Wednesday 27 May 2015

Naseeruddin Shah Unplugged



Finished reading And Then One Day A Memoir, by Naseeruddin Shah. Like his incisive performances on screen and stage the book too has been written with uncanny frankness. It is a no holds barred take on his life and also on the film industry. He takes nothing seriously, including himself.

Probably the first film of Naseeruddin Shah I saw was Manthan and I was in high school. While watching the movie I totally missed Naseer and didn’t realise he was in it. The movie was one of those early offering from what came to be later known as ‘arthouse’ cinema.

I could make out Girish Karnad (having seen him Swami earlier and he was one of those few men wearing shirt and trousers in the film) and Smita Patil, as I had seen her photo in some film magazine, the rest of the cast I totally missed out. I thought they were real cowherds from Rajasthan or Gujarat and realized many days later through some film magazine that Naseer was one among them!

In his memoirs he mentions that during the shooting of Manthan he used to stay in cowherd’s costume for the whole day, sleep on the floor and learned to bathe and milk a buffalo!

As I was brought up on a regular diet of formulaic Hindi ‘masala’ films with larger than life heroes with drop dead looks and heroines with distinct hour glass figure and aadarsh Bharatiya naari character, to me Manthan looked staid, weirdly disturbing, incomprehensible and somewhat amusing. How could someone make a film on lowly cowherds? Their pronunciation of ‘society’ as sissotti evoked lots of classroom banter, especially during Civics classes, when this particular word used to frequently crop up.
 

It is not that mainstream cinema did not have working class heroes. In fact Bollywood has always celebrated the triumph of the underdog, but in case of actors assaying those roles their starry mannerisms often came in the way. An Amitabh Bachchan may be a dock worker in Deewar or coal miner in Kaala Patthar, but the swagger and halo of superstar remained. On the other hand guys like Naseer or Om Puri quite literally got into the skins of characters such as cowherds and rickshaw pullers, as if they have been living it all their lives.

……

Although Shah’s father was not prosperous, he was a dyed in wool brown sahib who never left home without his hat “even in a one-tractor town like Sardhana”. In order to ensure that his three sons got the best public school education, he sent all of them to St Joseph’s School in Nainital. Naseer later went there to shoot for the movie Masoom.

Though he was not a good student and hated school, he was lucky enough to get early exposure to best of Hollywood movies. He got to see the likes of Orson Welles and Spencer Tracy, at a time when his contemporaries elsewhere in India were getting hooked to the brain dead ‘two hanky family and social drama’ of Hindi films.


……
 
Naseer's own life reads like a script of Anurag Kashyap or Sudhir Mishra movie. He lost virginity at 15, got married at 19 to Purveen Morad, a Pakistanin woman nearly 15 years his senior. He met her while doing his graduation at Aligarh Muslim University. He smoked grass and was quite hooked on to it, wonder when he came out of it. He even survived a knife attack from his friend turned foe Jaspal. Shyam Benegal and his wife took care of him while he was in hospital.


His first marriage has some parallels to his role in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. He was busy building up his acting career and family life took a hit. Anyway at nineteen he was no way ready to start a family. The couple drifted apart and they had a daughter from that marriage.

More than a decade later in 1982 he got married to Ratna Pathak Shah. Before getting married the couple had to surmount lots of family obstacles as they happened to be from different faiths. Moreover Ratna's family was strict vegetarian. Thankfully terms like love jihad had not come into existence back then.

Ratna was a steadying influence in his life and after marriage managed his house and finances very well. Probably in the book she is the only person whom he treats with some reverence!


Also Read: Bangalore Beat

Tuesday 19 May 2015

Holding One's Head High

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion - Steven Weinberg
 

The above irreverent quote rings true in times like these when literalists rule the roost in every religion and every conceivable form of atrocity ranging from banning books, killing non-conformist bloggers, ethnic cleansing, car bomb explosions and beheadings gets done under the banner of religion.
 

But what this New Zealand based Sikh guy did came as a breath of fresh air. Have no idea as to how religious Harman Singh was, but from appearance he looked like a practising Sikh. And what he did left the social media awash with praise for his humanitarian gesture, though he self effacingly claimed anybody would have done that. He happened to see an injured child lying on the road after being hit by a car. He rushed to his rescue, took off his turban and wrapped it around the boy's head to stem the blood loss. This gesture saved the boy's life.
 

Newspapers in New Zealand and Australia were guarded while describing his gesture – in their online editions some said he 'set aside' religious protocol while helping a child, while Sydney Morning Herald even said 'Sikh man Harman Singh acts against religion, removing turban to help injured child'. As if saving a life is against religion! Probably they were expecting the poor chap may attract the Sikh equivalent of fatwa for this unusual act.
 

However the kind of praise Singh attracted from Indians in general and Sikh community in particular made them realise that though the turban is very dear to Sikhs (they may even fight long legal battles to uphold their right to wear it), it does not come in the way while carrying out humanitarian gestures. There is much more to Sikh religion than dress codes.
 

Because of their beard and turban, Sikhs often get mistaken for Muslims in most parts of the First World. Right from 9/11 to the most recent terror attack at Lindt cafe in Sydney many Sikhs became victims of hate crime out of mistaken identity. Hope the above gesture would go some way in enhancing their reputation in these countries, even after discounting the fact that public memory is woefully  short on such positive news.

Also Read: Bangalore Beat