Ab Aayega Mazaa – an odd (and oddly enjoyable) little relic of the 80s

After Farooque Shaikh’s passing late last year, I watched some of his old work – Gaman, Saath Saath, other reasonably well-known (by “parallel cinema” standards) movies. But a few days ago I found a DVD of the 1984 Ab Aayega Mazaa lying about (I think I had bought it after Ravi Baswani died a few years ago) and started watching it, only to be gobsmacked by what an unusual little film it was.

It begins with the actor Raja Bundela dressed in a black cloak, prancing about a graveyard with a crucifix, talking about how the dead have to reserve their "plots" in advance because things are getting crowded. This is revealed to be a nightmare: the film’s hero Vijay (Farooque Shaikh) awakes suddenly to find he has overslept and is late for office as usual, and wouldn’t you know it, his old grey scooter isn’t starting again. While waiting at a bus-stop (this, boys and girls, is what people used to do in the pre-liberalisation days – you know, before India became all shiny and Lamborghinis and iPhones dropped from the sky into the backyard of every house) he meets a sweet girl named Nupur (Anita Raaj). She lives in Golf Links and has three phones in her house (in 1984 even the prime minister didn’t have three phones) while Vijay occupies PG quarters in Patel Nagar, which is a pointer to their very different social statuses. But romance begins, as it did in those distant days, with a glass of water bought from a roadside stall, and an argument with a vendor who doesn’t have change for 50 paise. 

At this point Ab Aayega Mazaa seems set to be your regular early 80s middle-class romance centred on two of the most un-starry leading actors of the time. But the story soon heads down a garden of forking paths, and it turns out that the dream scene in the graveyard wasn’t an anomaly – it was representative of the film's overall madcap tone.

For anyone interested in the non-mainstream cinema of the time, this movie’s title credits have many points of interest. It was the directorial debut of Pankaj Parashar, who would helm the popular TV show Karamchand shortly afterwards, and go to make Jalwa, Peechha Karo and (the relatively big-star, big-budget) Chaalbaaz, all of which had traces of the manic energy one sees in Ab Aayega Mazaa. More amusingly, this very youthful film was co-produced by two actors who would soon acquire an “old man” image through their work in television: Alok Nath, who would play Haveli Ram in Buniyaad (and who has been enjoying a late-career resurgence recently, after being the subject of Twitter jokes about his “babuji” image), and Girija Shankar, the doddering, self-pitying Dhritarashtra in BR Chopra’s Mahabharata (a good performance, but one that annoyed my generation of viewers who wanted to watch battle scenes instead of endless self-mortifying conversations between the blind king and Vidura).

Shankar acts in Ab Aayega Mazaa too, in a part that reminded me a little of Pankaj Kapur’s oily Tarneja in Jaane bhi do Yaaro: he is the boss in an advertising agency that is really a front for the wicked activities of a Godman who uses incense sticks to peddle drugs. Which is a logical (or illogical) extension of the more straightforward early scenes that detail corruption and self-interest in the advertising industry: someone even proposes a soap made of adrak because consumers appreciate “natural” things. (“Zaroorat ke hisaab se aadmi ko phasao”. Cheat a man according to his needs.)

That isn’t the only JBDY connection: the tone of this film – especially in the scenes that play like deliberately thrown together college skits – is often similar to that of Kundan Shah’s movie. And that probably has something to do with Satish Kaushik writing the dialogue (and also playing a small, amusing part), as well as with the presence of Ravi Baswani, whose excellently over-the-top America-returned accent and defective Hindi makes Satish Shah’s DeMello seem like a Bharatiya ladka. Rajesh Puri is here in a short role too, and the young Pawan Malhotra – an assistant on the earlier film – has a weird little part as one of the Godman’s minions, who wears a bright purple robe and sits atop trees commenting on proceedings. There are funny sight gags (like a lamp that switches off and on if you make a coughing sound near it), throwaway lines (a “dying” man tells his friend “Meri motorcycle bech kar apne scooter ko paint kara lena, dost”), and some non-sequiturs, as in the scene where Sidey (Baswani) creeps up on a saucy ayah thinking she is Nupur, throws his arms around her and asks her to guess who he is (“Main tumhaara bachpan ka saathi hoon”), and she exclaims “Badri? Par tum toh aam ke ped se gir ke mar gaye thay.” Little moments like these make up this salad bowl of a film.

Ab Aayega Mazaa is hit and miss, but a notable thing about it is how it takes many of the clichés of mainstream Hindi cinema – the lovers separated by an authoritarian parent, the foreign-returned swain who becomes the third corner of a love triangle, a villain trying to pinch diamonds hidden in a statue, even a lost-and-found narrative involving a daughter who went missing in an accident years earlier – and treats them with a mix of parody and homage. On one hand there are many droll, deadpan scenes where it is obvious that the film is winking at its audience. On the other hand, it does seem to wholeheartedly throw itself into some of the tropes of commercial cinema: straight romantic songs (gaane bhi do yaaro?), a scene in a bar where Farooque Shaikh has fun playing a Bachchan-like comic drunk, a couple of fight scenes that are milked for humour (but that could simply be because people like Baswani are doing the fighting). There is some tongue-in-cheek “filmi” dialogue too: those who are used to standing in bus lines get a cold when they travel by AC cars with rich people, says Vijay sadly, when his love life turn sour. And though Nupur’s father - another Tarneja-like character - is a slight figure who speaks in a mannered tone, he says the sorts of things that would sound beautiful in Amrish Puri’s booming voice. “Insaan sab se jeet ta hai, par haarta hai toh sirf apni aulad se. Tumne mujhe jeete jee maar diya. Aaj ke baad tumhaara ghar se nikalna, sab bandh.”

