because they don’t get the language. They have their own stars, they have their own star system. It’s different. So when that tends to happen, I suppose, the one route that they find they can use for their expression, creatively, is by making something that’s different. Because they are competing with a hardcore commercial Hindi movie which their viewers also want to watch. So if they want to make a Bengali film it’s got to be offering the viewer something different because they can’t offer them Ranbir Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra and Barfi!, right? And that’s a, sort of experimental but commercial Hindi film. So they might as well look at something so unique to their culture and sensibility that people really go and watch it because it’s something that appeals to their regionalism.

DEALING WITH STARS

I want to talk you a little bit about star prices. First question I’m going to ask you here is, how is the balance holding up of the draw that the stars get at the box office today and the kind of prices they command?

Well the draw is huge. I think there is no doubt about that. Stars are very, very important and stars do draw in audiences at the opening weekend, however the film is. Friday, Saturday, to some extent till Sunday, are dictated by star power, and then the film takes over from Monday. So I think that’s the reason they’re paid the fees that they are. Having said that, as I said, last year for example, you saw a lot of films that were star-less that did spectacular business given their budgets. So I think, right now, you’ve got an environment where both sorts of movies are working. If you look at Hollywood, their top 10 movies are without stars but that’s because they are still making massive, million dollar, blockbuster franchise movies. It’s not because they are making experimental cinema or non-commercial cinema without stars. They’re making blockbusters that don’t need stars anymore. I think we’re also going into a phase where we’ll have to both co-exist. You’ll have your big star-studded vehicles and they’re not going anywhere but you’re also going to have a whole different economy of films that are not star dependant, which is great.

In India what do star fees end up depending on? How does it actually work, to whatever extent you can share with us? Does it depend on their last release? Does it depend on the kind of director or producer they are working with?

I think it’s really supply and demand. So if you’ve got 10 saleable stars in the country and you’ve got many studios and producers and they are wanting to make many movies with them. Then there’s limited supply, there is massive demand, and the prices will be what they are and they’ll be dictated primarily by the stars. And obviously it needs to make economic sense in the overall scheme of things but it will be on the higher side. So that is just the way that the star fees are dictated in that sense.

You know there has been a lot of accusation that UTV initially, when they came into the business, they hiked up star prices because they were signing on so many people and they wanted so many. I want to ask you if it is still making economic sense. It’s not a question of are they overcharging or not, but is it affecting the economy in any way? Of course there are quotes from producers saying that almost 35 percent of a film’s cost ends up being star fees. There are also debates about whether they should pay their own staff more etc.— which means prices being hiked. So what I am asking is is it affecting, is it challenging the economy at this point or is it a comfortable balance?

Well I wouldn’t say it’s a very comfortable balance because the fact is that there is a certain value that you have to ascribe if you want to make a film with a star today and that just is what it is. Now the question is whether that’s on the back end, a sharing on the back end and maybe a lower payment upfront, or whether it’s an overall fee and there is no sharing in IP or on the back end. So star prices are definitely pretty high. But it’s interesting because it challenges you then to think of some vehicles with stars and some without. And we still have to make commercial cinema and that’s what I think a lot of us have been doing over the last few years. I mean we’ve made ABCD and Kai Po Che just this year. Both movies released in February. They did spectacular business for films without stars. But we’re also making films with stars, we’ve also made Chennai Express. So it just helps you to have a balanced slate that’s not completely star dependent but accepts that we are a star driven film culture. People love their stars on screen. And if you want to make commercial movies, we have to make some of them with stars.

Sure. That’s a given. That’s a given in any… No, I was just wondering if you feel that the way stars are thinking will also need to change. And I also actually want to do add that…

You know, why should it? If someone is willing to pay them a certain fee, I don’t see why they should change the way they are thinking.

Because of the larger picture? You know everybody is part of the …

I think we’re in a capitalist economy that is dictated by self interest. So at the end of the day everybody is part of the system where they are in it because they have certain ambitions for themselves. And I don’t think any of us are in here for social cause, you know, at the end of the day. So I think it’s fine.

Okay. Stars. You spoke about the back end of paying stars. A lot of stars are becoming producers. Either they are tying up at the back end and co producing a film or they’re turning producers in a full fledged way. Two questions here. One is, is the back end model a good substitute for having to pay upfront fees or is it more of a gamble? Two, do you feel stars bring in value to promoting a film? Say, John Abraham is producing a film which he is not starring in. Does he have an edge over other producers in promoting that film. I mean, is that a…

You know, honestly, Vicky Donor  was such a great film that I think it would have worked regardless.

Yes. Of course.

But John had faith in the film to put his name on it and get the movie made. So he added a tremendous amount of value in just getting the movie made. But, frankly, in the promotions, whether there was a video with John or not, I think would not have been that relevant because the film worked on its own. Now sure, if you’ve got the ability to have a music video with John in it and he’s promoting it, why would you not do it? He’s a producer of the film. Anything that’s going to sell. But honestly, when it comes to promotions for movies where the star’s not in the film, it can help but maybe not all that much. Except with someone like an Aamir Khan where the fact that he’s producing a movie adds so much value to it and so much dignity to it and actually adds a lot of commercial value to the project as well because there’s a certain brand that he’s built that stands for quality. And you always believe that: ‘Okay, if Aamir’s producing this film, we’ve just got to go on that first day.’ But, you know, other than that I think it’s pretty important for stars to back movies. And like if an Akshay Kumar backed an Oh My God! And it was a great thing that he did because honestly the business of that film would probably have been 15 percent lower of he hadn’t been in it. But it would still have been a massive hit.

And the back end thing where …

So back end. I think it’s a good model if the upfront fees actually do come down. I think if the fee is going to be higher and the back end is also going to be there, then it’s a bit of a self-defeating proposition. But I do believe that if someone’s willing to put their neck on the line and say ‘We want to put some skin in the game as well and we’ll be willing to cut our fee and earn from the profit. And we believe so strongly in the movie that we think that we will actually get much more than our fee because it’s going to be a really profitable movie.’ I mean, it’s something that Aamir does, something that Shah Rukh does.

SCREEN DENSITY

Okay now I’m going to come to the screen density. How acute is the shortage? I mean you know the numbers but numbers don’t really explain the on ground reality. It’s around eight screens to one million people as opposed to 117 in the US.

Yeah it’s around 130 screens per million in the US as opposed to 10 screens, 10-12 screens here in India.

And what I also want to ask you is why is the shortage so acute in a country where cinema is perceived widely to be the biggest thing?

I guess we live in so many Indias, right? And we talk about one India and probably this is not… I mean we shouldn’t be looking at screen density here because when you have got such a large proportion of the population below the poverty line I don’t think you can consider them as a denominator in that equation because they’re struggling to just make ends meet. So I think cinema really wouldn’t come into the picture there for them, right? So if you had to look at it that way our screen density is probably higher than is reported because we can’t look at the entire 1.3 billion population. Having said that, even if you look at say half—that are people who can afford a cinema ticket, a really cheap cinema ticket—it would still be abysmally low. It’s not that 3 Idiots  has not been watched by a vast proportion of the population but they’ve watched it on Doordarshan, they’ve watched it on satellite television, they’ve watched a pirated DVD and so on and so forth. So only three crore people have actually watched it in the cinema but a whole lot of people have watched it not in the cinema. A state like UP has a population of 18 crores and they’ve got 150 screens— that’s the sort of disparity in terms of screen availability. So as I said, I don’t think we’ve scratched the surface of that. And we have the burgeoning middle class with everyone getting richer and having more disposable income over the next few years. I do think we need to keep pace with the number of screens we are putting out there too. And as I said, I feel the exhibition sector… usually a market consolidates when it’s reached a certain level of maturity. I don’t believe we’ve reached that level of maturity yet to really talk about consolidation. So one or two players have bought each other and that’s fine. But I do hope that that signals the next phase of growth because it has to.

And I also want to get a sense of… we know, like you agreed, that there aren’t enough screens but I also want a sense of how acute is this problem? How fast does this need to give?

Well, you know what’s happened is that the metros have gotten pretty saturated. So there are many, many screens across your top 15 to 20 to maybe even 35 cities, but after that there is a massive, massive gap. And that’s really that tier two, tier three city that needs to be looked at in the next phase.

Which is what everyone is talking about right now.

Exactly.

Do you feel that that’s just about to happen? That’s just around the corner? Is that also something you guys are gearing up for in some way?

You know, I have to say, I don’t see it around the corner. I don’t think you’ve got players looking at that level of capital investment right now. But I’m hoping that they are bullish enough in the next few years to be looking at that as the next phase of growth because one player buying the other and maybe saturating the metros even more is not going to be an answer.

And everyone does seem to understand that?

Absolutely. I think the exhibition sector is acutely aware of it. It’s just that the economics for them need to work out. I think the real estate business has also been going through a bit of a phase right now where it’s been tough for them to make that investment in places in order for it to be justified in terms of the returns that they are going to be seeing from there. So it’s an interesting time. I’m pretty optimistic about it and I think that we are going to grow. But I can’t say I’m seeing something imminent in the next 12 months or so.

THE MULTIPLEXES

Okay. Multiplexes. Undue focus on multiplexes. I want to get a sense of how much or how that has distorted both the market and the content?

When you say undue focus…

As in, we are depending a lot on revenues from the multiplexes. Like you said, it’s not called a ‘multiplex film’ because every film is a multiplex film. This is a fact we all know but what has been the real import of this? How has it distorted the market or the content in any way?

I guess I think it’s been a positive distortion, if you ask me. The sort of cinema that was not getting backing seven or eight years ago has now gotten the backing because I think studios are seeing that, because of the higher ticket prices in multiplexes and because of the sort of people who are visiting multiplexes, I can make movie that’s maybe rarefied in its sensibility and still expect it to give me returns. So I think it’s actually helped cinema to a very large extent. So I don’t believe a film like Dev D or a film like Kahaani or a film like Gangs of Wasseypur would have gotten made if it wasn’t for studios now seeing that actually even if these massive multitudes don’t start thronging the cinemas, as long as in my key metros I’m able to get the multiplexes at a certain capacity, then I know it’ll pay out if I invest in this movie.

This is great and we’ve all been celebrating this, but isn’t there a sort of danger that the kind of movies… that if the economy is depending too much on multiplexes cinema might stop reaching out to other parts of this country?

See I’ll tell you what, if we’re talking about multiplexes in metros then I would agree with you. But multiplexes exist everywhere. A multiplex is basically more than one screen. Now that can be Bhilai or it can be in Bombay. Actually if you’re asking that if the exhibition sector focuses only on the cities, then there’s going to be less growth? Sure. Yes. There will be. But I’m looking at multiplexes going as far and wide as possible and hopefully looking at no frills options as well where you have a scaled down version of what you would get in a Bombay or a Delhi. It’s still a two or three screen multiplex and you’ve got decent seating and good air-conditioning and good projection and all that but it doesn’t have to be state-of-the-art like some of our cinemas are. But as long as they are looking at penetrating the heart of India, I’m fine with multiplexes going as deep as they can.

DIGITIZATION

Okay, digitization. Both in filmmaking and in distribution. How fast are we moving and are we moving fast enough?

In filmmaking, we’re moving pretty fast. I think most people now look at digital as a first option. It’s faster. You don’t need to light that much as you need to do for film. You don’t need to be obsessive about wasting raw stock. It’s just a great medium to shoot in. I mean as long as the director’s comfortable and the DoP (Director of Photography) is comfortable in that medium, then it’s something that everyone is exploring today. When it comes to distribution I’d give it another year and a half before we may not have a physical print which exists anymore. You might still be making it…

Well, that’s great news.

That’s great news.

Because there was a feeling, at least a year or two ago, that the initial cost might be a deterrent. So people may not have been looking at the larger picture when it came to distribution and when it came to filmmaking also, because they felt they had to sort of…

No, I think cinemas are definitely digitizing really, really fast and it’s happening very, very quickly. So I don’t see that as being something that’ll… It’ll be another nine months to a year and a half away and there might be only 20 physical prints of a massive film that we need to release all across the country.

And filmmakers and DoPs, they’re not worried about… you don’t feel like they are still not creatively hung up on film?

Some of them are. Some are. But if you look at, compared to two years ago, the number of people using digital today has gone up significantly.

Okay. And you feel like it’s keeping pace. That’s actually…

It is keeping pace. I think it’s the responsibility of everybody to really educate each other about the medium and about shooting on digital. Obviously now there is a certain charm to shooting on film and everybody’s going to be feeling that way for a while. As with any new technology that comes into the picture you tend to romanticise the earlier one. But I think as we go forward, I do believe digital will be the medium to shoot in.

