Hammer Over Heritage

 

I recently came across this picture on Twitter of Mumbai’s Eros movie theatre covered with tarpaulins as it gets ready to be torn down to make way for yet another ritzy shopping mall. Built in 1938, Eros is one of the prime example of art deco style of architecture in the city, which was very popular in the 1920s and 30s across the world.

Art Deco combined modern styles with fine craftsmanship and rich materials, while symmetry was its hallmark. However, its dominance ended with the beginning of World War II and the rise of the strictly functional styles of modern architecture.

South Mumbai became a Mecca of art deco in the 1930s with apartments on the newly reclaimed Marine Drive built in this fashion. The trend later spread to suburbs such as Matunga and Chembur. In fact, even today Mumbai houses the second highest number of art deco buildings in the world after Miami.

Coming back to Eros, during my stay in Bombay (as it was known back then in the early 1990s), it was a landmark theatre located right opposite to the Churchgate station. It was dull yellow structure with a light maroon façade and had two art deco blocks joining in the middle to cylindrical structure.

Eros along with Regal and Sterling used to screen only English movies, and I remember that Steve Martin starrer Father of the Bride was the first movie I saw at Eros, and the first in Mumbai. The movie was a hit and the producers tried to milk it further with sequels.

After that these three movie theatres – Eros, Regal and Sterling became permanent fixtures during off days and holidays.

Those were pre-internet days and movie watching was an altogether different experience. Online booking was not even thought of, and hence, one had to reach the theatre a couple of hours in advance to avoid facing a ‘house full’ board at the ticket counter. Making an advance booking meant going to the theatre in the morning to book for a night show. 

After the culture of people going to malls and watching movies in multiplexes became well entrenched, the single-screen legacy theatres came under threat. Sterling reinvented itself into a multiplex, Regal diluted its Hollywood only norm and Eros stopped screening movies in 2016.

Now this piece of priceless heritage is soon going to be history.

Bollywood Bereaved

Bollywood, which was already facing widespread disruption in film making and distribution due to the lockdown, has now been hit by a double whammy of another kind - deaths of Irrfan Khan and Rishi Kapoor.

Both had diametrically opposite career trajectories. Khan was a rank outsider, while Kapoor was born into Bollywood's first family. For Kapoor, the entry into the tinsel town was a stroll in the park, but for Khan, it began with a hard landing.

Kapoor gained instant stardom with his debut film Bobby, but Khan had to move heaven and earth to be recognized. His was a gritty tale of an aspiring actor saddled with bit roles, who finally emerges out of the shadows through his talent and commitment.

Though I had seen Salaam Bombay way back in the late eighties, I only recently discovered that Khan was there in that film. Back then the only recognizable face in that Mira Nair's in-your-face peek into the Mumbai's red-light area was Anita Kanwar. She had become a well-known face because of her role in TV soap opera Buniyaad. Doordarshan was ruling the tube and satellite television was still a few more years away.

For Khan, the nineties was almost a washout - the mainstream cinema was under the stranglehold of David Dhawan-Govinda horseplay with double entendre ditties and wafer-thin plots. And people were more than willing to suspend their disbelief to cheer Govinda's gyrations. It even forced many established names to dumb down and fall in line.

On the other hand, offbeat film circuit was lorded over by Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri, who had by then carved out a niche audience after a long struggle.

Khan remained confined to the small screen and sundry TV serials. It was only in post-2000 he began finding his place under the sun. The tearing down of single-screen cinema theatres to multiplexes also worked in his favour.

He made a splash in the international film circuit by appearing in Life of Pi, Namesake and later Slumdog Millionaire. In the mainstream cinema, he made an impression by figuring in Life In a Metro, opposite Konkana Sen Sharma. His small-town naivete endeared him to the masses. Another film that won the critical, as well as mass acclaim, was Maqbool and Haider.

Soon the mainstream directors found him bankable as the multiplex cine-goers warmed up to the versatility of his acting prowess. Whether it was a light comedy, a crime thriller or tragedy, Khan assayed those roles in many shades with ease that soon became his trademark.

Movies like Hindi Medium, Qarib Qarib Single and others followed. However, the most talked-about film on social media turns out to be Lunchbox. Though I didn't like the ending, Khan, along with Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Nimrat Kaur successfully present a slice of Mumbai's suburban middle-class life.

