Dinesh Thakur

Talent in revolt succeeds
The screenplay of destiny, is just what life for every man, woman and child has been ever since life began. And that is just what makes life interesting, inspiring, even idiosyncratic at times. I have followed the screenplays of some of the most glaring destinies and among them one that inspires me is the outstanding screenplay of Dinesh Thakur, Dinesh, a screenplay which could have gone one way and made him, maybe, one of the most talented character actors or villains of Hindi films. But whose screenplay had other ideas written out for him and took him in a very different direction.

Dinesh did his first few films, specially Rajnigandha, directed by Basu Chatterjee, who changed the very trend of filmmaking for a while, Anubhav, another trendsetter made by a director for whom setting trends was a passionate habit, Basu Bhattacharya. Dinesh also had films like Rajbans Khanna’s Jalianwala Bagh, Ramanand Sagar’s costume drama, Baghawat and some other insignificant films "to make a living in a difficult and ruthless city like Mumbai". The screenplay of his destiny took a drastic turn after Baghawat (Revolt) and he revolted, became a rebel and made a striking comeback years later in the late Basu Bhattacharya’s Aastha, in the season of spring, "A rare exception I made in the case of Basuda, who in many ways was my guru when he came to films. For more than 20 years after Baghawat, the screenplay of destiny in the life of Dinesh took him to Hindi theatre from where he was first discovered by Basu Chatterjee who was enamoured by his intense talent and cast him in his first film, Rajnigandha.

Dinesh, these days is celebrating the 24th anniversary of ANK, the theatre group he founded with the help of a few like-minded and creative talented friends ("I don’t believe in celebrating silver jubilees and golden jubilees. I have decided to celebrate the 24th anniversary for creative reasons of my own and I have, I feel, a right to do what I want to unless something overpowering comes in and disturbs my balance, my control, my total control over myself.")
But first a little about the daring breakaway, the revolt, the baghawat from Indian cinema. It was all well and good when it all started for him as an actor. He liked playing the roles that were offered to him, roles like the rejected lover in Basu Chatterjee’s Rajnigandha and the other lovers in Basu Bhattacharya’s Anubhav and Aastha (in the season of spring). The film’s were appreciated. The two Basu’s, specially, made a name for themselves. They found ways to spend the minimum, to get the best talent and to make the best quality of film. They found ways to reach the audience in a sensible way. The industry even welcomed the intense and sensitive actor, Dinesh Thakur - and so did the critics and the audience. He was not like any other actors in the crowd. He was in a class by himself.

Appreciation and recognition "threw" him into the "marketplace" forcibly. He was soon wanted by all kinds of filmmakers, big and small, and he was caught in a trap from which he had to extricate himself, literally fight himself out free from the golden cage they were all trying to cage him in. He could have fallen and made tonnes of money, built bungalows, made it as a star, but that was not what he had come to Mumbai for. "Dum ghutne laga," he said in one of our many conversations. "Aur in saare temptations to maine dheere dheere thukra diya. People called me a mad man, a foolish man, an eccentric. They said there were actors who were waiting to get the kind of roles and films he was getting and here he was outright rejecting them without even listening to the various scripts till the end." He didn’t believe in acting or making films which depended on trash and nothing but trash in the name of entertainment which was slowly growing into the opium, ganja and charas, the people’s common addiction, which was gradually ruining them, physically and mentally.

Dinesh watched this degeneration of films both from within and without. The resentment grew into anger and finally led to the final walkout. He gave up all the golden opportunities and decided to dedicate the rest of his life to theatre which was his first love before he came to make it in films. Dinesh wanted nothing of all that. He wanted creative satisfaction as an actor and a director if possible. And he knew that he could do it because if there was anyone who knew the talent that was simmering in him, it was Dinesh himself. He decided to take one major step. It was just the time when Shashi Kapoor and his wife, Jennifer Kapoor, "blessed Bombay" building Prithvi Theatre in honour of Shashi’s father, the late Prithviraj Kapoor, who was a doyen of theatres in the ’40s and ’50s. Dinesh approached Shashi and Jennifer and they were more than impressed with his ideas and talent. Soon Hindi theatre which was lying dormant and almost in the throes of death in Bombay came alive at Prithvi Theatre because of the almost round-the-clock hard work put in by Dinesh and his team which was small in the beginning but which grew into a flourishing tree of talent.

Today when Shashi Kapoor looks back and sometimes thinks of his wife Jennifer, he wonders what men like Dinesh and hundreds of other talented young men and women from different parts of the country would have done if she had not had the foresight of building a theatre, a theatre which was unique, something which was found nowhere else in India and where lovers of theatre could really enjoy theatre, something which they had lost for years because no one was prepared to take the first step to reach higher when it came to theatre.
Right now Dinesh is creating some kind of a record at Prithvi Theatre. He has been conducting an annual ANK festival during the last 24 years. This year he is celebrating it in a very different way. He has dedicated the entire festival of 24 major and controversial plays, all of them written by Vijay Tendulkar, the controversial playwright, whom Dinesh considers one of his "gurus". He has also made people accept Tendulkar as "the playwright of the millennium".

Unfortunately, the playwright who should have been gloriously happy is thoroughly disillusioned not because of what Dinesh is doing but because all that he has written (and he has written some of the most powerful plays in any language and Dinesh has staged has not been able to fulfil his ambition, an ambition he has nurtured all his life. He has realised his writing or anyone’s writing doesn’t have the power to change the cruelty, the callousness and the cursedness of society. He, however, hopes Dinesh continues his good work and the giant of a writer who had almost given up writing has agreed to make a comeback if Dinesh is going to be the director. A strange life it has been for Dinesh that’s why that line "the screenplay of destiny” just came to me automatically, the first thing I woke up one morning.

Ali Peter John