CO-PRODUCTION

I want to talk a little bit about co-production. It seems to be picking up. I mean, at least, it seems that most films are co-produced at some level or the other. I want to understand how that works, especially for you guys. How does the revenue sharing happen and at what stage do you guys come in? And why is it so attractive? I think you should start with that.

So, I think, starting with the fact that movie-making is about looking for the next great idea or the next great story. And really, every deal then works its way around that proposition. So if someone comes to you with something superb and you really want to make that movie and it’s going to be… the nature of that deal is going to be a co-production because they are the ones who came to you with it. Then if there’s another production house, or their director, who also has a line production unit, then you are open to it because you want to make a great movie and if the economics work out, you are happy for it to be a co-production. On the other hand if you have got movies that you have developed and incubated yourself, then it’s your own production. So we don’t like to stymie our growth by saying we’ll only look at one model because ultimately we’re all in the search for great stories to tell. And if they are coming from a prospective co-producer, why not?

And you haven’t developed any sort of working model or formula for yourself that… you’re just open to whoever is coming in, at whichever stage the film is in?

Well, we prefer to be involved very early because I think the idea really is that we do want to add value to the creative process in a collaborative manner and in the best way possible.

Say like for a film like Udaan. You guys came in pretty late. I believe the film was offered to you guys in the beginning and then you came in…

Absolutely. Well I’m not aware of it being offered to us in the beginning but I know when I saw the rough cut, I hadn’t read the script before that, and when I saw the rough cut I loved it and we said that we did want to back it immediately. So, yes, that was one film we got involved in on the edit. But there are movies like… I mean Dev D  was our own production but I’m trying to think of an example of a co-production. So, like a film like Delhi Belly. That’s a film that Aamir showed us the script for. We loved the script and said, ‘Absolutely. We’re on.’ And we were on from the start.

And the revenue-sharing, the profit sharing, is there a set way which it works? Or is it like each…

So each deal is different. Each negotiation is different. So it really depends from deal to deal and depending on the deal that you strike with your co-producer. But we have one general template model and then that sort of undergoes modifications, depending on who you are dealing with.

DATA ON CINEMA

I want to talk to you a little bit about the information available. At least to an outsider, there isn’t good information available on how a film has done. You can’t trust the figures that you are reading. Or how much is being spent on a film. Do you guys have all the information that you need or do you guys have to go out and conduct your own survey?

It’s really unfortunate that we don’t have the equivalent of a Rentrak or an A. C. Nielsen in India and hopefully that’ll get corrected in the next few years. And that’s mainly because we’re still a 40 percent single screen market and data from there tends not to be computerised, it tends to come in bits and bobs from here and there. Some of it tends to be understated sometimes but that really depends on who you are dealing with. And no studio is obliged to share their information. Even if they are a public company you are not obliged to share your movie by movie figures with anyone. So people tend not to do that. So when there is this opaqueness involved…

Sorry, so then there is a case to be made for greater sharing at this stage when the industry is evolving.

I think it needs to come the other way around. I don’t think studios are going to do it voluntarily. But if everything is out there and computerised and all your theatrical business is out there on a server because that’s just the way the business has evolved and everything is there to be seen, that I think is the best way for us to go about it. I don’t think anyone is going to obligatorily share their theatrical information if they are not obliged to. But the moment we get into a Nielsen situation or a Rentrak situation where the figures are just available to everyone, that would be a nirvana situation I think for all of us.

AN OPTIMAL RELEASE

This is related to the information question. Have you guys been able to figure out your optimal release? How many screens should you release a film on and what is your maximum? Do you know your optimal or is that being impacted by…

Well, we think we do. We think…You know, it’s been 60 movies in the last seven or eight years. We’ve made mistakes and we’ve done things right as well and I think we’ve come to a really good understanding having mapped out the entire country and having mapped out the cinemas across the country. Which sort of audiences that frequent which cinemas for which type of movie, what our own numbers have been and now we’ve gotten a pretty decent amount of empirical data on our own films, across genres—big star cast, non-star cast—for us to come to an optimal release strategy which I think we’ve been adopting now for the last few years. On a film like Barfi!, for example, I mean a Ranbir Kapoor film can go to 3000 screens today. We decided to go to a thousand and we decided to build capacities, build a word-of-mouth and then go wider. And I think that was a really smart strategy because we didn’t overspend on prints and at the same time we got into situations where the film was housefull. And there is nothing like watching a housefull movie. When you are not able to get tickets it just adds to the word-of-mouth and it builds the interest and excitement around a movie, and then your movie tends to run much longer because of that positive halo around it. So I think we do that from film to film. And on a film like Rowdy Rathore we just went to 3500 screens because that was the nature of the movie. It was a really mass oriented film and we wanted it to go as far and wide as possible. So, yes, I think we do think of optimal release strategies rather than flooding the market with prints.

And you think you’ve built them irrespective of how much of data is available?

Yes, because we have done a lot of competitive mapping as well. I mean, one is obviously looking at every cinema in the country and looking at its capacity and looking at the business that we’re able to get from our own films obviously, as well as the information that is available out there in the market. So mapping that, mapping what other movies have done in the same genre of the movie that we are releasing and, yes, I think from all our trade sources we have managed to get a fair amount of data to take those calls well.

Okay, and what about when to release a film? What are the factors that go into that? I mean, are there seasons for particular films? And, of course, I also want to talk to you about conversations with other producers and distributors to avoid clashes— how is that working? How is that changing?

Well it’s really crucial. It’s one of those five or six really key factors that really affect the success of the movie. And, obviously, seasonality, cricket matches, school holidays, weather, religious festivals, non-festivals, Shraadh, Eid (Ramzan), all those obviously impact your release strategy across the year. Fact is that there are 52 Fridays in a year and you have 250 Hindi movies that will release every year. So there are going to be clashes; you can’t avoid that. But I guess you just have to pick the right dates for your movies and move on. And with the smaller ones you might have to be quite flexible about hopping from one release date to another depending on which other big movies are announcing. But with your bigger ones you tend to lock them in advance and then just not change them because once you’ve decided that’s the right date for your movie then you stick with it.

And are there conversations across platforms? Do you guys also negotiate with other producers and distributors?

Not really.

Or is it just about timing?

We just… yeah. And then I think everyone, if you take ego out of it, I think, everyone realises which film is a bigger film and then takes their own call about whether to clash with it or not. And I think that’s fair. As I said, it’s a free market.

And with the market changing and becoming a free market, are the egos going down as well? Because this used to be quite a major thing, the egos…

Well we’ve taken ego out of our equations completely. I mean we just take a decision based on whether it makes sense for our movie or not. I mean the movie is the most important thing. The movie has to work. Who cares if you’re moving your release date? No one is going to know, except the five people in the trade who are going to talk about you having gotten scared of this bigger film and moving your date. It really makes no difference to anyone. Everyone is finally going to look at the business of that movie and how well it did. And why would you because of your own ego not move a film if it just deserves a better release date? I mean, I can speak for us. We definitely are not in that situation.

HOW TO MARKET A FILM

I want to come to marketing, which is going to be a big section. Again, first I want to begin with information? Do you guys now have really good information on how marketing works and how much you should spend on marketing? Before we come to specific models, how much should you spend on marketing overall?

We have a really good sense of how much we should rationally be spending on marketing. What tends to happen is as you go into the media noise corridor two months before your release and you are competing pretty aggressively with maybe 15 other movies that are all shouting out at the same time, and not just competing with them but competing with all the other brand messages that are going on around you plus a fragmentation of media that has happened, you tend to have to attribute a little bit more to your marketing budget just based on… Say rationally I know should be spending this but I do need to shout out a little bit louder— that might on paper not make sense because I’m hitting my reach and my frequency parameters on my media plan. But I do need to shout out a little bit more, purely so that I can project my movie bigger.

And do you tend to use a lot of pre-release surveys to see how much information is available…

We do. We track our movies very, very closely. So we’ve got… we have a weekly tracking mechanism where we know how we’re doing on buzz and interest and on desire to see.

So basically what are the surveys? Are they talking to people and trying to figure how much they are aware of the film and how excited they are about the film?

Yeah. Yup. So you’ve got a many city survey that happens weekly where you talk to frequent moviegoers. So you should be someone who watches at least a movie a month in a cinema hall and you’re asked about spontaneously which are the movies you want to watch. So the movies that come to your mind are ones that you are not being goaded into answering about. And then you ask in an aided manner— ‘Have you heard of these films as well?’ and then you see what the responses are on that. And you ask about excitement to watch the film, whether you would go on an opening weekend or you’re going to wait to hear what people have to tell you and so on and so forth. There are five or six parameters that we look at. Each one gives you an indication of how well you are doing. So you might be high on the awareness of the film because you’ve managed to communicate your message to everyone but no one’s really that excited about it. Then you realise that your creative isn’t working. The people have seen it but they are like ‘Yeah, okay. I’m going to take my chances and go later.’ So then you need to build that. Or you might be really high on excitement with the people you have managed to reach but you haven’t managed to reach too many people, in which case you need to be able to take your media plan wider. So those are things that we are tracking everyday actually but we get a weekly report card on how we are doing and how everyone else is doing as well.

What are the big marketing trends right now? Is one of the trends spending lesser on big films with what happened on a film like Ra.One? So much money spent on the publicity. So much publicity that there is large section of people who believe that that is what worked against the film. Is that one of the trends? And, of course, I’ll come to the second trend which is bigger marketing for a smaller budget film— the Vicky Donor, English, Vinglish  kind of thing.

Sure. I don’t think there is a trend of spending less on bigger films. I have to be honest. I don’t think anyone’s doing that because I think the simple logic that a studio or producer would use is that: ‘I’ve spent 50 crores making this movie. Now am I going to scrimp on that final two more crores?’ Because in any case, there is a certain basic marketing budget that you need to spend and then it’s about, incrementally, to shout that much louder, it’ll probably take a couple of more crores or three crores to do that. So am I going to scrimp at that last stage or do I just ensure that the entire investment is not contingent on me being miserly about that last mile?

But again, it is about optimisation, not maximisation.

You’re absolutely right about that. I think what tends to happen is that you might believe that you’re optimised in your own environment but you have to realise that you’re dealing with people who are subjected to multiple messages every day. So you might think that you’re optimally reaching them with your message the right number of times but you need to look at the competitive subset that you are in. And the right number of times might not be the right number of times relative to the way someone else is reaching them.

So, I mean I know these are not your productions, that you are not qualified to comment beyond a point, but what could be your learning from something like Ra.One?

I think my learning ultimately would be that the film has to work. You can over hype and it can live up to that hype and there is nothing wrong with that. Or you can over hype a film and it doesn’t live up to that hype and then people are disappointed. But if a film works, then the marketing works. A film doesn’t work, then frankly everything is going to be seen in retrospect as, ‘Oh okay, they over hyped it and it didn’t work.’ But finally, you aren’t talking about a detergent, right? Which, if you do a blind test with someone with two beverages or two detergents, it’s all about the branding that you have created around it and frankly they might not see the difference in when they are using it. But a film is something that they are going to be going out there to experience. So it’s that much more important for them to really feel that your marketing has really lived up to your promise.

So you’re saying this is not so much about strategy as about the brass tacks of a film. Because I know Don 2 followed closely on the heels of that and they really cut down on the publicity of that because they were afraid of what happened with Ra.One. But you’re feeling that that kind of reaction is not really…

You know I can’t comment on what they did because I was not privy to it but I have to say… See each film is an entity on its own and you need to market it. I mean we’re very careful about the softer issues rather than how much we’re spending and the media plan. All that obviously will follow. But what are we trying to position the film as? What is the tonality that we’re using? The medium is the message also. Which medium are we using? Are we using social media more? Are we using TV more? Because, what type of movie is it? Things like that are very important to us and we need to stay true to the film while obviously emphasising all the great things about the movie. But it can’t be something so divorced from the film that there is a mismatch or a dissonance when you are watching it. That I think is the most important thing that we have learnt over the years.

And I want to talk a little bit about, again, one big trend that has been talked about in the market which is taking smaller budget films, spending a lot more, more than the cost of the film almost, on the marketing. How is that working out? Is that something that is working well? Or do you feel that it’s just a balance that has been reached for now and, maybe that also will start shifting? Maybe you won’t need to spend so much on marketing a Vicky Donor once people start to naturally gravitate towards films like this?

You know, honestly, I think you need to back a small film really aggressively, if you’ve made it. Because, ultimately, you’re making it because you believe it can work. And if you’re going to finally then not give it the promotion it deserves because it’s not a big film… you could have made a film for four crores and a film for 40 crores, that doesn’t mean the marketing budget of that film will be one-tenth that one because then you’d just be not serving the film that you’ve made at all. I’d say that there is bare minimum today that you need to do for every film below which you are just not going to be heard at all in the system. And that’s just how it is. And that can be significantly higher than the budget of your film in the first place but you’ve got to factor that in when you are making the film to start with. Which is why you have to be so careful when making a smaller film because you are completely reliant on the quality of the film. You’re not going to be able to pre-sell. You are not going to be able to get that opening weekend easily. So it’s really all about the movie at the end of it. And then you better market it as well as you can in order to ensure that people know about it and come and watch it. So it’s crucial, I think.