Actually, given that much of this story is about how to “present” or “advertise” yourself (Nupur, who works with a theatre company, points out that "Zindagi mein bhi toh hum acting karte hain" – we behave differently depending on whom we are with), one could suggest that this low-budget film with lunacy in its DNA is occasionally disguising itself as something more mass-audience-friendly. That results in a tone so erratic that it definitely isn't for all tastes, but much like the Jaane bhi do Yaaro crew they must have had a grand time putting it together.

A memory of Farooque Shaikh

Less than a week before I heard the saddening – and most unexpected – news of Farooque Shaikh’s passing, an SMS written in a familiar style lit up my phone screen. “Adaab,” it said. “Wish u a Merry Christmas, a Joyous New Year and a v happy life ahead. Best luck, always.” A few minutes later, the same message arrived again. This could have been a network glitch, but having seen Mr Shaikh (or Farooque saab, as it seems more apt to call him) a few weeks earlier, wrestling with and frowning at his handset – something I can often relate to – I could picture him having re-sent it accidentally.

Either way, I had become used to the courtliness of his SMSes (even when written in shorthand) in the previous two months, ever since I first contacted him in connection with a writing project. In mid-October I had texted him – in the supplicating tone of a journalist seeking a few minutes of an Important Person’s time – asking if we could speak for a short while; on the phone would be fine. He replied with an “Adaab sir”, adding that he happened to be coming to Delhi at the end of the week, and it “wd be a plzre” to meet then “at a mutually cnvnnt time”.

We met, and it was a pleasure – for me, at least – even though the conversation was short and unexceptional. He was everything you’d expect from his screen persona, warm and unfailingly polite in his direct addresses, though he did get a little agitated when he spoke more generally about falling standards in popular culture. I had a couple of specific talking points to cover, but we were quickly done with those, and for the next half-hour he talked mainly about how commerce had completely taken over the film world, and expressed annoyance about the hegemony of the Rs 200-300-crore cinema. “Vaahiyaat filmein agar 300 crore ka business kar rahe hain, toh aur log aa jaayenge, and they will go down the same route.”

Much of what he said – if you simply transcribed it – would read as relentless complaining, and I didn’t agree with all of it. Some of it mixed deep idealism, a yearning for a fabled past where things were always so much better than today, and a narrow, subject-oriented view of “good” and “bad” cinema. There were capricious asides: while making the (reasonable) point about Hollywood’s technical excellence masking deficiencies in content and not allowing any other type of film to get breathing space, he suddenly brought up films “jiss mein spaceship yun zor zor se awaaz karti hai, phir girne lagti hai – whereas it is a basic fact of zero gravity that a spaceship will not fall like that even if it breaks up.” And he clearly wasn’t a fan of Jaws and the summer-blockbuster culture it spawned: “Ya toh ek machli aisi hai jo logon ko khaamakhaa marne lagti hai. This kind of stupidity has to stop.”

But the discontent came from his strong views on the relationship between a society and its popular culture, and his keenness to fix responsibility. “Cinema is a willing or unwilling appendage to society, so we may as well have some quality in it. Otherwise it’s like saying ‘Naashta toh mujhe karna hi hai, sada hua bhi chalega.’ But why not have a good meal, even if it is a small one? You risk your health if you eat chaat all the time. And then we complain ‘hamaaray society mein auraton ke saath yeh hota hai.’ You can’t pretend that cinema doesn’t have an effect on our minds – it’s a big thing.”
 
It wasn’t all about venting though. The meeting reminded me of conversations I had had with other, very likable men of integrity of his generation, Kundan Shah and the late Ravi Baswani – a tone that combined irritation and frustration with the ability to step back after a while and crack a quiet joke about one’s own irritability. And a genuine, boyish curiosity about what the younger person sitting in front of them felt about these things. (I have memories of Kundan, Ravi and Farooque saab – separately, of course – pausing for breath after a rant, then chuckling and asking a version of the question “Do you agree with any of this? Or could it be that I feel this way only because main budhaa ho gaya hoon?” And the question was asked sincerely, not rhetorically.)

Farooque saab spoke with pragmatism (“it is unreal, and perhaps even unfair, to expect that a filmmaker is going to do good to society at a loss to himself”) but perhaps had an unrealistic view of the power wielded by the “thinking” audience (“...and so the discerning viewer has to make his presence felt. With the internet you can get back to the filmmaker immediately if he has made a bad or bawdy film, and tell him off. He will take that seriously. He depends on the ticket that the viewer buys.”) He moved between optimism and cynicism (“But as is the norm all over the world, the major audience is males aged between 15 and 25 years. They are the ones who decide whether a film will run or not”) and used humorous analogies: “Aaj kal ke movie reviews mein star ratings aise bikhte hain jaise langar mein khaana bikh raha ho.” And “You know the Sea Link in Mumbai? It cuts down travel time dramatically while you are on it – but when you exit it you’re in trouble again. That’s how the industry today is. Film toh complete ho jaati hai but then the intelligent, sincere filmmaker is in a surrounding that he cannot control: agar 3,500 screen kisi big-budget film ne le liye hain, then you get the one or two remaining shows, and the show time is such that your own wife won’t go for it.”