The news of his ailment began doing rounds from last year, though the details were a closely guarded secret. His mother's death a few days ago made news for the fact that he was not able to go to Jaipur due to the travel restriction caused by the lockdown. Khan's end surprised many, and it came quite early - he definitely had much more of cinema left in him.

Rishi Kapoor

He was the youngest member of Bollywood's first family, and the first film Bobby was a dream launch. Soon he emerged as the archetypal lover boy with cherubic looks and happy-go-lucky demeanor. He was the original disco dancer of Bollywood and soon became the favourite pin-up boy in women's hostel rooms.

To his credit Kapoor stuck to his lover boy roles even when the anti-establishment angry young man hero, popularized by Amitabh Bachchan, was a rage. He continued to churn out reasonable returns to the box office through his movies like Sargam, Khel Khel Mein and later Chandini.

However, it was in the fag end of his career Kapoor got roles in which he could stand out. Whether it was playing a nonagenarian in Kapoor & Sons or the patriarch of a Muslim family branded as terrorists in Mulk, Kapoor assayed those roles with dexterity that was not on display during the early part of his career.

But my all-time favourite happens to be Do Dooni Chaar where he plays a harried Maths teacher who aspires to buy a car from his meagre savings. His wife, played by real life spouse Neetu Singh, provides an able supporting cast.

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Working class heroes: Apna Time Aaa Gaya

Working class heroes have quietly carved a few sweet spots in the Bollywood box office. Actors like Ayushmann Khurrana and Rajkumar Rao with their boy next paan shop looks and non-filmy backgrounds have succeeded in becoming ‘bankable’ with their movies turning out to be money spinners.

In their movies they hold regular middle-class jobs - a private company executive or a government bureaucrat and move around in two-wheelers or not so fancy hatchbacks like a Wagon R or a Santro and live in very middle-class colonies and apartments. Their love lives also would be far from perfect and sometimes even their love interests need not have ‘heroine’ looks as in Dum Laga Ke Haisha.

However, both Ayushmann and Rajkumar partly owe their success to Amol Palekar, probably the first working class hero with a middle-class background in Bollywood. It was Amol Palekar, who in association with director Basu Bhattacharjee and Hrishikesh Mukherjee painstakingly carved a niche for such characters in the 1970s, when larger than life heroes held a vice-like grip over Bollywood box office.

During my childhood days in the 70s heroes were six-footers with drop-dead looks, while heroines dazzled us with their flawless skin and even more flawless aadarsh Bharatiya naari character, someone above all forms of suspicion.

Those movies were three-hour long dramas with highly formulaic plots, laden with distinctly black and white characters and copious running-round-the-trees duets. Needless to say, our young impressionable minds easily got hooked to it.

Along came Amol Palekar with his aam aadmi demeanour harried about the challenges of life. Back then it seemed sacrilegious to us that a hero could go about the whole movie without even getting involved in a single fisticuff; not court his lady love in fancy cars, but BEST buses and local trains; drive a rickety Lambretta scooter or Standard Herald car. No Impala or Ford Mustang car chases, no horse riding ... tsk tsk, how can he be a hero!! We wondered.

After some initial tut-tutting people started warming up to him thinking that cinema need not always be an escape from reality, a little dose of realism with a pleasant middle-class setting as a prop was welcome.

Then came guys like Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri, and it led to further unlearning of our concept of heroes. They came with hard as nails reality and provided a peek into life in lower middle class and slum localities. It took a lot of time for people to appreciate their style of acting.

Their legacy was carried forward by the likes of Manoj Bajpai and now by Nawazuddin Siddiqui. However, though this particular category enjoys greater critical acclaim, its bankability in the box office is low.

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Vinod Khanna's Unforgettable Role

The death of a yesteryear superstar often brings back memories lying mothballed in remote corners of one's mind. Few weeks before his death a picture of a sick and ailing Vinod Khanna flanked by two people sent shock waves across the social media. Those on the wrong side of 40 were aghast that their teen idol has become so emaciated. He was reportedly suffering from bladder cancer.

After a couple of rumours about his 'death' the inevitable ultimately happened. And he was 70, not an untimely exit, but still looked a tad early considering that he was an adorable hunk during his prime. At the death of every actor there is a flood of write ups listing among others his most influential films.