Again, opening weekend. Lot of focus. Much higher than it used to be in the last couple of decades. Is that skewing the trade in any way? Number one. Number two, is a Sholay  possible in this climate at all?

A film that will run for seven years?

No. A film that would pick up so slowly, almost being on the verge of declared a flop and then go on to become… (one of the biggest grossers of all time).

It’s tough. It’s tough. Because that’s just not the dynamic that exists today. I mean, you have social media today where the verdict is pronounced pretty much on Twitter by Friday evening. You’ve got the number of screens that you are releasing your movie in because you are also combating piracy and you want to ensure that you’re as widely seen as possible so that you don’t succumb to piracy. All of this just dictates that, by that Monday, the verdict is out and everyone’s… all the thought leaders have watched the film. If it’s a smaller film then it’s very important what the critics have to say about it. With a bigger film sometimes it’s irrelevant, sometimes it is. But a Sholay  is pretty difficult. I mean a film that’s not… you won’t get shows the next weekend if by Monday you haven’t performed and by Tuesday the exhibitors need to decide on the showcasing for the next week, which is how it works.

We’ve been talking about the free market economy. We’ve been talking about the capitalist economy we live in. But business ethics is one question that still holds. So marketing ethics. You spoke about how you market a film. Is that something you guys are grappling with? How you position a film? Or does it not matter? Is any publicity good publicity? How is that working out? That’s one thing. The other thing is, I know that pretty much tough luck would be the answer but where does this leave space for independent cinema? So even though digitization has come in and all of us can potentially make a film but then you stumble at that, ‘I can’t market my film for 30 crores or 40 crores.’ Then what happens? I mean I just want to get a sense of… I mean you might not be able to action anything. You are a part of the market but what are the business ethics that producers should be, or are, grappling with at this point?

You know, I think good business ethics will also mean good business. Honestly, I don’t believe any publicity is good publicity. It’s just not true. Because you can be in the papers everyday and people can be completely turned off what you are saying because you’re saying it in a very aggressive manner or you’re saying it in a way which puts people off or you’re talking about things so unrelated to the movie that it’s not funny. So I think there needs to be one round of questioning from everyone about… because you have got so many different avenues open to you to get your movie spoken about. I think we all need to just sit and introspect a little bit about what is it that we are saying because we can get whatever we say published or we can get it aired. But is that going to really help one more person say, ‘Oh, because I’ve seen (or read) that, I must go watch the movie on Friday’? I’m not so sure. So I think good business ethics really is about promoting your film for the film it is. And really if there is any way to get the message of the film across or the ethos of the film across in a way that’s going to help you on that weekend that’s good marketing ethics because then you’re really telling people the best part about the movie that you want them to watch. When it comes to independent cinema, I have to say we use this term independent cinema in India but it’s a bit of a misnomer because we’ve taken one term from the West and used it here.

You know what I’m talking about.

Every film’s been… they’ve all been backed by studios. You talk about any film that’s managed to get a release it’s been a studio film. So starting from our movies, from Khosla ka Ghosla  to Aamir  to a Dev D  to A Wednesday  to Mumbai Meri Jaan  to Udaan  to Kai Po Che, you know, any of these movies, they’ve been backed by studios so they’re not really independent. I think if you’re talking about really experimental stuff, stuff that’s so rarefied that it would really be a South Bombay, South Delhi, Bangalore, Calcutta experience… I think going to the exhibitors directly might be the best and tying up with an exhibitor and getting them to showcase the film in a way that they talk to their patrons about it. You trailer it there… (in those cinemas). I think one has to look at those ways. If you don’t want to go the studio route, which is perfectly legitimate, you go to an exhibitor directly.

So you’re talking about more local economies…

Because I’m assuming a movie like that might not be able to afford a budget to be on television. You might not be able to spend on television and be able to promote your movie in that medium. Trailering is much cheaper and it gives across the whole… you can do a two and a half minute, a three minute. It really communicates what the movie is about. So ensure that you do a fair amount of trailering. Go to one exhibitor probably, who’s got nationwide presence and do an exclusive date with them where they can give you one show per screen and then if it grows, it grows. It’s not easy and that’s just the environment that we’re in.

Any other things that you feel that everybody across the board needs to introspect about when it comes to business ethics and how they are shaping the market, overall, for the movies?

I think that the way the television industries were told to have their own standards and practices body and it doesn’t undergo certification or censorship. I mean a lot of us believe that there is regressive content on television and blah blah blah. It is not monitored by a government body at all. It’s just there and if you’ve got grievance with it you can contact someone and you can have yourself heard. I really hope that we can move into that for cinema as well. Just because we’re a more high profile medium doesn’t mean that we need to be subjected to certain certifications. I’m sure if everyone is just told to have their own models of standards and practices the way the broadcasters do, then they will get more responsible. If you just impose a responsibility on the person themselves to take that call then I suspect it’ll be a much healthier environment for us to be in. I don’t see that happening any time soon but…

CENSORSHIP

Actually that was going to be a later question but I’m going to ask it now because we’ve brought this up. There has been a lot of talk about moving into a system where movies are certified according to them being suitable for ages above 12, 15, 18…  A lot of filmmakers have not responded very well to that at all because they feel like that will cut down on the audience. Does that affect producers at all? Is that something that you’re concerned with?

Not if the guidelines are really cast in stone and are very clear, like probably the BBFC guidelines are in the UK where it’s very specific what is 12, what is 15 and what is 18. If it becomes arbitrary and really something so subjective that any individual body watching it can decide on that, then it will lead to even more chaos. Then I’d rather stick to what we have right now which is U/A, A and U because there at least you’ve got the three broad parameters and now through trial and error I think we generally know which direction we’re heading when we’re making a film. So if we impose a new certification there has got to be very, very clear guidelines. Having said that I think I have to say I think the Censor Board, which likes to be called the Certification Board, because they’re not the Censor Board, has made quite a few strides in the last few years and you have to hand it to them. They are not in an easy situation. They are having to deal with any fringe group coming and protesting, going to the MIB (Ministry of Information and Broadcasting) and the MIB clamping down on them because they passed the movie. And at the same time, they’ve got to deal with the irate fraternity which is always questioning things and trying to push the boundaries. So, they’re in a tricky situation purely because they’ve been, the way that they’ve been legislated as a body. Having said that, I do believe that we need to be more progressive, even more progressive than we are right now. And I think we need to accept that if you’re giving someone the right to vote, they should have the right to watch what they want to watch. If they can elect their own government, they should be able to watch a movie and decide whether they wanted to watch it or not. If there is something misogynistic in the film, something that is just beyond the bounds of what is permissible in a society, that’s something that one should be looking at. But, really, I think we’re in a situation now where we should be able to watch a film we want to see considering you can watch whatever you want on the internet and that’s completely free.

THE OVERSEAS MARKET

Okay, in the nineties, there was this whole conversation about the NRI film and the NRI markets to the extent that there seemed to be such a great discovery of that market that it started to dictate content in a lot of ways. Has that balance been restored or is that focus still pretty much there? How much are we depending on overseas markets right now?

You know the overseas market for a small film is pretty much non-existent because you’re talking about the diaspora. You’re talking about the 30 million South Asians overseas and trying to reach out to them. For a big film, it would probably be 10% of your overall revenue, which is significant, but when you compare it to domestic theatrical which is 50-60%, it’s a small part. So I’d say we’re probably you know… it was an interesting new phenomenon in the nineties because it had opened up as a market and therefore it was being spoken about. Now you have reached a steady state of that being the contribution. You’re dealing with rampant piracy, especially overseas where you have got massive bandwidths where people can access movies and sort of download them really fast and you’ve got your movie available on Friday evening on a bit torrent site regardless of what sort of movie you’ve made. So you’re combating massive piracy and the fact that you still have a worldwide release of only 500 screens for 30 million people and they’re going to want to watch a Hindi film because they are as movie obsessed as their brethren here and they’re going to go online and download it. Because you’re not giving them a legitimate way to see it. You also can’t have it available legitimately online on the day and date of the release because that is just not something the exhibitors will accept. So it’s a bit of a chicken and egg overseas where we haven’t, again, scratched the surface of that market. But till we enter new markets at least through, maybe through free-to-air television and get our movies shown there and then move on to other platforms and then to theatrical, it’s going to be a slow process. But it’s something.

Are they any new emerging NRI overseas markets? Which ones are the biggest ones right now?

There is… you’ve got the usual suspects. There is the US, there’s UK, there’s Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Gulf. Those are your key markets, that comprises maybe 80-90% of your total revenue. South America we have not ventured into at all. We’ve released a couple of movies in Brazil and Peru but that’s really a one-off and depending on if you’ve found the right film that the distributor wants to distribute. Africa is pretty unexplored other than South Africa and maybe a few other markets.

But that is a huge potential isn’t it?

Massive. Massive potential.

Africa, yeah.

It’s a bit of a function of the economy there also where the whole went into a depression and therefore the exhibition sector suffered, movie prices went down by one-fifth. Europe, again, is important. France, Germany, a lot of the Eastern-European countries. Then down in the Mediterranean you’ve got Turkey, you’ve got interesting markets where you’ve a got a South Asian diaspora. Russia is another market which has been largely unexploited since the fifties and the sixties. Japan, Taiwan, Korea, these are markets where we are releasing our movies much more. China, of course, suffers from regulations about a certain number of movies that can be released. Then the South Asian markets of course, massive South Asian population, we know that but not as widely exploited as it can be. So there’s a lot of work ahead.

Very diverse markets, so you can’t answer it in a holistic way but some key ways in which the marketing differs for overseas market than it does here?

A lot of online. We use online quite extensively because that’s where our people are and we can’t afford mass media for those markets. We use a lot of localised platforms. So local radio stations, local newspapers for the South Asian population, local television stations and we go into catchment areas. So we know there are certain catchment areas where, you know, there are South Asian populations existing— leaflets and flyers and door-to-door marketing.

What about non-NRI overseas market? Where are we on that?

Nowhere, honestly. I don’t think Indian cinema has really crossed over at all. Some of our movies are watched a little more widely than others. We probably have some directors who are known within a certain section of those who watch world cinema but honestly I don’t think we’ve really made too much progress.

But which way does the progress need to happen? Do films need to get up to par? Do we need to be making enough films? Or do you feel like you need to start exploring exhibition possibilities and then create awareness?

It’s a combination of both and I guess we’ve tried it with some movies. It’s debatable whether they were the right movies or the wrong movies. With a film like Peepli Live  which we believed was a satire, it has some resonance in terms of being able to reflect what’s going on in India, is tongue-in-cheek, but might be appreciated by a world cinema audience. We did a delayed release in the UK but probably it was too delayed which is why it didn’t work as well as it could have. It worked well but not as well as we would have liked it to. With films like Barfi! we are entering into markets like Japan, like Korea, like Taiwan, like Turkey where the film is going to be watched by an audience broader than just the Indian audience. So there is progress being made but it’s really negligible when you look at the overall revenues of the movie right now. So we’re doing it for our movies but we haven’t had that one massive crossover hit like a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was for Taiwan. We’ve just not had that.

Okay, now that Disney has tied up with UTV, acquired UTV what potential new avenues, what possibilities, are you looking at whether or not you end up exploring them?

It’s a huge, huge, huge opportunity.

Tell me some of the possibilities that are on the table right now.

One is the distribution, just tapping into the global Disney distribution system, which we’re doing very actively right now. And, I mean one doesn’t want to speak too early and we just want the results to show but that’s something that we are looking at very actively, getting our movies distributed as widely as we can using that infrastructure. And two is obviously creating franchises here in India. We haven’t really had Indian franchises yet. We’ve had sequels but a franchise is something that goes beyond a movie and that goes beyond the ancillary rights around a movie. It goes into other spheres altogether. We haven’t had that yet in India and I think we’re ripe for it now. So using the Disney creative learnings across the last 80 years and to begin to tap into that.

Are there also conversations about the kind of films that you are producing? You know we still primarily make movies for our market and the South Asian population. So is there more of a chance of making films that might work across the board? For the lack of a better example, a Slumdog Millionaire, is that possibility very…

You know I think you need to root a movie somewhere.  Slumdog Millionaire  didn’t work in India and it was obvious why. It didn’t speak about the country as we know it and therefore we rejected it as an audience but obviously it did gangbusters business everywhere else. We’re looking at movies that work for India. We’re very clear about our objective. We want to make Indian movies that work for our people. Now if by their very nature they transcend just a South Asian population and are able to go wider? We’d always have an eye on that, that’s something we will look at. But it’s really important to root a film and know who you are making it for. And if you’re working with filmmakers who have a sensibility, just naturally, where the grammar of their cinema is, and it will travel, that’s great.