Near the end of our chat, he – consciously or otherwise – used an analogy closely linked to the plot of one of his most beloved movies. “There are two people in the race – the sprinter and the evening walker,” he said, marking the difference between money-obsessed filmmakers and the ones with a social conscience. “The promenade walker will not get ahead because he isn’t in it for the race, he’s out for a stroll – the sprinter is the one who wants to get ahead, and he will always win.”

In Sai Paranjpye’s Katha, based on the hare-and-tortoise fable, he was cast against type as the wily hare (or the sprinter). I alluded to the film and he merely nodded and gave a quick smile, not pursuing the point – he wasn’t much interested in talking about his own movies, or at least his contribution to them. When he brought up Listen…Amaya – as another low-budget film that was released in only a couple of halls – this is what he said: “Recently ek film thi, Listen... Amaya, jiss mein Deepti ji aur Swara Bhaskar thay...” No mention of himself. 

Which may be a reminder that he wasn’t “in it for the race” himself. I have no doubt that he took a project seriously once he had committed to it, but he came across as being blasé about his own career, unconcerned with such things as staying in the public memory. Still, he had done some fine work in the past couple of years – in Shanghai, Listen…Amaya, even in his short part in Yeh Jawani hai Diwani – and there may have been more to come. 

I don’t usually get too affected by the deaths of public figures, even those whose work or achievements I admired. But this was a little different, because of the immediacy of having met him so recently, and because he was too young. Notwithstanding his own indifference to fame or plaudits, with the right mix of subject, writer and director he might easily have had a notable second innings as a screen actor. For now, we have the past work: old favourites like Chashme Buddoor and Katha, of course, but also films like Gaman (now available in a restored NFDC print) and Saath Saath, which deserve to be revisited and rediscovered. And I have the rueful knowledge that despite having had opportunities, I never got around to seeing a performance of Tumhari Amrita.

[Related posts: a tribute to Ravi Baswani, Shaikh’s co-star in Chashme Buddoor; a review of Sai Paranjpye’s Katha; a piece about Listen Amaya, and about watching Shaikh and Deepti Naval on screen together after all these years. And on two excellent films in which Shaikh had small parts, 40 years apart: Garm Hava and Shanghai]

About Listen... Amaya

Memory, the many forms it can take and the different ways in which it moulds lives and relationships – this is a theme of the new film Listen... Amaya, which centres on a paradox: on one hand there is a young woman – described as “free-spirited” and leading an apparently modern, forward-looking life – who is trapped by the past, idealising her long-dead father to the extent that the thought of someone else sharing her mother’s bed is sacrilege; on the other hand, there is a much older person who believes – perhaps because his mind has begun playing tricks on him and his memories are slowly drifting away – that life is not just the sum total of your yaadein (“yaadein zindagi nahin hoti”), it is also about what lies ahead. And that memories can even be stored in photos and then tucked away for a bit while one sets out to create new experiences.

This tension between the young and the old – the girl is Amaya (Swara Bhaskar), the man is a photographer named Jayant/Jazz (Farooque Shaikh), friend and eventual lover to Amaya’s widowed mother Leela (Deepti Naval) – supplies the film’s main narrative arc. In Leela’s quaint little cafe-cum-library, the sort of place that has lately been mushrooming in the more hipster (or wannabe-hipster) quarters of Delhi, Amaya bonds with Jayant and they decide to do a coffee-table book together (she will write, he will take the pictures) - but things get complicated when the young woman realises that the two older people are more than just friends.

That Listen...Amaya will probably be a likable, charming film is something a viewer might guess beforehand. Much of its initial appeal, for a generation of Indians with fond memories of the so-called Middle Cinema of the early 1980s, lies in seeing Deepti Naval and Farooque Shaikh together after all this time, and it is a whimsical, possibly unintended detail that a film about memory can be so enhanced by a viewer’s nostalgic relationship with these actors’ past work (it even tosses in a “Miss Chamko” reference, as if the point needed to be underlined). But to focus too much on the casting and the associations it creates in our minds might be to ignore how good Shaikh and Naval are here, in these roles, and how beautifully they have aged.

They are reasonably well-served by a film that acknowledges the value of its three principal performers (all of whom are terrific, though Bhaskar struggles with an under-written part in the second half) by giving each of them respectful long takes and held shots – including some shots where two people are in the frame, not “doing” very much, simply observing and reacting. Some of the best of these scenes are the ones with little dialogue (or little over-expository, “meaningful” dialogue), where a glance or gesture becomes an insight into the changing shades of a relationship. We see how the buddy-buddy rapport between mother and daughter (Amaya tells her mom about slapping a boss who made a sexual proposition, and Leela reacts stoically) gives way to friction when the young woman is unable to cope with the idea of her mother as a romantic or sexual person. We sense the emotional bond between the lovers – a bond that probably began with shared tragedy and loneliness but deepened into a love so clearly founded on friendship that one flinches at Amaya’s insensitivity when she asks her mother “Is it just about the sex?” – and we see the complex relationship between Amaya and Jazz as they explore the physical bazaars of Delhi, from Chandni Chowk to Hauz Khas Village, while also exploring their own private memory palaces. There is often a real sense for the small, throwaway moment, as in a scene where Jazz calls Leela from his landline to tell her “Mera phone kho gaya” and she reflexively responds “Kahaan?” before shaking her head at the silliness of what she’s just said (and meanwhile we see him silently spread his hand out in a “what the...” gesture, even though he knows she can’t see him).