Though many had listed movies like Amar Akbar Antony, Lahoo ke do rang, Chandini or Jurm, but to me the movie that remains hauntingly etched in my mind is Mere Apne (1971), a little known film which he did in the early part of his career when he was transitioning from a villain to hero and still many films away from stardom.

Directed by legendary Gulzar, the movie steers clear from the Bollywood binary of good versus evil, with all characters having shades of grey in varying degrees. The only exception is Meena Kumari, who after having lived all her life in a village comes face to face with changing mores of city life in the autumn of her life.

The film was about campus violence, educated unemployed and the ongoing rivalry between two gangs - one led by Vinod Khanna and the other by Shatrughan Sinha. As both Vinod and Shatrughan were newcomers they had a lot to prove, with no starry airs to distract them. Hence one gets to see some great acting on display. As for Gulzar, he showed lots of promise in his debut venture and later went on to make masterpieces like Maachis.

Much later after Vinod Khanna had become a Member of Parliament he had told a journalist that during the shooting of Mere Apne there was a cold war going on at the sets between the FTII trained actors and the rest. Shatrughan, Asrani, Paintal were FTII trained whereas Vinod Khanna wasn't. But he did make up for his lack of formal training with amazing screen presence and carried off his role with aplomb.

Later he went on to become a very bankable star and a formidable rival to Amitabh Bachchan, but suddenly left all that to join Acharya Rajneesh's ashram, leaving many of his producers and fans befuddled or heartbroken. Thankfully, unlike Rajesh Khanna, whose career suffered a sudden shipwreck from which he could never recover, it was not the end of his film career. He returned after few years and proved his could still set the box office on fire.

Be it his acting career, quest for spirituality or taking a plunge into politics Vinod Khanna lived his life in his own terms, without caring much about 'log kya kahenge'.

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Phata Poster Nikhla Deshbhakt

It used to be said that reel life imitates real, then they became our role models and real started aspiring for reel, and now in this era of narcissistic selfie society the reel life stars have become spokespersons on almost anything under the sun.

With the country sabre rattling with Pakistan over terror attacks and aggressive nationalism being the new credo of political correctness, wearing patriotism on one's sleeve is the new normal. The whole country seems to have become a garrison with every citizen being a combatant. And those in the film industry are no way immune to it.

The other day I came across a 'viral' video widely shared and 'liked' on Facebook, whose title if loosely translated from Hindi to English would mean 'Nana Patekar shows Salman Khan his place'.

The video is a rant by the Tiranga star, who initially buttresses his military credentials by claiming that he had served the army for a couple of years and then goes on to say that the soldier was the most important person in the country. The rest of our countrymen are insignificant and he equates his current profession of being a film star as something as inconsequential as bed bugs.

He then goes on to declare that a ‘jung’ was on with the neighbouring country and hence it can't be business as usual. So Pakistani stars acting in Bollywood was not on. 

To be fair he was prodded repeatedly  by the videographer to decry Salman Khan and the interviewer finally got more than enough sound bites to cobble up a surefire viral video.

Salman Khan has been a trollers’ delight for his usual foot in mouth remarks. However his recent statement on Pakistani actors was actually a huge deviation from status quo. For a change he really sounded sensible when he said Pakistani actors come with valid visas and they cannot be equated with terrorists. 

It would have been a perfectly humane remark at normal times, but it touched a raw nerve post-Uri attacks. While TV studios are vying with each other to play high decibel war drums, it was suicidal to say something on those lines. Salman was declared enemy of the state and many of his industry peers too joined the chorus.

The last I heard on Pakistani actors was that Cinema Owners Exhibitors Association of India (COEAI) has decided not to release movies starring them, in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka and Goa. Thus Karan Johar's Ai Dil He Mushkil (which has Fawad Khan) and Shah Rukh Khan's Raees (Mahira Khan) run the risk of not hitting the cinema theatres of many states. 

Cinema, music concerts, cricket matches are very visible symbols and targeting them often satiates the revenge lust of the chest thumping jingoists like the political senas of Mumbai. For them it provides good return on investment in terms of publicity if they storm studios and multiplexes.

