s-

Ali's Notes

It’s so bad!
It's just been six years since we started our awards, the SCREEN-Videocon Awards, and it already seems like we have completed sixty. The experiences we have gone through, both emotional and practical, the psyches of various kinds of people who have been involved with the awards we’ve analysed, the stars’ more than anybody else, have taught us lessons for several lives. It’s a very tough job organising these awards. The fever starts right from the time we start finding genuine people to form genuine juries for films, TV, music and Marathi films. These distinguished men and women have to find time to see films, to discuss films, to nominate films and finally decide on the winners. We have been very lucky all these six years to find some of the best jurors, men and women from the industry who couldn’t be easily questioned. This is the first and really tough part. Then comes the job to come up with entertainment show, the stage, the art director, the director of the show and all kinds of technicians working under them. We have been successful during all the six years (and let the critics say what they want).

There is one problem which has gradually cropped up with passing time. The heart-pounding demands made by the stars who perform at the shows! Just imagine. This time, a leading star demanded sixty-five lakhs of rupees just for a three and a half minutes dance item. There were others too who were (and are) friends (and other nice people but something happens to them around the time of our awards (and other awards) and they only think of money. The tension grows nerve-wracking. I don’t know who started this money business. The first three shows we had we didn’t pay anyone any money. But now we have to talk money first and everything else afterwards. The stars demand their prices and their prices are only shooting sky-high. I will not be surprised if they start demanding money for attending our award shows too. How important is money? How long will this game go on? It’s scary when it comes to money. One pretty actress who comes from a renowned family was committed to perform at our show. Suddenly, just a few days before the show we received a letter saying she was sorry she had met with an accident and couldn’t do it. The next morning she was on the covers of every newspaper lighting the lamp to inaugurate the International Film Festival of India. A few weeks later she was dancing away to glory at another show. What do you call such lowly behaviour? Do the stars set their own rules once they become stars? A question which has been disturbing me endlessly.


Khan ek khazana
A scene outside a studio
Where one Khan made history
So many years ago
A man called Mehboob Khan
Today it’s the day of another Khan
The day of Shah Rukh Khan
He is shooting with his favourite
Actress, Juhi Chawla, so full of life
They are both so full of life
There’s a huge crowd all around
Inspite of the tight security
There are men women and children
Who’ve come from all over the country
From England, from Pakistan, from Paris
They all want to see Shah Rukh
They wait for hours to see him for a few minutes
They finally see their dream fulfilled
They are thrilled to see his clothes
Which he wears to work, his shoes, his car
They say they’ll slit their wrists
If they don’t get a chance to see Shah Rukh
The Khan completes one shift and is in a rush
To push off to another at 8.00 pm
How much money does a man need, I ask him
“I don’t know why I love so much money
But I love money. It helps you to become a man”
He poses with almost every fan
Signs every autograph, something which
Not every star does
He then gets into a sleek car Number One
He pulls Meghna (Bosky) into the car with him
Is Meghna planning a film with the Khan?
What a fascinating team they would make!
May what they are planning happen
It could be the happening of our times

The best still
And whoever says Amitabh Bachchan has lost the fire at fifty-six is talking through his foolish tall hat. Amitabh, this grand-father of Nayi Naveli is still as full of all the enthusiasm, all the excitement, all the joie de vivre and all but all the entertainment. I who have had the privilege and the pleasure of watching the growth and growth of “the Big B” through all the ups and downs, through all the hurts and humiliations, through the valley of death only to emerge more determinal to prove that an Amitabh is born only to win.

True, not all his films have been doing well at the box-office but the craze for the man who has been accepted as the star of the millennium has to be seen and heard to be believed. I was a witness again when Subrata Roy, Amitabh’s “brother”, the one man institution who started Sahara with just two thousand rupees and a second hand Lambretta (scooter) and built an empire which other emperors and empires can only envy, was celebrating the twenty-second anniversary of Sahara with his fellow workers (he calls himself “working manager”). Among those who entertained a disciplined crowd which went into a delightful frenzy, were Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, Aishwarya Rai, Raveena Tandon and Jaspal Bhatti and “the Big B” above all. “The Big B” with a grey beard sang and danced to some of the best songs from his films. He spoke to the audience, drove them mad. He delivered some of his best dialogues which were as powerful as they were when they made him Amitabh Bachchan, the superstar. He rendered Kabhi kabhi mere dil mein and took an entire generation into a flashback. He recited lines from his father’s Madhushala. He knew them by heart. He was on stage for almost all the four hours. The other stars were there too. They too tried to steal as many hearts as possible. But they couldn’t beat “the Big B”. They just couldn’t. They’ll confess they couldn‘t if they go by their conscience.