But there could have been more of these moments, rather than the clunky psychoanalysis that weighs the story down. The film is also stifled by its tonal unevenness. There are jarring asides where side-characters play Greek chorus in increasingly annoying ways (starting with the guitar-wielding, coffee-loving, so-cute-you-want-to-strangle-them kids dancing in the cafe in the opening sequence, carrying on to a dead-on-arrival subplot about a couple who become entangled in the problems of the central trio). The often-intrusive background music is among the worst I have heard recently: what is with that terrible, ululating sound when Jazz recalls the accident that killed his wife and little daughter? (In any case, even at the level of the dialogue, the scene is prolonged and static.) The tribute-remix song “Ek Ladki Bheegi Bhaagi Si” – the fantasy of a goofy, over-helpful young man with his Heart in the Right Place – is pleasant on its own terms (and nice to watch in a context removed from the film, such as on a music channel), but what is it doing here? (In a sense, of course, that question is as old as Hindi cinema, given the episodic structures of even our best commercial movies. But Listen... Amaya’s strengths lie in very different terrain, and if one comes to feel – as I did – that the sole reason for the existence of a song is to provide a marketable number for promos, well, it breaks the fourth wall in a not-very-good way.)

More than anything, and though I liked this film on the whole, I wish it had trusted its lead performers to carry it all the way through, and paid a little more attention to character development rather than piling on the cutesy side-shows. “There’s some magic in your coffee today,” those kids warble at “Mrs K” in that opening sequence. Yes, but also a little too much artificial sweetener.

Some thoughts on Shanghai

Dibakar Banerjee’s Shanghai begins with a prologue of sorts – a scene where casual chatter between two lower-class men slowly gives way to something more intense and shadowy. The younger man, Bhagu, is brash and excited about the assignment that lies ahead; the older one, Jaggu, is reluctant, wary and more concerned about the safety of his small truck than anything else. Bhagu is played by the diminutive Pitobash Tripathy, who was so good in another fine film Shor in the City – he is well cast here as a loose cannon, capable of temporarily unnerving even the smug people who give him his orders. And yet, both men are basically patsies for larger forces that they cannot begin to understand. (One might, at a stretch, say they have been shanghaied.)

Together they will engineer the fatal incident that lies at the heart of this story – the mowing down of political activist Dr Ahmedi (Prosenjit Chatterjee) shortly after he makes a speech denouncing the high-profile International Business Park (IBP) project. “They’ll take your land and call it pragati,” Ahmedi has been telling the poor people who gather to hear him speak (“they” meaning the government, which has started the project in collusion with big business houses). The parable he relates is that of an unfortunate man visited by big-shots who usurp his property, build a mall on it, charge him money for water and behave like they are doing him a favour. Naturally this activism makes him a controversial figure, and when the truck “accidentally” hits him, his former student and sometime lover Shalini (Kalki Koechlin) sees the attack for what it is. But she may need the help of a small-time maker of sleazy films (Emraan Hashmi) if she wants proof that can hold up in court.
 

Banerjee and his co-writer Urmi Juvekar have done a solid job of adapting Vassilis Vassilikos’s 1967 novel Z (a story situated in a very specific political context) to the contemporary Indian situation – this film is a tightly knit comment on the aspirations and power struggles that brush against each other in a messy, many-layered society. Though the genre is that of the political thriller (complete with the “what really happened?” narrative that marked such movies as Blow Out and The Manchurian Candidate), this is also a slice-of-life depiction of a world where there is no lasting solution to the hegemony of power, where underprivileged people unwittingly participate in their own exploitation, pages routinely go missing in reports, and the rich and their merry men rob from the poor. (No wonder the descriptor “Robin Hood” is sarcastically used at one point to describe someone who tries to go against the grain of things.)

No time for a structured review just now, but here are a few notes:

– I watched Costa-Gavras’s film version of Z a long time ago and only remember it dimly (not having completely understood the politics of the story at the time), but I do recall the magnetic presence of Jean-Louis Trintignant as the investigating magistrate – very deadpan and very expressive at the same time as he tries to sift truth from fiction. Abhay Deol does a decent workmanlike job as that character’s equivalent, the conscientious bureaucrat Krishnan – a Naxal sympathiser (it is hinted) who understands the many ways in which power can be misused. For all the seriousness of Krishnan’s intentions, however, his “investigation” takes place in a shabby, mosquito-ridden hall with barely functioning coolers and dirty bathrooms. Some of the scenes here – the surreal appearance of a basketball mid-proceedings, a sight gag where first Shalini and then Krishnan slip on the just-washed floor outside the hall – are played for humour, but there is a subtext: this dingy, out-of-the-way setting (galaxies away from the fantasy of the posh business city “Shanghai”) is just the place for a token enquiry, the findings of which are likely to be swept under the carpet. (There is no actual carpet in the investigation room, but if there were you can be sure there would be plenty of dirt under it.) And this is a morally slippery place where people struggle – literally and figuratively – to maintain their footing. Krishnan may seem in charge, but even the policemen he interrogates regard him with a blasé eye. “When a chief minister, other politicians and Bollywood celebrities are in the city, the force has to be occupied elsewhere,” he is told when he asks about inadequate security arrangements.