Whereas amid all this turmoil the corporate-bania class happily carries out trade with Pakistan. Hence cheap cement from Pakistan continues to land at our ports and various border trading points and exports from India are shipped to Pakistan without any ado.

Same is the case with China. Now Diwali is round the corner and we are being bombarded with messages to boycott Chinese crackers as it always sides with Pakistan. Irony dies thousand  deaths because they are tweeted using phones and laptops laden with components made in Chinese manufacturing hubs like Shenzhen.

While we are fed with swadeshi homilies, our captains of industries make fortunes doing business with the very countries we are being told to hate.

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James Bond In His Sanskari Avatar

The spectacular success of Spectre in the country has whetted the appetite of James Bond franchise and they want to go beyond the multiplex crowds of the Indian metros to tap the huge market that is Bharat - the country's small towns and hinterlands.

If it were only for the language barrier they would have overcome it by dubbing it in Hindi or any other Indian language, but their extensive research revealed that these audiences somehow cannot relate to the blond Daniel Craig's exploits and craved for shuddh desi characters and plot.

Hence it was decided that to get access to this untapped market they will have to align with local players, mainly the Bollywood filmmakers. The research also revealed that these filmmakers were also very eager to remake Bond flicks with Indian sanskari characteristics. They held an IPL type auction and some of the top Bond hits of yesteryears were lapped up by top Bollywood filmmakers for astronomical sums.

Leading the pack was Sooraj Barjatiya, who managed to snap up two films. The first one was The World is Not Enough, which would be renamed as The World is not Sanskari Enough.

Though the plot of the film is still at conception stage, discreet enquiries with chai walas and spot boys of Rajshri studios revealed the broad storyline is somewhat like this. The desi Bond is on a mission to prevent the sanskar deficit the world currently faces and some are even trying to annihilate it. In this mission he is ably assisted by another agent Sheikh bin Sultan al Zayed, who hails from another sanskar rich country - Saudi Arabia. Together they try to provide vital nourishment and other forms of sustenance to the sanskar starved West.

The other one from Rajshri stable would be For Your Eyes Only, which would be known as For Your Saatvic Eyes Only. The movie will be set in the pilgrim centres located to the north of Rishikesh and my sources were unable to get any more details.

Another yesteryear Bond flick Moonraker was notched up by Karan Johar after a protracted negotiations regarding the improvisation of the title. As it is well known Karan Johar always makes a film whose title begins with the letter ‘k’, hence it was decided that Moonraker in its desi avatar will be known as Karva Chauth Moon Dekhkar.

The movie will be set in Manhattan and revolves around a saatvik love story. Desi Bond falls in love with a girl after ensuring that she belongs to the same caste, but different gotra and is not a manglik. It is also about the valiant efforts of our NRIs in upholding our culture, despite living saat samundar paar.

News regarding the cast is totally under wraps but as in other Karan Johar movies this one will also have many making cameo appearances, which would include Baba Ramdev and Radhe Maa.

Ashutosh Gowarikar was able to snap up the remake of cold war flick Live and Let Die. It would be known as Live and Let Dal Fry. Set in Indian hinterland this movie the desi Bond tries to unravel the recent mystery behind the disappearance of this vital and saatvic source of protein from Indian plates.

It is also rumoured the Ram Gopal Varma is angling for the Timothy Dalton starrer Licence to Kill, but Bond franchise people are wary considering his recent box office track record. It has been more than a decade since he had delivered a hit. Sources close to Ram Gopal varma say if he clinches the deal the movie will be named Licence to kill: Ab Tak Chhappan.

(A work of fully faltoo imagination)

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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!

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The Timeless Appeal of Shawshank Redemption

This Facebook image of full-salt-no-pepper Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman together and the realisation that the cult movie they starred - Shawshank Redemption - was going to celebrate 20th anniversary left me astonished. Let me admit I was one of those who watched the movie only a couple of years ago using a USB, though the movie was released in an era when terms like internet were known only to the geeky class.
 
The film had a low profile release, at least in India, as it got overshadowed by the fading hype of Jurassic Park and at the Oscars Shawshank Redemption got eclipsed by the likes of Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump, which ensured that this movie drew a blank, despite seven nominations. I vaguely remember it being screened in some theatres and it soon faded away without much ado. The title itself sounded very intriguing and with words like 'redemption' thrown in it sounded more like a morality play.
 
