The prostitution of the pen

I am travelling by an autorickshaw being driven by a young man who is a crazy fan of Aamir Khan. He has a cassette player which plays the song Eh, kya bolti, aati hai kya Khandala, sung by Aamir Khan in Ghulam. He plays it full blast twice. I tolerate it till I can. I am already sick and tired with all the sound and fury signifying nothing the traffic in Mumbai has turned into and I wonder how long I will be able to survive like this. I request the Aamir Khan fan at whose mercy I am to slow down the volume or switch it off if he didn’t mind. The devil in Aamir Khan’s fan goes for my neck, almost avoiding a headlong crash into a double-decker monster in the streets and says: “Aamir Khan ka gaana achcha nahi lagta to pahila bolna mangta tha, utaar deta tha raste ke beech mein. Chal takle ab bhi taim hai, uttar jaa, mayyat ke gaadi me jaa. Apni gaadi me jaana hai to Aamir Khan ka gaana sunnahich padega (You should have told me you didn’t like Aamir Khan’s song. I would have asked you to get off mid way. Come on, baldie, there’s still time, get down and travel in a hearse. If you want to go with me you’ll have to listen to Aamir Khan’s song). My head is like the heads of all those men and women on the Titanic just moments before the Titanic sank. I don’t know what to do. I keep quiet. I have a wife and a little daughter who is madly in love with Aamir Khan and here was this Aamir Khan fan/fiend all set to kill me if I didn’t like Aamir Khan’s song about Khandala and all the aysh (good things) he would do once he gets up there with his rani, Rani Mukerji. I have no choice. I keep listening to the song without really listening to it (you say you can’t do it, I say I can, with a will anyone can). The autorickshaw comes to a screeching halt. There are atleast five other autorickshaws standing close like long last friends and believe it or not, all of them have Aamir Khan singing Eh kya bolti. I can’t believe it. I open my ears, my eyes, all my senses to know the truth. It is the truth. Aamir’s song is the most popular song all over Mumbai. My salaams to you, Aamirbhai and sorry all you Aamitbhai’s fans.

I get out of the autorickshaw and walk into the Dinanath Mangeshkar auditorium and lyricist Majrooh Sultanpuri leads a packed auditorium in paying tributes to “the Shahenshah of ghazals”, Talat Mehmood. The mood all around is solemn, serene, silent till Majrooh Sultanpuri stands up to speak and he doesn’t speak. He thunders. He lambasts the kind of poetry that is being written in films today. He makes a special mention of Aamir Khan’s song about going to Khandala to do some aysh with Rani. He says “this is not poetry, this is the prostitution of the pen.” The packed auditorium is stunned. Majrooh sahab trembles with anger. His voice is strong and clear and angry. He wants someone to put this “prostitution of the pen” to an end. “It is only you, you, the people who can put an end to it by rejecting such songs,” Majrooh roars and the audience sits shell-shocked. They have never seen this avtaar of Majrooh. He then lashes out at the Paap ki duniya. He says today there are “paap songs”. There are “paap bhajans”, there are “paap qawwalis”, there are “paap ghazals”, there are “paap poems”. Today everything that is paap is everything that is liked, he says and the audience knows what he means by paap. He means sin. He means that everything has been reduced to paap and this paap will destroy all that is good, all that is for the soul. All that is for the pleasures of the body will live. Everything else will die. How I wish Aamirbhai was there to answer him. It was his song. I wondered how that autorickshaw man would react to Majrooh. Strangle him with his blood red scarf? Kya paap hai? Kya punya hai aaj ke duniya mein, Majrooh Sahab?