– The screenplay has many neat little touches. “Mujhe interference na milay toh main aur andar tak pahunch sakta hoon,” (“If my work is not interfered with, I can make further inroads”) Krishnan tells the chief minister (played by Supriya Pathak) during his meeting with her. This is ironical because he is already sitting inside the private chamber of someone who probably orchestrated the events he is investigating – a fly in the spider’s parlour – and also because, a short while later, he will get an offer to become an “insider” in another sense. Incidentally Farooque Shaikh plays the CM’s principal secretary Kaul; it’s nice to see him and Pathak together after so many years, but it's also pleasing that these two actors – known best for playing likable, homely people in the Middle Cinema of the early 80s – are made to inhabit very different character types. Pathak looks positively sinister in her one major scene near the end, when the CM steps out of the shadows to greet Krishnan, asking him with fake warmth about how his wife is doing.

– As in his last film LSD, Banerjee makes effective use of the handheld camera, but here the handheld shots are “objective” (which is basically to say that there isn’t someone within the narrative holding the camera: it’s more a case of an invisible narrator juddering between characters, putting us in the middle of the action, creating a sense of claustrophobia). There are some fine compositions, as in a scene where the principal secretary speaks with Krishnan while huffing away on a treadmill. We see the two men’s reflections in the fitness room’s mirrors, but in the very centre of the frame is a third mirror, and in it is the silent, statue-like figure of a man holding a bottle of water and a hand-towel for Kaul. One wonders what “pragati” might mean to this anonymous minion.

There are other clever visuals: a shot of a large SUV being trailed by a small (but lethal) van; the irony of road traffic being stalled by a street celebration in honour of “progress”; the word “Dreemgirl” flashing on the Hashmi character Joginder’s cellphone. And the scary depictions of anarchy in the making include a morcha scene where you feel that the revellers are drunk on the idea of being part of something big and important, regardless of what it is. (The frenzied “Bharat Mata ki Jai” dance has a similar mood.) “Hum China ko peechhe chhod sakte thhe,” (“We could have left China behind”) someone ruefully says at one point. Presumably he means in terms of economic progress, but by the end we have seen the emergence – in the fictitious city of Bharat Nagar – of something that resembles a police state more than a transparent democracy.

– Trying to keep your equilibrium, turning your face away from injustice until your conscience no longer lets you...these are repeated motifs in this film. In a late scene, a character is asked to leave a building from the back-door because there are angry people outside waiting for him, and in the next scene another person (who has amusingly been portraying himself as a macho Rajput) recalls how he had to flee his home through the back-door because people were coming for him. This adds up to a study of individual scruples confronted with permanent threat of repercussion. And so, it makes sense that the ending is cynical and idealistic at the same time: on the one hand, a character does something that in a more simple-minded film might result in the cleaning up of the political order; on the other hand, we see that nothing has really changed. Perhaps the “pragati” being constantly talked about is a version of the principal secretary on his treadmill, running to stay in the same place.

A short meeting with Ravi Baswani

Very sad to hear about the passing of Ravi Baswani. I met him in March last year in Mumbai, and at first glance he looked a bit sturdier than I’d expected; his two best-known roles - as Farooque Shaikh’s rascally bachelor pal Jai in Chashme Baddoor and as the high-strung photographer Sudhir in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro - had fixed him in my mind as a wisp of a man permanently in danger of being blown away by a strong breeze, in the style of the great silent-screen comedians. One of the best sight gags in Chashme Baddoor has him leaping nimbly to and fro in a single-minded effort to kick-start a scooter into life; it’s slapstick, but it’s also balletic and done with tremendous comic timing, and it’s my favourite Baswani memory. Watching it, you almost feel like the scooter will kick this little man back.


Nor was I prepared for Ravi’s thick moustache, which made him look vaguely like a major-general (and which he carefully combed with his hands at regular intervals throughout our conversation). But his voice was still just as boyish as Sudhir’s. “It says ‘Push’ but you can’t push it, you can only pull,” he complained jocularly about the recalcitrant door of the Café Coffee Day in Andheri, “This is like the bloody political system – nothing works around here!”

We talked mainly about Jaane bhi do Yaaro and about that tiny window of time in the early 1980s when Ravi played the two movie parts that got him such a large fan following. In the late 1970s, he told me, he was a Delhi boy sporadically involved with theatre – he had been into acting since his school and college days but never really thought of it as a profession. “I worked as a management trainee after college, and that's where I was exposed to such fine terms as Job Satisfaction,” he said with a chuckle. Going to Bombay in search of film work was not something he was thinking about – “I thought if cinema was ever going to be a part of my life it would come to me.”