Moreover the main actor Tim Robbins was quite an unknown commodity and so was Frank Darabont, who was making his debut as director. Though Morgan Freeman did ring a bell, having acted in successful movies such as Robinhood The Prince of Thieves and Unforgiven, he was not a household name like say Eddie Murphy.
 
So for me the movie got lost somewhere in the back of my mind until a couple of years ago when I came across a friend who had downloaded the movie in his computer. Using a USB I copied it to my system and began watching it. Within 15-20 minutes I realised that I was not watching some run of the mill stuff but a classic.

Tim Robbins plays a high street banker who lands in prison due to quirk of fate and learns to cope with life behind bars. While Freeman plays the long time jailbird, who keeps getting denied parole. The two develop a rare bond of friendship and later Robbins carries out a riveting escape from the prison. After a slow start the movie grows upon you. It does not have any science fiction special effects or slickly edited fight sequences or any gizmos - just plain straight forward story telling, often with voice over by Freeman in his  deep baritone, with a good eye for detail.  
 
By the time I had finished watching the riveting 142-minute long movie I realised it was one of the best films I had seen in my life and rued why I didn't see it on a 70 mm screen earlier. 

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Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna

Coming from a generation that grew up listening to his extremely hummable songs on AIR's Vividh Bharti and Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, seeing a Google doodle paying tribute to the master of yodel Kishore Kumar, on his 85th birth anniversary, was the ultimate compliment. It only shows that his appeal has transcended many generations - from the era of 35 RPM LP records to 35 GB USB drives, via cassettes and compact discs.

Radio stations and TV channels had built up a hype over his 85th birth anniversary. But for millions of Indians  Kishore Kumar's songs were anyway everyday happenings, they were meant to be hummed while taking baths, shaving or listened to in their I-pods or car stereos. Only their favorites varied - for some it was his racy numbers like Bachna ai haseeno or Om Shanti Om, to others it was a sad numbers like Chingari Koi badke or Koi hamdam na raha,  while for others it was the middling melodious romantic numbers like Pyaar maanga hai tumhi se or Ek ajnabi haseena se. To each his own such was Kishore Da's range.

His rise coincided with the rise of Rajesh Khanna, for whom he lent his voice in many films and later did so for Amitabh Bachchan and many other stars before dying at a relatively young age of 59. Interestingly some of his hit songs figured in movies that did not do well in box office. But thanks to the popularity of the song they are still in great demand in YouTube and other song downloading platforms. While watching those songs one felt the director or producer had let Kishore da down by selecting a poor star cast or a story line leading to poor show at box office.

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Culture And Anarchy

Recently I came across a news item that writers in Myanmar are trying to relearn the habits of free thought and testing the boundaries of free speech. Long spells under military rule meant journalists, writers, artists and others associated with cultural field had to undergo various levels of censorship to conform to what the regime thought was appropriate.
 
But before they cast away those conformist skins for the brave new world, it won't be a bad idea to share them with Indian writers and artists who seem to be staring at an increasingly intolerant society.

While for some learning these skills may be a tough grind as they have been under the corroding influence of democracy for more than six decades, but for organisations like say Tamil film industry or Hindi commercial film industry (who are either at the beck and call of Thackerays or Dawood Ibrahim) the learning curve to reach those levels of conformism may be a cakewalk, as they are almost there by default. Moreover the fact that the Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf has a good following in India will only be an added plus.

Another major challenge may be Indian conditions - they are different and hence the training may require some improvisations. In Myanmar the artistes have to contend with the jackboot of military junta and nothing else, but here they have to grapple with state, non-state, religious and corporate forces and that too with  many axes to grind.

Salman Rushdie recently put it very succinctly. He said that "because the writers, painters, filmmakers, artists don't have armies. We don't have the boys to put on streets to defend our film, novel or painting. So it's not hard to attack." He then went on to add that a "strange form of identity politics has developed in which people don't define themselves with things they love but by the things they hate. So to attack a book about the Ramayana, book about Shivaji or painting about Saraswati... these things are easy to do. That somehow galvanize the sense of identity of these extremist forces." 

And he should know, after all death threats and fatwas have shadowed him for decades.
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