Come on, Divya
Girls, my mother always said were much more brilliant than boys. For years I felt she said it and believed it because she had three naughty boys who would come to naught she said and no girls. She often asked God why He had not blessed her with atleast one daughter but her God had given her less than what she deserved, always. Just imagine bringing up three boys when she was widowed at the age of thirty five! She went through all kinds of trials that were heaped on her. She died when she was forty-five but she never gave up her strong belief in girls being much better than boys and how girls would gradually take over the world ruled by “rascals and swines” (that’s how she knew and addressed all men).

I wish my mother was alive now, now when more and more girls are showing the boys that they are in for trouble, that they were gradually getting set to take, snatch or grab the world from men. My mother’s feeling is growing stronger when I see the girls and women around me, women like Rekha, Shabana Azmi, Hema Malini and Zeenat Aman and Deepti Naval who started some sort of a revolution. And now a whole lot of girls made of sterner stuff in more was than one, girls like Pooja Bhatt who was little girl till the other day and who is now a producer of meaningful films and girls like Divya Dutta and Vani Tripathi who I’ve known closely and who I’m sure will be among the first battalion to lead the war against all those men who have treated them as paer ki jooti for years. Come on, Divya, come on Vani! For my mother’s sake, for my sake, for the world’s sake.

What the hell!
I am still exulting, celebrating and thanking God on high for the success of our awards function. I have (like my entire team has) the right to because we literally slogged and sweated it out for days and nights. But more than the joy it is the heart that keeps rankling, piercing, puncturing and even giving me sleepless nights because of the little wounds caused by some so-called great men and women. They were the cause for all kinds of mental injuries, injuries which made us think again about them and their heartless and ruthless behaviour. I remember a big star, a legend I went to invite on a hot and sweaty afternoon. I remember how he looked at our card, caressed it lovingly and said “certainly, certainly SCREEN is my paper. I’ll be there. What time do you want me there?” he asked and somehow I knew he had made up his mind that he would not be there and he wasn’t. I did not care to ask why because I couldn’t force him to, he was a legend and he had a mind of his own. But I did not expect him to behave the way he did. I wonder if these greats imagine how we wait for them at the gates and how we hold our hearts breaking into pieces when we know that they had fooled us, fractured our feelings for them. I remember a senior actress-leader whose serial was not nominated and how she was “very angry” and how she said she would not come. Then she said she had a party at her home just one night before our function. She said she would come to my function, if I went to her party. I left all the last minute activities of the night before our great night. It was painful, disturbing, damaging but I still went but she didn’t come. And from my childhood I believed she was a woman with a big heart! There was one entire family who couldn’t make it, because they were “sick”. I asked one of the best psychiatrists how all of them could fall sick at the same time and he said it was a great clash of egos, nothing else. One of their little boys was not nominated for an award.

I love these people, these film people but I hate their petty-mindedness at times. They are small people somewhere and their being small hurts me. Why do these poor, sensitive, men and women behave like rhinoceros and dinosaurs when it comes to playing with our hearts for no reason at all? Why do they behave one way when they need something from us? And why do they expect the world from us when we just ask them to show themselves at our greatest day in the year which is the best way to show off? Will they ever learn to respect our feelings? They bend and break before all those mags-rags which destroy them. They take us for granted for being good to them. What the hell, friends! What kind of friends are you? Going with the wind. Don’t you know you will be gone with the wind one day, gone with the dust, reduced to ashes? Don’t you realise that glory and grandeur and ego are ephemeral, now here, nowhere tomorrow? What will be remembered are good deeds, the smiles you bring on the faces of millions. You are sensitive, fragile, handle-with-care creatures. Try putting yourselves into our chappals sometimes and you will choke when you are beguiled, betrayed, battered by your boorish behaviour. I am not condemning you. I am only showing you ways to make your lives more meaningful. The choice is yours. Take it or leave it. Try taking it and you will see the difference it makes to your lives.