Which is what happened. Naseeruddin Shah – whom Ravi knew through the Delhi theatre circuit – was getting ready to film Sai Paranjpye’s Sparsh and he happened to show Ravi the script. “I was so impressed that I told Naseer I have to be involved with this film, even if it meant working as his personal spotboy.” Eventually Paranjpye asked if he would handle Properties for the film, and Ravi and his theatre group (called “Non-Group”!) became closely involved with behind-the-scenes work. Paranjpye was so impressed (in an interview to Filmfare, she said “Thanks to Ravi Baswani and his team, if I asked for a pink elephant at night, it was there in the morning”) that she cast him in Chashme Baddoor.

After the Bombay premiere of that film, he was going to return to Delhi to resume his theatre work when a friend asked him to direct and act in a play for him. Kundan Shah, who had enjoyed Chashme Baddoor, attended one of the shows and was enthralled by Ravi’s talent for manic humour and by his glass eye, which gave him a mad-scientist look at times. He had already thought of Ravi for the role of the high-strung Sudhir, and this performance made up his mind.


“To me, Ravi WAS Jaane bhi do Yaaro,” Kundan says today, “He was the comic cement of the film. When I got him on board, I knew that a key component had been taken care of.” Ravi would bring exactly the hoped-for qualities to the role. His Sudhir is hyper-excited, paranoid, marked by childlike swings of emotion: when he’s morose he is the picture of incurable pessimism, but a few seconds later he’s on his feet again, this time impractically cheery even when there isn’t much to be cheery about. In scenes such as the one where he yelps “Jaane nahin doonga!” at the rent-collector, he resembles nothing so much as a Chihuahua snapping away at someone’s heels. This makes him a perfect foil to his more poised, idealistic partner Vinod (played by Naseer). It also places the responsibility of pulling off the broader comic scenes on his shoulders – something that would carry a real-life resonance during the shooting, as Naseer became increasingly unconvinced about some of the comedy and Ravi occasionally had to mediate.

In fact, Ravi was one of the very few people involved with Jaane bhi do Yaaro who was sold on the script at first reading. “I didn’t think there was anything unacceptable in it. It made perfect sense to me and I believed in the absurdity, the dark humour, etc.” On more than one occasion, his confidence and talent for improvised zaniness was a morale-booster to the other members of the cast and crew during a very difficult shoot where people were often asking each other the immortal question “Yeh kya ho raha hai?”

“During that shoot there was innocence and there was the passion to do something really well,” Ravi told me, “We weren’t competing with each other or looking over each other’s shoulders. Aisa laalach kabhi nahin tha ki main lead role kar rahan hoon ya kuch aur kar raha hoon? Everybody was throwing suggestions around, multi-tasking...you can't imagine the level of enthusiasm. When Kundan shouted 'Taking!', there were 15 voices that answered in a chorus 'Giving!' We had absolutely no idea that we were involved in something that was going to be a cult or a landmark or whatever. We were just doing our work as best as we could. It was like the Gita’s philosophy: Aasha kiye bina apna karm kar lo.”

His own career never really took off post-1983, but he was stoical about it, preferring to dwell on the positives. “After satellite TV came in, the repeated telecast of JBDY and Chashme Baddoor has led to a resurgence of viewers who talk to me as if the movies were made just yesterday. When I speak to college students or young interns at workshops, the admiration is there to see – there is a quiet pride that one was involved with such films.”

His first VHS copy of Jaane bhi do Yaaro came from Doordarshan as late as 1990, eight years after the film was made. “Now it’s more widely available but sad to say, though we are told the prints are digitally remastered and rerecorded and all that shit, the quality is still very bad.” There isn’t much of a culture of film preservation in India, I remarked, and Ravi nodded in agreement but then let out a short laugh. “True, but kya iss country ki priority film preservation hai? You know what I mean, right? There are so many other things that need to be preserved, which is not happening.”

Towards the end of our talk, a trace of regret showed itself. “We’ve all lost our innocence now,” he said. “The loudness of comedy in recent times is very disheartening. It’s all about verbal diarrhoea – all this Laughter Challenge nonsense. Even some fine comedians are getting involved with this circus, purely for money’s sake.” But he said even this with a smile, and with the same matter-of-fact humour he showed when he quipped in a magazine interview a few years ago that he should have taken a cue from James Dean and died immediately after Chashme Baddoor and Jaane bhi do Yaaro were released. “I would have been a two-movie legend by now.”


[Did a version of this for the Hindustan Times. Photos courtesy Aditya Arya, who knew Ravi well since the 1970s and who worked as stills photographer on JBDY. More on that here]

The scorching winds of change: rediscovering Garm Hava

I’m sitting in my favourite DVD-browsing space – the shady, lizard-ridden attic of the Palika Bazaar shop that sells “original copies” of world-cinema titles at Rs 150 – when the salesman leans across and whispers, “Saab, mere paas ek bahut special film hai. London mein copy banaaya. Poore India mein aapko sirf iss dukaan mein milegi.” (“I have a very special film, copied from a London print – you won’t get it anywhere else in India.”) So saying, he unwraps a DVD of M S Sathyu’s Garm Hava.

It’s a strange little moment, incongruous to the setting; normally, the man would be using this hushed tone to hard-sell a porn film. More bizarrely, just a couple of days earlier I was speaking with an aunt about the puzzling unavailability of Sathyu’s film in the Indian market. (She saw it a couple of times on its initial release in 1973 and has never been able to get it out of her mind – especially the haunting soundtrack with the “Maula Salim Chishti” qawwali. I saw it as a child on TV and was unable to appreciate it then but was keen to see it again.) For a movie that’s considered one of the key works of the “Indian New Wave” of the early 1970s, it seemed to have gone underground, never to resurface.