SURVEY BASED FILMMAKING

We spoke about surveys earlier. There are a whole lot of other kind of surveys being commissioned. There are surveys being commissioned at the development stage, before a film, to kind of try to figure out what kind of films to make. Then of course during the making of the film. Now that is something that intrigues me. We’ve heard of instances where even with something say like Oh My God!  there was a survey and people saying “Oh, we want to see god as god.” (They wanted to see Akshay Kumar, playing Krishna, dressed as Krishna was depicted in mythological and religious portraits. And so he was dressed like this in a climactic scene.) and therefore there are changes made… So where are you guys with that? Is there a conversation about where to draw the line because, like you said, that if you start influencing creatives enough… It’s also important for the creative industry to grow on its own. So what is the tricky balance with that?

I think Steve Jobs said something really interesting once, he said that research is all fine but someone’s not going to be able to tell you what they want till they get it. Because if you want to give them something new, they’re not going to be able to tell you what that something new is. When you give it to them, that’s when they are going to say: ‘Wow! I can’t do without this anymore.’ Right? So I doubt that anything breakthrough or path-breaking creatively is going to come purely out of research, right? Having said that, if you immerse yourself a little bit in just trends and what’s going on, in lingo, just understanding new interesting things happening in society and just keeping your ear open and eyes open to reading more about it, just interacting with people a bit more and that sparks a creative thought, I think that’s the most important research a creative person can do. Right? But the ideation of that insight to the story that really needs to come from there. I think it’s really important.

But I was talking about the surveys that are being commissioned by producers while the film is being…

I can speak for what we do. We’ve tried script research before. It hasn’t quite worked because I think it’s very difficult for an audience to envision a film the way that the director is envisioning it. It’s not their job to do so. Where research comes into play for us really, in the filmmaking process, is at the rough cut stage where we have a director who we’re creatively collaborating with who also buys into it. And we say, “We all have certain views about the film. Let’s just show it to people.” And here I’m not talking about friends from the industry, trade etc. because then everyone is a little tricky about giving their honest opinion. I’m talking about proper structured research where you have 20 people who represent the rough target audience and they just watch the film and they have a chat with a moderator after that. And the director is sitting in another room and just watching it on a close-circuit television and ten things might come out of there. We do it across various cities. Not that we learn what to discard and what to take on because people can have very individual, very subjective opinions on something that is not relevant, but maybe two or three very important themes are coming through about the beginning of the film, about the character and about a certain motivation and about the end. Those are the things on which we then sit and we have really important discussions.

What are the things that you are likely to more do it for? Are you likely to more do it for, say, genre films because that’s fairly new in India?

We’d like to do it for every film that we’re working on but we’re very sensitive about the people that we’re working with. So if we’re working with a director who is completely closed to it we won’t get very far and we don’t like to exercise final cut because that’s just not the way we like to operate. We want to creatively work with people and we do believe it’s a director’s medium ultimately. So if it’s a director who’s open to feedback and is very happy to get test screenings on board, then that’s something that we would do. But maybe it’s a cut we’ve all watched and we really like the way it is and we decide that actually whatever research tells us this is the movie we’ve made, this is the movie we want to go ahead with— then we take that call. So really there’s nothing that’s cast in stone. I do believe it can’t hurt if there is trust on both sides. The director and producer trust each other enough to know that whatever comes out of it we’re going to sit together and we’re really going to have a proper discussion about it and not get swayed so much that we’re going to take…

So you’re saying that basically it’s just another aid. It’s not something that…

It’s not something that’s going to make or break our decision on the film.

REGIONAL FILMS 2

Fair enough. You guys have made, what, five regional films, backed five regional films last year?

That’s right.

Where is that going? Are you guys looking at making more regional films? Is the concentration, focus more on South India? How is that working out? Is that the way for all distributors, producers to go?

See, I think if you want to be a truly pan-Indian studio then you need to be doing more than just Hindi cinema. I think it’s important. Having said that you also need to accept that you don’t know that sensibility at all. You could make a movie in China for all you know and you know it as much as you know a Tamil film. But you have to learn it and learn it in a systematic manner and first accept that you don’t know anything. And then go in there and start making movies that you sort of believe in, that probably are less risky than the other ones because they’re star driven, they’re proper commercial movies. Some will work, some won’t. But I think the first thing is to just seep yourself into that culture. So we don’t want to spread ourselves too thin. We’re doing Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam… That’s what we’ve started with and for the next couple of years I think we’ll be focusing on that.

And do you have to shift operations in a big way there? Do you need to have a completely…

We have a set-up there already. So we have our head of the South business and he’s got offices cross Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad…

Okay, you will be looking at other regional films? Marathi?

We might. As I said, those regional cinemas that have an overlap with Hindi are ones that are much less lucrative, in a sense, because they are not really cinemas that have potential to grow that much because the same audience is also watching Hindi movies and is quite happy to watch a Hindi movie. The South is interesting because it’s a different audience altogether. Hindi movies just don’t do much business in the South at all. So it’s a different cinema. It’s a different set of stars, it’s a different system, a different operation altogether.

SATELLITE RIGHTS, MUSIC SALES, MERCHANDIZING, LICENSING AND OTHER ALTERNATIVE REVENUE SOURCES

I want to come to satellite rights. There is a lot of talk about how movies are actually sold. And what movies work. And what movies don’t work. When you look into the figures as an outsider, a lot of things don’t make sense. Agent Vinod selling for a lot more than a Kahaani. Or Barfi! not selling as well. All these notions that a thriller does not do as well or this film does not have a ‘repeat value’ or this film does have a ‘repeat value’. How accurate are these surveys, given the TRPs themselves are actually extremely questionable, at least in India? How evolved is the process of selling satellite rights?

So I guess TRPs are questionable but that’s the only benchmark to go by. So that’s what we go by.

But that’s something that needs to change?

Well, the whole broadcasting industry needs to work on that so that’s not something we’re going to worry about. That’s just what we take as the Holy Grail to determine whether a film’s working or not on TV. That’s what the advertiser looks at, that’s how media is bought and so on. Yes it is true that broadcasters have their own theories about which movies are TV friendly and which ones are not and that might not be proportional at all to how they have done theatrically. But that’s just how it is and that’s the environment that you need to work with. So the buyer has the right to have their own theories about what they want to buy.

But are these theories based on any kind of proper…

I have to say they are based on the logic, whether we believe it or not, that movie viewing on television has to be something that you can snack on. You’ve got to be able to watch five minutes, go off somewhere, do something, be okay with two breaks, come back and pick off where you left it. So they tend to believe that action movies and comedy movies tend to work really well. When it’s a drama, when it’s something you need to be very, very compellingly involved in the story with on an ongoing basis, they tend to believe that that’s not something that lends itself to viewing on TV. Now I’m sure they’ve got a lot of studies that they have done to tell them that because obviously they are all very smart people. This really dictates massive budgets for them. So that I think is a theory that they operate on.

And you feel that that is… do you see a lot of acceptance for that theory in your own experience or… ?

Well you don’t have any choice to accept if that is what the buyer believes. That’s what the buyer is going to be paying good money for. And that might in the future dictate the kind of movies that get green-lit too. Because if 30 percent of your revenue is going to be based on satellite television, you’ve got to believe that you’re making cinema that will finally be bought by a channel.

And how big a factor is it for you when you take on a film?

It’s a factor.

Let’s talk about home video quickly because that’s the only market that is dropping. It’s… what? Fifteen percent or negative something? Is that only because of piracy or do you feel also because VoD (Video on Demand) and Direct to Home are catching on? Are they really catching on?

Actually, I think more than VoD and Direct to Home it’s that… One, is, obviously, piracy, two is the fact that a film is going to be available on satellite television pretty quickly and everyone knows that. It’s going to be 60 days, 65 days, before the movie is on a satellite channel and they can watch it for free. If they haven’t watched it before that on a pirated DVD, or if they haven’t watched it in a theatre. So the whole joy of owning a copy of the film is really irrelevant today I think for most people because they can either download it from somewhere or there’ll be some way of watching where they won’t need to own a physical DVD and it’s just become a bit irrelevant to have a physical copy of a film anymore.

Vishwaroopam was released simultaneously.

Actually it didn’t. He wanted to but it didn’t happen.

It didn’t work out? Is that a way to go? Is that something that could…

I don’t think it’s a way to go because it’s just… you won’t be able to release your movie theatrically because exhibitors won’t accept it. So it’s just…

But if you could, hypothetically, convince the exhibitors is that something that could make market sense?

I do believe there is no harm in doing it because I don’t believe that you are going to cannibalise very much at all on your theatrical business. I think someone who wants to watch a film in a cinema hall is still going to go and watch it. Someone who was anyway going to watch it on television later or on home video will access it on VoD. Having said that the exhibitors have a legitimate reason to say, ‘Guys, if you want showcasing in a cinema don’t have it available on another platform the same day that you are giving it to us because we’re just not going to take that.’ And it’s not something that is done anywhere in the world actually. Windows in India are much shorter than anywhere in the world.

PIRACY

Okay. Piracy. There was an anti-piracy cell. A bunch of you producers got together. Has that seen any traction? Has that been able to do anything? What are some of the steps that can be taken even today? Or do you feel that the market needs to just develop around piracy?

Well, the market is developing around piracy. I don’t think anyone is under any illusion that it’ll be stamped out completely. I believe that legislation is going to be the only way to get to make a difference to that. If you’ve got really stringent collective action against the pirate and the person who is going in and accessing content from the pirate, only then are you really going to be able to move forward.

Legislation and implementation, of course.

Absolutely, absolutely.

The cell that you guys set up, has that been able to take any measures? What can producer do themselves?

You do what you can. You’ve got an online anti-piracy agency when you release your film that ensures that take down notices are sent to any website that is pirating your movie. But given the level of proliferation you do your best but you know that it’s never going to be enough. You’ve got codes on every print that you send out so you know from where a print has been pirated. You know from where your movie has been pirated so you can take action against that cinema. The cinema will invariably tell you that it’s not the case, that if it’s a physical print it could have happened on the way. So you’re never going to be able to tell exactly where it happened. The stakes are so high that even if you put a security guard on every print, you know how much they pay and the lure of the sort of money that they would get if they had to go out and pirate that film would be so high that it’s not really going to be worth your while. So there are lots of reasons why you have to accept that you do need to work around piracy and that’s just how it is.

What are the alternative revenue sources that are hot right now? What are you guys talking about? One of the things that you spoke about earlier, licensing, gaming, merchandising, that is still a nascent market in India. One of the questions that I wanted to ask you was: Is that something that needs to develop more India specifically? I mean so far what we have seen is that we’re trying to import it exactly in the way it exists abroad. So if you have an action or sci-fi film in India, you’re going to have an action figure corresponding to that, or whatever, which we don’t make much of. But we might have a different market. Maybe Gangs of Wasseypur could have merchandising around it which is not the kind of film that you will have merchandising for abroad. So is that something you guys are thinking of in a completely different way now?

Very much. And I think it needs to happen with the right movie. Of course gaming we do on a number of our movies already. There are lots of other platforms like your Netflix and Hulu and YouTube and Samsung and various other platforms that we are on today which were non-existent a few years ago. But yes I think merchandising is definitely something that we need to look at much more.

In a different way. I mean I remember, for example, when Hum Aapke Hain Koun released there wasn’t a girl anywhere who didn’t have that green and white disastrous dress that Madhuri (Dixit) wore.

Or the felt cap of Maine Pyar Kiya.

Which is not what how you would think of merchandising abroad.

That just happened organically. It was just that people really wanted it badly. As an organised effort it could have done much more.

But I’m thinking that is the kind of merchandising that might work here much more than a Superman costume?

Absolutely. Absolutely.

What about in-cinema advertising? One does believe that the revenues in India are lower than the revenues that you earn aboard with in-cinema advertising. Is that something that needs to give?

So that’s revenue that goes to the cinema.


Okay. What about radio and music sales? How is that shaping up?

Well it’s shaping up pretty well. Of course, physical sales are pretty much non-existent today. So you’re really looking at digital. Radio and broadcasting as your key drivers as far as music is concerned. And the physical format, in music, is not really something that we look at at all. But music is the best way to promote a movie in India and so we look at it as a marketing tool…

As well as a revenue tool. What are the one or two alternative revenue sources that producers are most… which would you would bet your money on? Which are the ones that are coming up?