Naturally, I bought the DVD. The print was poor – faded colour, spots and scratches, a couple of seconds of film missing here and there – but not as bad as I'd feared. (I wouldn’t have minded subtitles because the Urdu spoken in the film gets a little dense at times; but again, given these experiences, maybe not.)

Garm Hava's opening montage of images about the Freedom Movement and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi is followed by a lengthy shot of Salim Mirza (Balraj Sahni) photographed from a waist-high angle at the Agra railway station, waving at a departing train. His sister is leaving for Pakistan and he’s seeing her off; they’ve spent their whole lives in close proximity, now they are being parted in their old age.

This isn’t the last time we'll see Salim waving goodbye to a member of his family. “A hot wind is blowing,” a rickshaw-driver tells him as they leave the station, “Those who don’t get uprooted will get burnt.”

The garm hava in question is the cruel aftermath of Partition, and Salim and his family are being forced to make wholesale adjustments in their way of life. Because of legal complications, their ancestral house is slipping out of their hands. Salim’s daughter Ameena (Geeta Siddharth, in a much more central role than her two-minute appearance in Sholay's family massacre sequence) is separated from the man she is betrothed to. Everywhere, there are subtle changes in equations between Hindus and Muslims. “Sab azaadi ka phaayda apne tareeke se uthaa rahe hain,” (“Everyone is using Independence for their own gain”) sighs Salim when a rickshaw-wallah asks him for two rupees instead of the customary eight annas. A potential landlord assures him that he is unconcerned with a tenant’s religion, but then asks for a year’s payment in advance, because “aap hi ke mazhab ke koi saat maheene ka kiraaya chhod ke chale gaye” (“Someone from your community left without paying seven months’ rent”). Through it all, Salim remains stoical – God will see us through all this, he believes – but his family members, including his son Sikandar (played by the young Farooque Shaikh), aren’t so sure.

Some of the acting in Garm Hava is uneven – I thought a couple of the supporting performers were miscast, and the old lady who plays Salim’s mother seems constantly to be looking out for the director’s instructions – but there’s no faulting Balraj Sahni’s immensely dignified performance in the lead role. Sahni invests a great deal in little gestures, speaking volumes with a subtle shift of his eyes, or by cocking his head ever so slightly, or tapping his cane nervously on the floor while speaking to a money-lender. (I don’t want to stretch the comparison too far, but this portrait of a patriarch trying to retain his dignity while the world he once strode proudly through collapses around him reminded me of Burt Lancaster’s wonderful performance as the Prince in Visconti’s Il Gattopardo.)

Equally notable is the film’s anthropomorphising of the Mirzas’ old haveli. The house is given a life and a personality of its own, with the camera freely exploring its interiors, familiarising us with every corner, pointedly framing characters in doors and stairways as if to stress the relationship of these people to their setting; almost suggesting that one is incomplete without the other. We are reminded that ancestral houses become a part of the people who have lived in them for decades (and the haveli can equally be seen as a symbol for the nation), and this is most poignantly realised in the scenes involving Salim’s mother. When the Mirzas have to leave, she resists, clinging to the walls, crying out that she’d rather die than go away. Later, she insists on sleeping on the terrace of their new accommodation, because from here she can see the haveli in the distance. A scene where the dying woman is carried back to the house, in a palki, is shot to suggest her memories of her first trip to the haveli – presumably as a young bride, in a palanquin, decades earlier.

Most “Partition films” contain moments of strong violence – the movies can’t bring themselves to look away from the horror stories about neighbours killing each other or ghost trains filled with dead bodies, gliding across the fresh borders. And unflinching depictions of this sort can serve a purpose too (although they also carry the danger of trivialisation). But the violence of Garm Hava is subtler: it’s about the uncoiling of the many threads holding together a family, about being uprooted from the only life you knew. This isn’t a flawless film (there’s something a little too convenient, even manipulative, about the way misfortune stalks the Mirzas **) but it’s an important one – a poised, personal, ground-level perspective of a critical time in India’s history – and it’s encouraging to hear that the original print is undergoing restoration. Not a moment too soon, and I hope similar work is done on the under-seen films of other notable Indian directors of that time, Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani among them.

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** In an essay in his fine book 50 Indian Film Classics, M G Raghavendra points out that the film tries to distance itself from the melodramatic idiom of mainstream Hindi cinema but succeeds only to an extent, and this compromises its overall tone

Sai Paranjpe's Katha: tortoise therapy

Major nostalgia happened while I was watching a party scene in Sai Paranjpe’s marvelous 1982 comedy Katha yesterday: sitting delicately next to a beer glass in one shot was a bottle of Gold Spot, that wonderful orange drink from the Ancient Days. (Another scene had an antique television set that was kept under a cover “because it’s afternoon, there are no TV programmes at this time”. Nostalgia good. Early 80s gooodd.)