I’d say that if 4G is implemented in India the way that it is anticipated, 4G might be a massive source of revenue for studios because there will be a lot of audio-visual content that will be very easily downloadable and accessible. And if you are able to repurpose your catalogue where you are able to provide byte size content for platforms you might be in a really good position there. That’s one. Two is, I think, if you look at the online models today so from a Netflix to a Hulu to a YouTube. These are all models that I think are growing and evolving as we move along and they are new mediums completely. We’ve already got deals in place with most of them and we will continue to do a lot about that in the future.

THE COPYRIGHT ACT

I want to talk a little bit about the latest amendment to the Copyright Act, which gives a lot of people now a right to royalty. Is that something that you guys are concerned about? Have you had a look at the legislation? Are you rethinking your contracts? There is also ambiguity about how much royalty to be paid. So what are your concerns about that amendment?

So I don’t want to get too much into this because it might be something that is subject to litigation in a while etc. so I really don’t want to dwell on that too much. But yes it’s obviously something that we have looked at very, very closely.

And it is a concern?

It is a concern. Absolutely.

What are the concerns? If you can just tell me what is it that is of concern in the…

I do believe we need to look at India as the market that it is rather than ascribing western models of copyright to it. I think you need to look at music in Hindi cinema as a different entity altogether as compared to music that is not commissioned for a particular piece of work, that just stands on its own completely which is an album that someone’s created and sold as a separate album of that artist as against something that is commissioned by a producer to be written for a film to be shot and to be picturised on actors and actresses and then sold as a part of the movie. So I do believe that we’re in a little bit of a different situation here and I think those nuances need to be something that we all consider very carefully before we come to any final conclusion there.

Okay. And the ambiguity. Is that also something that is or that can be…

There is a fair amount of ambiguity which is what we’re all seeking some clarification on.

I don’t know if you are aware of it at all but screenwriters have been talking about a common minimum contract. Is that something that you guys have spoken about or…

No it’s not something that has been spoken about in any official capacity.

THE STATE AND THE NEED TO LOBBY

Fair enough. I want to talk a little bit about what the state can do overall. Of course there is the taxation. Resources and taxation are two main areas that I wanted to ask your opinion on. In taxation, of course, there is talk of entertainment tax being included in the GST. We don’t know if that’ll happen or not. There are discrepancies in the entertainment tax and service tax paid in each state. What are some of the concerns that you guys have? Where do you feel the state can, keeping their concerns in mind, aid the industry in any way at this point?

I think as cultural ambassadors of India in many ways and in many ways as the most public face of India to the world it’s probably important for the government to look at the sector a little bit differently and to look at how they can motivate this sector and how it can be given the impetus to grow. Because we haven’t really reached the stage where the sort of tax structures that are imposed on the industry right now are sustainable for growth in the long run. So I think it’s very important for the sector to be looked at and, frankly, also for us to represent ourselves in the right manner to them as well because I don’t think there has been a very concerted way in the past where we have represented our issues the way that Nasscom does for the IT industry, for example. So that I think is very important. The entire structure of taxation for the entertainment industry needs to be looked at. The other thing of course is piracy and I think legislation is the key role that the government can play in ensuring that piracy is dealt with in a very severe manner where the deterrent is so high that it becomes difficult for people who want to indulge in it. So those are the…

And do you feel like there needs to be a little more organisation in the industry to lobby, for the lack of a better word?

There are organisations. The problem is that there are three or four of them and I think it’s important for us to come under one body that represent the issues of the industry in a professional manner.

BETTER SCRIPTS AND AVOIDING PLAGIARISM

What are the changes that you can think of offhand in the creative… that need to happen in the creative industry which will aid the market at this point? Better scripts maybe, better scriptwriters, more film education, anything that you can think of.

You know there is a lot that studios can do and we’ve spoken about that but definitely the creative community needs to look inward a bit. Because I think the quality of writing that one has been exposed to in the last so many years and the stage at which writers are happy to put that out as their work and really ask someone for an opinion… One might be purely because of the training but I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s a certain amount of laziness in putting in that extra effort and getting it to exactly where it needs to get because I think there is such a dearth of concepts and ideas today that something that is even vaguely interesting can get picked up pretty early on but it’s not been developed into the best that it can be. The studios on the other hand have to ensure that writers aren’t feeling so desperate for their next meal that they feel the need to do that and are feeling more secure in order to focus on the writing. So I think just the quality of writing and the depth and intensity of effort put into a screenplay can change quite a bit.

And you did mention that studios also can do more in terms of allocating funds for research on a script or development.

I think many studios today, us included, are happy to do so. The problem is really the dearth of really great writing talent out there and the dearth of really great ideas out there that are represented in a manner that can pique someone’s interest. So I have to say that there is a massive dearth of talent.

What about, for the lack of a better word, approachability? Because honestly there is a lot of talent out there but one tends to believe that… There are fabulous writers out there. Come to think of it Indian literature today is the hottest property anywhere. There are fabulous writers sitting in Delhi but they are not going to come out here to try and write scripts. Because their whole impression is that: ‘I’m going to have to sit struggling in Versova, in a cafe.’ That’s not something they would do because book advances are so great. So is approachability, talent scouting, a wider reach something that you guys are also…

It’s important. I can’t deny that. Approachability is key. We try to be as transparent and as open as we can but obviously we’re not going to be able to meet everyone who has a great idea. But, yes I think it’s important for studios to be as approachable as they can be. And to actually be going out there to seek out people.

The way we used to plagiarise films in the eighties and the nineties is not how… a lot of things are changing. A lot of people are buying rights to remakes if they want to. Is corporatisation one of the major reasons for that clean up that has happened or is there a greater risk of litigation? Also I want to ask you guys, do you have systems in place to screen content for originality?

We do. Having said that, we might make a slip now and then. If we realise it later on in the process, it’s something that we would definitely look at. Because one couldn’t possibly have watched every film that exists in the world and in world cinema to identify if something has been taken from somewhere. So, but it’s something that we look at very, very carefully. It’s not something that we would accept at all. We do have a system in place where our lawyers get to watch a rough cut at some stage to give us feedback on potential issues that might come up later. But there is a lot of frivolous litigation as well, and we just assume there will be. With every film we allocate a certain budget to that because we know that that is something that is going to happen.

FINANCING MODELS

Okay, quickly. The industry status came a while ago. Have the financing models developed as one would have hoped when the industry status was accorded to films? And what is currently the prime source of financing? I mean public listing is one of them. I believe UTV has been delisted now.

It is part of The Walt Disney Company now.

But you guys had gone public earlier. What other organised funding? Venture capitalists…

Well, you have all your studios in the game today so they (films) are all privately funded by studios. You’ve got banks willing to offer, to credible production houses, loans at pretty decent rates of interest. So it’s fine now I think. If you want to raise finance for a film, and you want to do it through legitimate means, there are many legitimate means open to you.

You’re saying there are enough legitimate means that are available?

One is obviously going to the studio. Two is going to a bank and raising funding based on your credentials and based on your pedigree obviously. If you are a credible production house today you can raise funding from banks.

RELEASE AGREEMENTS

We touched upon this a little bit earlier. For example when Anurag (Kashyap) spoke about how even though Gangs of Wasseypur was doing well, the minute Ek Tha Tiger  was released Gangs of Wasseypur had to removed from screens. Are there larger agreements that can be worked out with exhibitors so that bigger movies don’t end up swallowing smaller movies?

I don’t think so.

No?

I think that the market is going to dictate that. And I don’t know about this specific example but finally you have to accept the exhibitor is going to be doing the best thing for their business in that week. So if a film is doing well I doubt if it’s going to be taken off screens if there is a big film. It will be accorded a certain number of screens but because there is a big film coming the week after, that is going to come in and take more screens. You just have to be savvy about where you are going to place your movie. If you believe you’re a film that will grow, don’t come one week before Ek Tha Tiger.  It’s a tough one. It is going to be tough.

COST-CONTROL

How are you investing in keeping costs low? I know there are producers who are hiring docket management systems to monitor the per-day costs and stuff like that. Is that a huge priority for you guys right now or do you feel that…

It is a big priority that you just have to do it on an ongoing basis. It’s just part of the deal.

What are some of the ways?

Well we just take on a really good line producer and we monitor the entire process really well. We pre-plan, we do our pre-production pretty meticulously. And that’s the best way to do it really, to just plan well in advance.

WHAT IS A STUDIO?

Final question. You started this conversation with speaking about how studios are coming back after decades. What is new studio system? How is it a sort of hybrid between a corporate and the way studios were thought of traditionally? What is this hybrid?

You know I think the way studios were thought of originally was you’ve got a massive studio lot. So there is a physical studio. You’ve got actors on contract, who work only with you, and you can loan out other studios. You’ve got your physical infrastructure to make movies. Today things are a bit more virtual. So today as a studio you don’t need to necessarily own sound stages. You can get most of your post-production work done outside of you. You don’t need to sign on talent that only works with you. You can choose to do long term deals with certain talent— like directing talent, acting talent. You don’t necessarily need to be… I mean you don’t need to have everything on one lot. It can be done in various places and it can still be all coming in to one studio. So I think the model today is really having creative, production, marketing, distribution, syndication- the whole value chain involved in the making of a movie and then the releasing of the movie can happen in your control, and for you to be responsible for all that but not necessarily having to physically control it.

Okay. And do you guys see yourselves as a studio? Would you say…

Absolutely.

The same model? Okay. That’s it.

Superb.

In keeping with this penchant for referencing and retaining cinematic images, Dodiya’s latest tribute to cinema (a part of the multi-disciplinary project Cinema City— that addresses the relationship between Mumbai and its film industry) has been on Bollywood antagonists, where he juxtaposes iconic old Hindi film villains against signboards for railway stations on the city’s Central Line, which he used to travel on when he went to art school. Ghatkopar, where Dodiya grew up and where his studio is still, has been assigned Pran, his own favourite villain. There is an anomaly in the series. Bindu, the only female antagonist in the series, is juxtaposed against ‘Atul’, a station that is actually not on the Central Line, but somewhere near Gujarat.

Back in Ghatkopar, he lets us into his studio, close to the chawl where he grew up, and settles down amidst scores of stunning collected and created works of art, to talk about his work and cinema’s imprint on it.

An edited transcript:

So before you went to the Sir J. J. School of Art, there was a moment you were considering studying Cinema. Now, you clearly love the movies, ample proof everywhere. You have also called it the ‘complete medium’, quite often. What tilted the scale in favour of studying Art over studying Cinema at that point?

Well, I was very good at drawing and painting and it was very easy to take a paper and start drawing on your small desk. So, I think one of the reasons was that painting was accessible. And I immediately realized… I was looking at lots of movies, and soon I realized that it’s teamwork, you work with many people. And there are instruments, and there are technologies, and there’s chemistry which is involved. And those things— I was a little scared of that. And then I was also aware that it’s an expensive medium, so even to take a simple photograph, you need a camera and, in those days, of course, film was there. So you have to get film, and get it developed and all that. So, in that sense, the painting was the most sort of ‘at hand’ thing. That I can just buy a small notebook and start drawing with a pencil, it was that easy. And I was good at painting also, of course. That’s why I am a painter.

Even possibly, at 11 or 12, you started to think of taking up painting as a career. You grew up in Bombay, in Ghatkopar… It’s interesting to me to try and understand where you were growing up. Was this an option back then? Did too many kids think of becoming a painter, or becoming a writer, or was it a very unconventional choice? Did it come from someone in your family?

No, actually, it was unconventional. It wasn’t easy, even for me. Though my parents were very supportive, but my elder sister insisted that I should go do Architecture, and she insisted that I should take in my 11 standard, instead of History, Geography, and Civics— Maths, Physics, and Chemistry. And I failed twice in my SSC (Secondary School Certificate) due to that. Of course, during those two years, I did a lot of painting, and my father gave me a first class pass, you know, a railway train pass, to go from Ghatkopar to VT (Victoria Terminus, now Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus) so I could have a look at the exhibitions at the Jehangir Art Gallery. The fear was that there is no future in this. There is no one star. At the most you can be a drawing teacher or have the job of a professor in some art school, but otherwise, what about the future, surviving, all those things? So, even the neighbours or relatives would encourage that point, that— ‘Don’t allow him to do painting.’ But then I was so good and I was winning these competitions, awards, and prizes and they realized that there’s so much passion and love I have for painting. So, it was decided that I should be allowed. And, of course, when I failed twice in SSC it was decided that I’m a gone case, and that I should simply do what I really love. And then I joined Sir J.J. School of Art, and then, there, I was like a king— enjoying painting so much. That passion, you know, of those days, till today remains the same. It’s not that now I have achieved, got, everything. It’s not that. That anxiety, that joy, is still there.

That’s terrific. But coming back to art and cinema, other than the obvious what for you are the key similarities and differences between the two mediums. I mean, purely in terms of the expression of each, because obviously, logistically, they are completely different mediums. For example, what does art afford you that cinema would not be able to. And, vice versa. What could perhaps cinema have afforded you as an artist which art cannot?

Yeah, well there are two things. As far as art or painting is concerned, it’s like a one-man-activity in your private space. Andthere’s total freedom. Whatever I want to do. Of course, there are viewers, there are people who look at your work, and your past, and your future and there are a lot of constraints and pressure once you are out there as a professional, but otherwise, basically, essentially, total freedom is there. I don’t have to prove anything to anyone; I just do it for myself. I just do what I really want to do. And no one can dictate to me, guide me. I am not painting for someone so that’s how it starts. And in cinema, first of all, you need a huge amount of finance and someone who puts in that money expects some return and that’s how it starts. But otherwise, for me, cinema is a complete medium, no doubt about it. There are visuals, there are sounds, there’s performance, there’s music, so much to it. And there’s a time span involved in it. So it is something, which is, I think, one of the greatest mediums of the 20^th century. And it engages you immediately. When a viewer goes to the cinema hall or a theatre, watching a movie, within a few minutes, he’s there, forgetting everything. So I think the medium has a profound quality.

You know, from what I understand of your body of work, I would say roughly there are two ways in which cinema has influenced your work. One is, what I would call the indirect influence, which is from watching cinema. You know the craft you have learnt from watching a filmmaker and what he has done with a movie and then translated it in to your own medium. But then that is invisible, indirect. And then there’s a direct influence, where you have referenced cinematic tropes or cinematic images in your artworks. So I want to start talking about the latter first. And my first question would be that, in a world populated with Bollywood images, which have been rehashed as kitschy cool—it has become a trend over the last decade or so—how do you stay inspired to reference Hindi cinema?

Yeah, I mean, see from early days, from when I was born and brought up, here in Ghatkopar actually, the movies were always here. You know, one of my first experiences of… if I have to say which are the first paintings that I saw… One kind would be at home— the earlier images of gods, goddesses, my mother being a very religious person. So they were all those calendars which used to come during Diwali, and they were framed, and they were all up there on the wall. And the second thing was, while going to town, I would see the huge hoardings, the painted ones. Nowadays, we have digitally created hoardings and posters of films. But in those days, there were a few studios where the hoardings or posters were hand painted. So that was my first exposure to art, I would say, or painted images. And I was, you know, quite astonished, quite sort of stunned to see those large, huge hoardings where the heroine is painted in very soft turquoise or emerald colours, and villains, often, with a palette knife, which has a texture. I still remember there was a film called Kuchche Dhaage. It was about the dacoits, with Kabir Bedi and Vinod Khanna—they were the dacoits—and the large heads were painted with a palette knife, with extreme orange and violet thrown on both the sides with green and red. So, you know, I still remember those things. And, would love to see all that. So, that’s how it started.

And I remember, like when, I was in my sixth standard, when I really, passionately began looking at art, drawing, and painting, I think Aradhana came, of Rajesh Khanna, and my God! It was, and it’s sad that last year he passed away, but it was phenomenal. I remember watching his movies, Rajesh Khanna’s films like Aradhana, Do Raaste, Anand and Amar Prem. I have five sisters, and four are elder to me, and they were all fans of Rajesh Khanna, like everyone else. And, to impress my sisters’ friends, all those girls, who used to come home, I would keep on drawing portraits of Rajesh Khanna, one after the other. From whatever magazines used to come at home, or the newspaper ads, so these things were there. And I think much later, when I started… ‘quotations’ and ‘reference’ was always a part of my work. I see all kinds of art and I get engaged with all those, from the early masters to Chinese calligraphy to contemporary art— whatever. And somehow, when I start doing my own work, I immediately, I am reminded of something, and if I am remembering some other artist’s image, I incorporate it. I allow it to be included in my painting. So that was happening—lots of it actually happened, mostly after ’91 or ’92, when I was a French government scholar in Paris and when I returned from Paris—and at one point, I thought: ‘Well, there’s a whole world out there, which I was probably interested in but ignoring in my own eye, which was the popular culture— the calendar art, the element of kitsch in popular art, which is so much a part of our life.’ Particularly if you are living in a suburb like Ghatkopar you are constantly bombarded with these kinds of images, during the festivals, like Diwali or the Ganesh festival. Images that I was not allowing in. And I remember one of the first paintings that I did then, which was called ‘The Bombay Buccaneer’, and it was about myself, holding the gun like in a James Bond pose, and the painting was inspired by a film called Baazigar, with Shah Rukh Khan and two actresses being depicted in his glasses. It was a newspaper ad that I kind of saw, and I did my own version of that depicting my two favourite painters in my glasses and after that I thought, ‘This I should allow’, more and more, and I was enjoying it actually. You know, when I paint a film star and then people recognize it, it’s already an established image, which I am kind of incorporating into my work. But, along with that, I would juxtapose things in such a way that it would create a different meaning all together, all the while retaining the personality of those film stars. For example, I wanted to do for a long time, this series of station signs, and when the Project Cinema City happened, I did this thing. And it’s obvious that cinema is there, and the city is also there. I wanted to create the villains of Bollywood, particularly of the sixties and late fifties, seventies. Now we have different kinds of villains but those were very, very stylized people in the way they would be depicted in those films.

I would interrupt you for a second; I want to talk about this series in some detail. I am going to come to it a little later. You know you said this, that you quote a lot in your work, so, you don’t need to necessarily have an answer to this question, but I would put it to you anyway. Why reference directly? See every art, every piece of writing, comes from somewhere— we are building upon the collective consciousness that we have, the artistic, or the mythological, or whateverthat is. So, invisibly, it’s there, in everything we create and everything we do, but why do you choose to make direct cinematic references in your work? Do you feel like it falls upon the artist to understand and interpret the enormous impact, the monumental impact, cinema has on our culture and psyche, or is there any other reason?

No, I think. Not because the cinema has this, as you said, monumental impact on our psyche. Not for that, but I think, some of the images or even… I often go to the actors whom I depict, whom I admire because I like them. And you know, what I do, as far as painting references are concerned—also the images which I do they are already established, already known—they are things which I like. So, what I used to do as a young boy is just copy a portrait of Van Gogh. You know, that’s how I started. My very first oil painting was a self portrait of Vincent Van Gogh which I attempted, so I think. And there was an immense joy, when I achieved the likeness of a Van Gogh painting in my painting, and I think, somewhere I retain that even today, that when I am coating complex paintings of mine, or maybe these cabinets that you see here, there are lots of Piet Mondrian abstract paintings inside. Actually I still have that same innocent approach— that ‘Oh! It’s so good, and I like it, and I did it for myself’. But of course, along with that, a lot of other things come, and then I noticed while doing that that though the established meaning is there, at the same time sometimes it also gets another meaning, when you put other elements together or juxtapose it with something else. So I think, basically, the images which came, particularly from cinema, they came because of the movies which I enjoy and the stills which are so popular, which people are familiar with. And I think one of the reasons is— the viewer matters to me a lot. You see, often artists are very private people, they just do it in the studio, what they want to do, and it gets exhibited. They are not, maybe for the right reason also, very concerned with how the other people would see it. They say it’s open— what one wants to see, let them see. But in my case, I am really concerned about how people see and how people don’t see a painting— particularly when you are living in a country like India, and a city like Bombay, a suburb like Ghatkopar, in a chawl. I have moved into this studio two to three years back, but where I was born and brought up, the same home in my chawl became my studio for more than 20 years. And, so my neighbours, they were my first viewer, they were the audience who would see me. They would have seen me drawing portraits of Rajesh Khanna as well as creating much more complex works with roller shutters and other stuff, so they were also getting educated with me. Because they were watching my paintings and I would love to share. I love to talk about what I am doing, why I am doing it, and in that context I think, I feel that I want to create something which one should be able to understand or which one should be able to relate to at least. So there are elements, whichare familiar and so the viewers are immediately drawn to those things and along with that I add many other things, which they are not familiar with sometimes.And that creates a sort of a conflict and they want to struggle to understand ‘why’. Why, for instance, do I have in one of my paintings, which is called ‘A Poem of Friends’, a Jayshree T. and an Aruna Irani dancing in a corner and otherwise it is full of text. And then there are two film stars dancing, so I think they immediately get drawn to it and then they try to understand what it all means. So I think how to get people engaged in my work has been my prior concern till today.

So, in a sense, you are saying that, for you, a lot of cinematic references come from a need to stay connected with your first viewers. You know, people who you grew up around. And in a sense also to stay connected with your own self. To start where you started and then take everything along as well but the other thing that I feel you express very well through cinematic references, that comes across really well, is your sense of humour. There’s a little bit of a tongue-in-cheek, there’s a little bit of a wry smile. Would you say that cinematic references are one of your primary, you know, sort of vehicles for a little bit of fun that you have?

Yeah, I think you are right. Whenever I have used particularly Bollywood and film stars or villains there’s been a lot of humour and wit, which is not to say that I am making fun of them, but I think there’s certainly humour in it, some element of tongue-in-cheek, those things are there. But then there are also other references I have from other cinema, like films of Satyajit Ray, (Federico) Fellini, or (Jean-Luc) Godard.

I was going to come to that. You are one of the artists that reference both commercial masala cinema as well as serious cinema. How is your approach to each of these references different?

Of course, the Hindi masala films or popular films were very much there. In Bombay it’s everywhere, at home also. And of course, the radio was very much there with Hindi film songs and the songs that we know from the forties, the fifties, the sixties… they were just amazing. The great musicians, the great singers, the great songwriters… the songs which I still hear. When I am painting, constantly, the songs of Mohammed Rafi and Geeta Dutt are constantly on my music system. But that is one thing. But I think when I saw other films, like regional films in India or not just Hollywood films from the United States but French cinema or German films or Italian films, then I felt that ‘Oh! This is also cinema. But this is so different’, and I must tell you a small… what happened to me when I saw my very first Satyajit Ray film on Doordarshan. It was on a Saturday. The movie was Nayak. And when I saw Nayak, the story goes like the film star is going to get an award in Delhi and he chooses to not fly, but to travel by train and the journalist Sharmila Tagore, the beautiful Sharmila Tagore in that film, they start talking and she wants to take an interview at some point. A station comes, the train stops just outside a small village near Calcutta, and he gets down just to stretch his arms and orders a cup of tea. And he takes in that small cup and as he is about to drink a cup of tea he sees that the journalist is sitting near the window and she’s looking at him. So he just asks in a gesture, whether she would like some, and she says, ‘No’, and that shot, you know, that changed my life, I would say.

What about that shot?

That was so natural, that was so real. I thought this is as if I was there. And it was not just a film; it was like life itself. I mean, this is the way people behave, this is the way people talk, this is the way people make gestures, and, I don’t know, it was probably… it was a kind of evening light, the tonality of the film, the expression of the actors, maybe the shot…whatever. I don’t even remember. Probably the subtitle. I don’t speak Bangla or understand it, but that was a huge impact. After that I had heard of Pather Panchali and the Apu Trilogy, but that was the first film (by Ray) that I saw. And I said this is something, a different kind of a film, and then I wanted to see more and more of that kind of film.

Coming back to your own work, can you tell us by examples how differently you would reference something from serious cinema that stayed with you? Like, if we take something from Charulata and something from popular cinema that you havegrown up listening to and watching, something as a part of all of our collective memories. If by example you could say how differently the references come to your work and what you do with your references, which is different in both the cases?