Paranjpe’s film, which I first saw more than 20 years ago on Doordarshan, is a beautifully scripted and acted story based loosely on the fable of the hare and the tortoise. After a cutesy title sequence (with an animated rendering of the tale), we meet our tortoise, Rajaram (Naseeruddin Shah), an honest, likable young man who works as a filing clerk at a shoe company. Rajaram stays in a Mumbai chawl that’s the picture of communal living; many families packed together in a small space, all on friendly terms, sharing food and gossip. He’s in love with his neighbour Sandhya (Deepti Naval), but true to tortoise form he keeps stumbling over himself and missing the opportunity to voice his feelings. Then his suave, opportunistic childhood friend Bashudev (“call me Bashu, it’s more stylish”), played by Farooque Shaikh, shows up unannounced and coolly moves in with him. Bashu secures free meals at posh restaurants, charms the other chawl-dwellers, smooth-talks his way into an administrative job in the company Rajaram works for…and eventually sets about wooing Sandhya and her parents. All the while, Rajaram continues plodding along in his own way, convinced that everything will come to he who waits.

Katha is mostly narrative-driven – it’s the sort of film where you get absorbed by the story and the characters without thinking much about the technicalities – but it’s also a very playful movie with some funny sight-gags: such as a scene where the sound is turned off and a large “Censored” splattered across the screen while a dirty joke is being told. And a couple of dream sequences that play like spoofs of the mainstream cinema of the time. In one, Rajaram is molested by a gang of cackling shrews (women from his office) and a jhaadu-wielding Sandhya comes to his rescue; in another, Bashu and the delightfully pixie-ish Jojo (played by Winnie Paranjpe, the director’s daughter) perform a disco-style variant on the song “Tum Sundar Ho” (which is used as the theme for the hare’s wooing of various women). Even Mithun-da might have blushed at the shiny vest worn by Farooque Shaikh in this scene; it’s fun to see these doyens of “parallel cinema” clowning about in this way, and Paranjpe keeps giving us entertaining asides that don’t have much to do with the main plot but which make the film very enjoyable.

Despite appearances, Katha isn’t a straightforward morality tale about the Good (read: slow and steady) guy winning in the long run. In the very first scene of the film an old lady, narrating stories to her grandchild, cautions him that in the real world you rarely have the tortoise winning the race, and the rest of the film expands on this idea. Balancing your personal ideals with the practical demands of living in an imperfect world…these are the real concerns of this story, which raise it above the romanticism of the fable it’s based on.

For instance, Paranjpe makes it a point to show us at the film’s end that both protagonists have achieved what they wanted. Even when Bashu is exposed as a cheat, he walks nonchalantly out of the office, twirling his key-pouch around his finger (“my sudarshan chakra,” he calls it), a thoughtful look in his eyes – he’s already planning his next strategy. The last time we see him it’s in a plane heading for the Gulf, presumably to continue conning and sweet-talking his way through life. A director whose primary concern was to provide a moral lesson would have ensured that the character got his comeuppance, but Paranjpe’s approach (much like Satyajit Ray’s) is more gentle – built on exploring shades of humanity in various characters rather than turning any of them into outright villains.

Of course this doesn’t mean that the viewer should condone some of the things Bashu does (especially his final act of seducing Sandhya and then leaving her on the wedding day), but he also serves as a medium for Rajaram to learn valuable lessons about pragmatism. What this film is really about is the development of the tortoise. Though he’s the good guy, on more than one occasion Rajaram comes across as plain silly in his idealism – at times you want to give him a good shaking or at least clip him across the ear. I’m thinking in particular of the scene at the bus-stop where he keeps up a steady, self-righteous rant about people who jump the queue, and the general insensitivity of the world. Here one gets the sense of a character who’s so bent on exposing others’ shortcomings that he fails to understand his own, and rarely makes a serious attempt to be pro-active.

At this level, it’s possible to look at the Bashu character beyond the function he plays in the narrative and see him as a guardian angel (albeit a smarmy, twisted guardian angel) who plays a cathartic role in Rajaram’s life. This comes across most clearly in a scene near the end. Rajaram has just discovered that his friend “borrowed” money from his unlocked cupboard without asking him. Bashu is unapologetic. “This is what happens when you don’t keep your belongings locked,” he says insouciantly. Rajaram responds with one of the funniest lines in the film (though he’s being very solemn indeed): “Main taala-sanskriti ke bilkul virudh hoon,” he says, “Jee karta hai duniya ke sabhi taalon ko tod daalun. Taalon ka matlab hai aadmi ka aadmi par avishvas.” (“I’m completely against the lock-culture. I wish I could break every lock in the world. Locks indicate lack of trust between people.”) Now Bashu, briefly turning into a sutradhaar, tells him “You have to be practical. People like me exist in this world, and we’re willing to take advantage of others. Stop being so idealistic.”

And Rajaram does learn his lessons. Our final indication that he’s grown as a person and learnt not to look at the world through rose-tinted glasses comes in the scene where he offers to marry Sandhya after Bashu’s disappearance. She tells him she’s no longer a virgin; he looks down, visibly upset, but then raises his head and tells her that it doesn’t matter to him. I don’t think the Rajaram we met at the beginning of the film, well-meaning though he was, would have been capable of such maturity. He would have been hampered by his unreasonable expectations of people and his firm views about how things should be. But by the film’s end the tortoise has emerged from his shell, and the hare is at least partly responsible for this.