I think I will have to select the specific paintings. For example, in 1997, or ’95, I think, Sholay was celebrating its 25 years. I did a painting called ‘Gabbar on Gamboge’, which had a chrome yellow background— yellow gamboge. Amjad Khan as Gabbar Singh from Sholay. The story around him, narrated with violent imagery and the skulls, and bones, and other things around. But it was like a strong painting in terms of colour and sound. Like, if the painting is there, no one can miss it. Its brightness and the image was obvious. There I wanted to do this in a certain way. But before I did that painting, just the previous painting was called ‘The Trans Siberian Express for Kajal’, which was the last shot of Apu Trilogy or Apur Sansar, when the father ultimately goes to the boy and he takes him on his shoulders. And Soumitra Chatterjee is on a frontal face and some of the written text comes on screen. And that painting had to do with… the film was made in ’59, and I was born in ’59 and I painted it at the end of the century. And along with that there was another complex world; in fact, Joseph Beuys’ drawing books is here. And the artist Joseph Beuys, the major installation called the ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’, with large granite pieces lying in a gallery studio. I had put all of that in the background and I was just wondering how time has changed, even in art, the artwork was happening in a very different way. I mean, people were familiar with oil in canvas, and sculptures in bronze or marble, but lots of things changed in the last 25 to 30 years, so I was thinking about it and how I myself have changed in all these years. And, probably, the boy who’s there in that film, acting as Kajal, he must be around my age. Of course, a little elder. So I wanted to think about the time— the changing time, and how life gets changed and how in the film that man’s wife suddenly dies during the childbirth and how his life changes. We know the whole story about that particular film, Apur Sansar. So it was a very brown, sepia-tone picture, with imagery from Satyajit Ray’s cinema and the images from Joseph Beuys— the German artist’s works. Each came from absolutely separate kinds of areas. So, that was a different kind of film, but ‘Gabbar on Gamboge’… I enjoyed Sholay a lot. I saw it first day, first show, I remember, ’75, I think. And I saw it at Basant theatre in Chembur. It was a long film and I remember in the interval, people were talking about how Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra, they are fantastic, and Sanjeev Kumar, of course, he is a great actor, but the villain, why, they should have gone for some well known name. And I had gone for the film with my cousin and I was telling him, I think, someone called Amjad Khan— he’s the high point of this movie, he’s going to be a fantastic actor in future, and that’s what happened. So, I remember that. So, I think probably with a popular film like Sholay, and of course we know how popular that film was…

So I think, it was in ’97 when India was celebrating 50 years of its independence and many events were happening. So when I painted ‘Trans Siberian Express for Kajal’ I was asked in Bombay for a show and I said I am going to depict one artist, whom I admire and for that I went to Satyajit Ray’s film. And ‘Gabbar on Gamboge’ was shown in an exhibition in Delhi in the National Gallery of Modern Art, and it was about choosing something from popular cinema. And then I thought of doing something from Sholay and that’s how I did it. And, in the process, I took a challenge. You see one can keep doing serious art and references which are much more serious, either from the art world or from serious cinema. But you know, here, for the first time, my palette was changed completely. I came up with bright colours and garish imagery in my painting, which happened for the first time. Of course, people loved the painting very much. In fact, it’s in a museum in Japan in their collection— the Fukuoka Art Museum. But I think, I feel that I don’t want to be bound or limit myself to one type of work. I keep on changing always. I feel that every time either with my work on watercolour, or work on laminate, or work on shutters or oils, I attempt things differently and I thought, ‘This popular cinema has a lot where I can experiment and explore things in a different way.’ And a very different kind of a genre would come out of this if I try. A different kind of narrative would come about in my painting, and I should do that, because I also like that. It is not necessary that I would sit through the films every time I was watching them at home but, and I must tell you that I really am quite familiar, particularly with the actresses, villains, comedians, heroines, and these were the kinds of things that were quite common in the seventies or eighties. The hero, the heroine, the villain, the character actors, the father, and the mother, and the extras who support them in a different way, like the servants or people who would come and give a cup of tea and things like that. I mean, I know everyone, including the, you know… I can make out by listening to the flute that this is S.D. Burman and not Salil Chowdhury, or I can say this is Sajjad Hussain and not Ghulam Mohammed. I am that good in understanding, the music particularly. So, Madan Mohan and Jaidev, all these people. Actually, there’s a lot of love for films, I must say.

Well, that in itself is a very good reason to keep it alive. But, I also have to ask you, most of the references are from older films. Is that because of nostalgia or because the newer Indian cinema has just not been able to sustain your interest in that way?

Yeah, I must tell you that. I would not say nostalgia because when I was watching those films, even at that time, there were some films that I liked and some films, which I didn’t like. But frankly, say, after 1980 onwards, or maybe in last 20 years, the Hindi films which emerged, I never liked those films really. Very few people, very few, literally like… I want to watch Talaash, say, Aamir Khan’s films. Even the early Aamir Khan films I have not seen, but I think after Lagaan, five or seven films that came in this decade they were all, I thought there is someone who’s thinking or wants to take films to a different level.  So, I think there are very few, whose films I enjoy. Because first of all music has very much been a part of films all these years. And the contemporary film musicians, their music, and the songs— I very rarely like. It’s… yeah, I don’t know, but I tell you one thing that recently, when I saw, which film did I see of his… Anurag Kashyap’s? When I saw his film, Gangs of Wasseypur, the recent one, but the first one… I think, no, I saw it on DVD I think… Black Friday. When I saw that film, initially I said: ‘Okay, the bomb blasts and all those things… ’ But when I saw the way the film moved, the way it travels, and there’s also travelling happening in the film, and I thought this is something interesting. And then I saw Dev. D, and then I saw Gulaal. I said: ‘This is someone who interests me.’ I like the subject matter, the solid performances, the great camera work, and the very unusual take on music— the songs composed are totally different, not the way normal Hindi films would have it, so I think there I felt that there is something. And then of course, I saw both the Gangs of Wasseypurs, and I like his films. He’s good.

I wanted you to tell me a little more about your Charulata images. Again, one of your Ray references, how did that come about?

You know, I actually was doing a series called ‘Saptapadi: Scenes from Marriage’ regardless. There were 24 paintings on laminates and I was doing the readymade laminates, like mica, which already had a pattern on it and I had earlier done works on that medium. Initially, of course, Saptapadi was also a film in Bengali, with Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen. And Scenes From A Marriage, it’s also a film by (Ingmar) Bergman, a very serious film. And I thought I wanted to sort of work on this subject of marriage: man, woman, the husband-wife relationship. And I thought, what would happen, what kind of imagery would come about? And soon I realized that if I take this in a Bergmanian way then it’s going to be very boring and I wouldn’t be able to engage my viewer. And even I would not be able to handle the subject probably or maybe it would become too personal. And if it would become too personal then maybe I would find it difficult to engage my viewer and soon I realized, ‘Okay, create a fiction, create a narrative,’ which is not necessarily a truth, but go to a wide range of images from calendar art to popular films etc. And in that case, I had, of course, three films, with Madhabi Mukherjee, which Satyajit Ray made – Mahanagar, Kapurush, and Charulata. All these films had the wife very much there, the central figure, and a relationship with the husband, or ex-boyfriend. So I thought it would be great to have three paintings called Arati, Karuna, and Charu, these three characters from Ray films. Also, since I like all these films so much. So I basically wanted to do a portrait of Madhabi Mukherjee also. And when I painted ‘Charu’, I thought why not have three other actresses from European cinema, which was anidea that came in the process. And I painted Brigitte Bardot from Godard’s film, Contempt, Jeanne Moreau from La Notte (The Night) by (Michelangelo) Antonioni, and of course, Liv Ullmann from Scenes From A Marriage. And having them together in one picture plane, these four actresses from the four greatest films, according to me, and scenes from those films together in one picture plane would be fantastic to just look at. Beautiful actresses, great actresses, and great films, and I just enjoyed doing that painting. In fact, I kept it for myself. That work is with me in my collection.

Did you ever get a chance to meet Ray?

No, never. I was too young and of course in ’91 and ’92 when I was away in Paris for my scholarship, I think it was the month of May or April (April 23, 1992), he died. And I remember the front page news of every newspaper, ‘The Master is no more’, on TV channels, his interviews, and other films were on. And I noticed, in fact, you know my biggest regret is his movies most of which I now watch on DVDs are rarely shown. Sometimes in a film club screening, but, you know, never screened here. His last film Agantuk was released in Paris then, but it was never released in Bombay. Of course in Calcutta people can see Ray films sometimes but not in Bombay. So that was a big regret.

Would you have liked to meet him and show him some of your work, which references his movies?

When I had my first solo show in ’89, there was a small, tiny catalogue, which I had sent in, to his Calcutta address, but that’s it. Never met him.

But, in any case, like you said, your quotation comes more from love, more than coming from, you know, picking up bits of craft, directly following a path that someone has followed. It comes more from expressing your love for what you do, which also should bring me to the series you did for the ‘Cinema City’, project in 2012 for NGMA. The first thing that of course struck me was you painted the villains and station signage together, and that this is the Central Line that goes from Ghatkopar to Victoria Terminus and it’s interesting how you… if somebody knows Bombay they would know that the Western line is a more ‘heroic’ line and this is the line that gets beaten. So, again, a sense of humour is very visible but how did you allocate the villains to the stations?

Yeah, well, actually long back when I was in the final year at J.J. School of Arts, was when the painting about the Ghatkopar stations signs called ‘Homage to Ghatkopar’ came about, and you would see the actual scale of the canvas and there are two types of signs— one, where the station ends, a long rectangular sort of a thing, and in between you have this metro sign, which is… So, what I did was I went back to the small scale and so when you see this, one of the questions is whether is it a painting or is it a station sign? Because it covers the whole thing. It doesn’t show the tracks or trees or other people or platform, nothing. Just that. You are so close to the whole painting that it’s exactly the station sign, you know, which you see. So, that is one of the questions: Whether is it a painting or is it a painting sign. That’s one thing which I love, that kind of a pictorial puzzle to put in front of my viewer. Second thing, when we were discussing the ‘Cinema City’, it was obvious that it’s a city because the station signs are there, and that too Bombay, and that too the Central Railway line, because Ghatkopar, where I live, that comes on the Central Line and from Ghatkopar to Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, or CST, there are 13 stations, and I added the 14^th one— my name. If you go near Vapi, in Gujarat, there’s a station called, a small town called Atul, where I put Bindu.

But, how did you choose which villains go where? Clearly you have reserved Pran for Ghatkopar, which is artist’s liberty so I guessed you picked the best for Ghatkopar.

Pran is my favourite villain and I have always remained that way. So, I was always clear that I would like to have Pran on Ghatkopar.

And, Gabbar would have to be on CST.

Yeah, exactly, I thought Amjad Khan, you know, but there is no reason. Like a lot of people were asking me whether some of the actors at some point lived in these specific suburbs, and I said, no, except for K.N. Singh, who lived in Matunga. Actually, I had another image there previously and I read somewhere and I said, ‘Oh! If he was living in Matunga, then I have not yet finished the painting so let me have Singh in Matunga.’ So, I just added him, because I like him also, very much.

Amrish Puri, of course, lived in Juhu. But he’s shown at Sion, so, there was no reason why he was at Sion? The rest of the selections you just made randomly?

Yeah, and also because the local name of Sion is also ‘Shiv’. And I think when I chose this image of Amrish Puri from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, from there he looks like some kind of a… he looks like some kind of a priest, who’s probably not a good man. So I thought, ‘Let me have one at Sion, Amrish Puri’, but otherwise, basically it was just going to be 14 villains, so which 14 people should be there. And the people who I enjoyed very much, that was important, you know. And that’s kind of how I selected people like Shatrughan Sinha, Jeevan, Shakti Kapoor…

That’s a very immaculate choice. But the youngest villain that you have is Gulshan Grover. Would you say that the era of villains is over now?

Yeah, the kind of villains… like yesterday I was watching your interview with Amitabh Bachchan, and I said let me see the website and he said, how earlier it was like either the dacoit or Thakur was the villain. Then, the times changed, and the politicians came, and then the underworld don kind of villains came, with Ajit and many others. So with the story and the heroic aspect— of a hero and his glory, the narrative was such that it was the demand. But I think now probably, I can’t comment much because I haven’t seen many contemporary films, but, I think, now it has changed, and probably what was interesting about these villains was that it was very stylized, the way they would talk, the way they would dress, or the way they would… like if you watch K.N. Singh, the way he would put one eyebrow up, the way his eyes would move and all, it was very special, I think.

But I think while basically trying to put the villains from cinema on station signs, the most important aspect is also the surface of the painting, which is kind of a very cracked surface and as if things are falling apart. Then blood drips and there’s those things. And I know what we have gone through, the whole country actually, but Bombay during and after the (Babri) mosque was demolished, the serial bomb blasts, the rise of underworld, terrorism, and 26/11 and all these things, I also think it’s an elegy, I feel. This series is an elegy to the city. Yeah, I mean, not that these people are bad and the city is bad, but the element of evil, which makes one nervous, scared, and there’s fear and I think I wanted to say that as well, with a…it falls in the popular style, with popular culture, with station signs, bright colours and popular actors from popular films, but there is also an underneath feeling of the pathos, sadness, fear, doubts, and loss of faith.

You know, you said that your references from cinema was one way to connect with your first, premier audience, your viewer, which was the people you grew up around. You have come along a long way, like you have said; all your paintings have been shown all over the world. How does referencing work when you have such a diverse viewership of art? Does it become restrictive, because obviously, not everyone is going to get every reference? I mean, there will be a certain viewer of yours, who would not have seen Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, and maybe a lot of your Japanese viewers would not have watched Sholay? So, experientially what has your experience been? Does it become restrictive or does it become a very interesting exercise in layering or a sort of exercise in interpretation, between the art and the viewer? What is your observation?

You are quite right actually. Because often I have quite specific references in my work, which are not necessarily… Often people would recognize those sort of things. But along with that, there are also some other things, which I also add or include in my painting, like one of my paintings ‘Gangavatra: After Raja Ravi Varma’, on the descent of Ganga. Now, out of the earlier graph of Ravi Varma I painted that and on the river which comes from the sky, there’s a female figure which Ravi Varma painted. On top of it I had superimposed ‘Nude Descending A Staircase’, by an avant-garde early 20^th century artist, Marcel Duchamp. Now what happened when I did that painting, my mother, when she saw it, she is familiar with this image, and she’s familiar with the myth of Ganga, and so she recognized everything but she could not understand the very abstract, dark kind of a form which is superimposed over the image of Ganga, and so she was quite baffled. So, what happens is when I am showing this image through slide presentations or through the actual painting, when it travels abroad, people are there in Europe and they recognize and are familiar with Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp, this well-known iconic image of earlier 20^th century art, but they are not familiar at all with the myth of Ganga. And now I am aware of both. So then, they are also puzzled there, like my mother. So, I think, in the process, I engage them for a longer time. They try to understand what it means, because partly they have got it— it’s only a part that they are not getting. So, I think, I like to puzzle, put my viewer in a position so that they have to struggle hard to understand, and in the process I have realized they remain with the painting for a longer time. And actually, physically also sometimes, but mentally also, psychologically as well.

There’s this chance of not reaching to a large audience. But I think of how large an audience you can reach and how much one should attempt. So, ultimately, I just do it. The first thing is, whether I am enjoying this or not while doing it.

I am going to come back to Ray for a second: do you feel like his education in Art—you know he went to Shantiniketan, was (Rabindranath) Tagore’s student—that showed through his films? Could you see it as tangible?

I think he also has said that. After doing Economics or something, it was his mother who insisted, he wasn’t keen to go to Shantiniketan, but she made a big fuss and he was forced to go to Shantiniketan to become a painter. Of course, he never continued painting, but he became a graphic artist and went into advertising. But two years of what he studied under Nandalal Bose and, of course, as a young boy, he did meet Rabindranath Tagore, and I think that had… Binod Behari Mukherjee was there, and of course there’s a beautiful documentary called The Inner Eye on Binod babu (made by Ray), but I think certainly— Shantiniketan. Because he got acquainted with the western classical music there, with a German teacher who was there, who would be listening and he would kind of put notes and that’s how he learnt notations there. And I think the basic philosophy of life, like in one of the interviews he says that Nandalal Bose said that when you draw a tree don’t draw the branches and leaves first and come down, tree grows like this—not from the sky—so put your strokes also in that manner. I think this is quite a key point in Ray’s approach to all his movies, and general philosophy of his life, that howI mean… it’s difficult for me to say, but he has an extremely sensitive approach to relationships, towards human beings, the life in the village or in the city. How much to show, how much not to show, that control, that immense control over the expression, that’s something that’s definitely Shantiniketan, and apart from that the great visual sense this man had in terms of tonality, in terms of form, in terms of texture, you see. I mean Pather Panchali is sheer unbelievable, the old lady and the shadows and the young boy, all that I think. The amazing thing also is the drawing and painting which he studied there. While we know of Ray mainly as an illustrator, but those drawing qualities… I tell you, it is the best drawing any Indian artist would probably draw. I mean, of course, there are painters and there are masters who had great drawings in their oeuvre but the sketches and drawings of Ray are not in the way of normal illustrators, which you find in applied art, in Bombay or in any other art school. It’s not that, that illustrative quality is not there. It’s pure painterly qualities, which are there, which I admire. They are great, they are fantastic. Even the doodles and the tiniest thing about the costumes, which he created for his scripts, which we see, they are masterful absolutely. It’s unbelievable. I mean, so many aspects together in one man, it’s just sheer genius.

Other than Ray, who might be a couple of filmmakers who have influenced you indirectly? When I say indirectly, I mean with their craft. What they do with their medium, inspiring your work with your own medium?

I remember when I was studying in Sir J.J. School of Art, we were members of a film society and we would go to see all kind of films. And the first time I saw a film by Jean-Luc Godard, the French filmmaker, and there I noticed that often there’s a soldier there in Remora print on the walls, or even Pierrot le Fou, or the Picasso reproductions on the wall. All that I saw because I could relate, ‘Oh Picasso prints or remora image in the background and something else is happening in the front.’ And the complexity of making the film itself, the way the shots were taken, the way the narrative was told. Often I would not follow it. And much later, Godard’s films, which are much more complex, which are difficult to understand sometimes, I think, but I think too layered, having various layers, working simultaneously, and seeing what happens, that kind of thing in my work has certainly come from Godard. Meaning: the language of the painting. That itself is a subject matter for me, or a painting in itself, or what if that is my subject matter. If Bollywood is not my subject matter; if the city of Bombay is not my subject matter, but the act of painting, what if that becomes my subject matter? What will happen? What kind of painting? And of course, I could hear American artist, Jasper Johns,who also has this thing… he was heavily influenced from philosophy of (Ludwig ) Wittgenstein, German philosopher, and he would select, he would want to say Red, but you say Red and you mean Blue, then what happens? I mean, I want to say something. Like that’s what happens with the languages, like I want to say something and I am using this language and I have a limitation with the language, now I am trying to explain and convey these things, but am I saying what I am really feeling? What I am saying is one thing, and what I am feeling is another thing, so there’s a gap in between. So that gap he would sometime attempt to focus on, and somewhere I feel in Godard that the language of cinema—shooting, actor, the city, content—he suddenly becomes detached. And he would show you a slightly dislocated kind of thing. And in Gujarati, we have this, though quite old and not that well known, poet called Labhshankar Thakar. Now Labhshankar had a series of poems about the creative process itself, the poem is about writing poetry, and then what happens… So, I think, I was quite influenced, in that sense, more than Ray. Of course, as I said, there’s no direct influence of Satyajit Ray on my work but it think it is Godard.

If I quickly asked you to name a couple of films for each category. A film, which you remember for the portrayal of a character? A film or a couple of films that you remember for the way in which they portrayed a particular character? What comes to mind first?

I mean, there are so many films actually. Few days back I saw a film called Million Dollar Baby, a film by Clint Eastwood. And it was a fantastic film, and the actress, the way she performed, Hilary Swank, I think it was great. I also enjoyed the Dirty Harry series, so that’s also another thing. But it think, I mean, all Satyajit Ray’s films have lots of great characters like Chhabi Biswas in Jalsaghar, then Sharmila Tagore in Aranyer Din Ratri, and the young Jean-Pierre Léaud in Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. And many, many films are there.

Okay, what about building a mood? A film you remember in the way it built a mood? Or, a couple of films?

Oh! Bergman comes to my mind. A film called The Silence, it has a real mood in it, you know, with characters and actors— amazing. And all Bergman films had a really profound, I wouldn’t say grief, but a poignant melancholy and they were extremely sensitive. So, Bergman I like. I also enjoy (Andrei) Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky’s films have that kind of a thing. Mood, the way water drips or milk flows. Stalker, The Mirror, and, of course, Andrei Rublev. Also Ivan’s Childhood. So these films I remember. Then much later, I saw, if you say, The Three Colors (a trilogy) by (Krzysztof) Kieślowski, those films I liked.

What about a film you remember for stylization?

I had not seen it for a long time, but when I saw, not recently but some years back, (Quentin) Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction. It’s obviously a very stylized film, so that comes to my mind; it’s an obvious choice. I think Anurag Kashyap has certain style, and manner, although there’s natural acting, but I think he has a certain style, that’s a good thing. And, I also like very much Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome, you know, and it is a fantastic film with K. K. Mahajan’s great photography and it was quite a stylized film. In the way it’s shot, in the way it’s cut, in the way the narration has been told, it is good.

You know, you have touched upon this a little earlier when you were talking about how you were very interested in your viewer, unlike, a lot of artists perhaps. But, has cinema in any way influenced who you engage with? And, how you engage with people? Can you think of any instances?

In my own context?

Yes.

No, I think, what I feel is that it’s strange that when I see world art. Particularly, the art of paintings, and there are a lots of minimalists. There was this period in sixties, seventies in America, where paintings were just flat colours or very little sort of gesture and action, so I like those work as well. But what I noticed in the west, particularly in visual arts, they are more… they hold, and they don’t go for ‘loud’ or to say much. It’s very minimal. Minimal is the word, which I find, even if they do video work, even if they do sometimes sculptures or installations, it’s the minimal which is like our very own Anish Kapoor, Indian born, living in London, doing work from there, large scale things, huge sculptures, amazing artist, no doubt, but I would still feel that there’s a certain aspect of minimal, which they follow, that’s Western. But in India, I feel I can’t do that. I feel I will have to tell you everything, you know? When I was in the old chawl—and I still go, my studio is still there—everyone would ask, who had come? Why he was here? This would come on television or is this a special film? Tell us, and everyone wants to know everything. And we are kind of intimidated, and people would come and talk to you all the time. So, I think, in a country like India, a city like Bombay, how can you be minimal? So, I think in cinema I find, a lot of things have been told. And particularly in Hindi films you have emotions shown through songs, through weeping and crying, through festivals and all kinds of things. You know, things are suddenly… either they are in Matheran or in Switzerland; you don’t get to know those jumps which are there, which I think is fantastic, which I like. And, I think that comes, so when I started doing these cabinets I thought I’d keep it a little small, but then gradually, I had to have a lot of things. I must have a lot of things in my work, so I think probably that has to do with my interest in cinema because there’s a story, there’s a music, there’s actors, emotions, all these things, and I put them together. But some of my friends often tell me that why don’t you make a film? Now, probably okay, in those days, you opted for pure painting, no doubt, but often, just yesterday I got this mail from a friend called Lynda Benglis, one of the top artists from America. I had sent her some pictures of my installations, and she said, ‘Oh! I see lots of stories there. It’s a film, it’s just like a film.’

You know, the line in Hindi cinema between the commercial cinema and the Art cinema is very, very distinct. We have two separate worlds. I want your opinion on how that’s reflecting currently on the art world in India? Given how important commerce has become now, is the line between the work that is dictated by commercial concern and the work that purely comes out of the creative vision of an artist becoming more and more distinct? In other words are market forces beginning to dictate creative content very forcefully in the art world?Like it is in cinema? Or, do you think it is still not too distinct a line between art, which has overt commercial concerns?

No, I think… see as far as fine art, visual art is concerned, there are people who start with serious art, and once they get settled, known, their work starts selling. I think then they keep on churning the same stuff, and that’s the biggest problem. You know, then that becomes more commercial, so that is one, it’s a serious thing. So, one has to be constantly alert, why one is doing it, for whom one is doing it, and if a painting becomes a stepping stone for me to achieve name, fame, success or money then I think there’s a big mistake. So I am extremely alert about this, so this should not happen. That’s one thing, and lot of people are aware of this, of course, but then there are temptations and that happens. But I think as far as cinema is concerned I feel that basically it’s an expensive medium. And if you do something very serious then probably it would be difficult to reach people, and that’s the way probably it is, and that’s why no one wants to invest in that because a lot of money has to go for making a film and then there are two separate parts. That’s why we have very few people, there are many, many young filmmakers, there are many friends of mine, who would like to do films in a serious way but for a long time, I have not heard of them, I have not seen their films while the usual churning of commercial type of cinema is there. But people say that there’s no art film and commercial film. It’s only a good film or a bad film. I don’t believe in that. I would say, there’s an art film and then there’s commercial film or popular film. Within art film, there are good films and bad films; within commercial films there are good films and bad films. So that happens you know, and I think in that case, some people’s films run, some we like, some we don’t like, that happens but I think it’s just… I personally feel that often people from the Hindi film world say that their audience is lower middle class, poor people, but India is a big country and to forget three hours of pain and worry, we make these films with songs and… I think this is underestimating people and their…  I mean all kinds of people see films. I am an educated, sensitive artist. I also watch films. So am I not supposed to see the films? Only someone who’s doing a small business on the street? Is the film only made for them?

Also, even that is underestimating. I mean, we grew up with the folk culture, and if you look back to 100 years ago, the man on the street, the so called ‘proverbial poor man’, was listening to a rich folk tradition and their music and the stories and, you know, so it was not exactly…

So, I feel that just to give this excuse that: ‘We make films for common people.  And common people are like this’, that is something… well, probably true everywhere in the world. And people like those kinds of films probably, but I don’t know somehow, it’s a very… at one side there are so many popular films, which I really like and enjoy and at the same time I hate this Hindi cinema. I hate it. It’s actually that kind of feeling.

 — Carl Gustav Jung, Swiss psychologist, influential thinker and founder of analytical psychology.