Two Javeds in one

The last time Javed Siddiqui wrote Tumhari Amrita in just three days. The play with Shabana Azmi and Farouque Shaikh sitting together at a table and reading letters written to each other during the times they spent together, during the times they were together and during the time they weren’t, during the time the country was passing through good times and during the times the country was passing through bad times. The play was a heart-wrencher not because it had stars like Shabana and Farouque in it but because of the stuff the play was made of. Writing at its best, writing from the soul was the highlight of the play. That’s why the play succeeded wherever it was staged, even in the Gulf, in London and America. And I’m absolutely sure just a few shows of Tumhari Amrita in Pakistan will help people, politicians, priests and all those prophets of doom forget all the reasons for the hostility between the two countries. Javed worked the same miracle on a very different level when he wrote Salgirah, a play about marital relations. Anupam Kher and Kiran played the husband and wife. It met with tremendous success all over adding more power to Javed’s pen. Now Javed has just finished writing another play which will have Sachin Khedkar and Nikki Aneja in the leading roles. It has still to open. In the meanwhile Javed has completed writing another “lovely love story”, a play which can be done only if a leading female star between the age of twenty and twenty-five has the guts to go on stage and bring Javed’s love story alive. Do we have such a gutsy girl anywhere around, gutsy, talented and full of the fire to face a very great challenge? Where are you, young lady? Stand up, Ms Courageous and bring Javed’s love story alive? Incidentally, this Javed Siddiqui is not related to the other Javed Siddiqui who wrote Duplicate, Baazigar and Jab Pyar Kisise Hota Hai. They are the same man but two different, very different writers in one man. Strange, but true.

What’s this, Sahab?

I knew it was coming. I was trying to find out ways and means to find a way out. But no, no chance. The phone rang just a few minutes before midnight. Yes, it was her. It was the call I was scared of the most at that moment, a call that scared me more than the call of the mrityudaata (the messenger of death) believe me. It was Charu Kanani, the all-time great fan of Amitabh Bachchan. She had seen Major Saab and she was hysterical, she was sobbing. She kept choking and asking: “How could that director and his writers cheat him into playing a role like this one? Why did Sahab (Amitabh) allow them to take him for a ride? How could he who is enlightened, Amitabh means enlightened, I know, fall into a trap like this? He fell in Mrityudaata and he has fallen again now in Major Saab. He is as good as ever. He looks absolutely fantastic in the uniform of a major and his salt and pepper beard. His voice is still all fire and brimstone. Everything about him is very good but what about the film? I think, no, I believe there is some saazish, some conspiracy to harm him. Bad story, wayward screenplay, dialogue that says so much and mean so little, music which is a cacaphony, co-stars, especially the young woman in love and all the others phoney. How could Amitabh the God whose ground I have been worshipping ever since I was a little girl agree to do a film like this? Why does he have to do a film like this now? What does he want, only money to save his company? Tell him, God is on his side, my prayers are with him. He will save his company, help it prosper. But for God’s sake tell him not to do such insigfinifant films. It hurts. It breaks my heart. It really makes me sick for days. We don’t want our God weighed in the same machine in which today’s puny stars are weighed. Save yourself, Sahab. How can you let this happen to you? How can you let this happen to us? You can’t. So chin up and carry on Sahab. We are with you. God is with you. What more do you want?”

What do I tell Charu and others like her, Mr Bachchan?

P.S.: My daughter, Swati has just had her say too. She says “ Amitabh Bachchan is great, okay, but why does he do such rank bad films? Look at my Aamir Khan.” What do I tell her, Mr Bachchan? I can’t say anything atleast after seeing Major Saab. And it hurts!

The rain pains

Suddenly on a suddenly rain soaked morning I wake up to the sound of the rain (the only sound I love next to Charu’s voice) and some strange thoughts pour on my mind, it’s a downpour, in fact. And I realise how the good old “darzis”, “tailors” and “masters” have been put on the shelf and how all the Aslambhais, Yusufbhais and Rabias are being forced to make way for the Manish Malhotras and Neeta Lullas and Anna Singhs and Rockys. These new young men and women are the ones who design the costumes for both the heros and heroines of Hindi films today. The stars wear what these new super beings want them to wear, and the director and producer can go take a ride to make arrangements for some more money for their ever so costly designs. These costume designers are the saviours of the stars. They have to be paid like stars, pampered like stars. The stars walk into their boutiques like they walk into some mandir. Sometimes one costume they design costs the same as a middle class family spends on food for an entire month. The sound of the rain grows painful when I think of all this.

The only truth

The more I think of Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya the more I think of that part of Mumbai which I have seen — a city, its callousness, its cruelty and its chilling circumstances, the teeming-maddening population, the sprawling slums, the endlessly flowing gutters, the growing number of liquor bars, legal and illegal, the social clubs (which are anti-social most of them), the hell called prostitution, the don’s dens, the little dons and the big dons, the deep yawning and scary gap between the rich and the poor, the nexus between the criminals and the police, the bonds between the police, the politicians and the dons and their men, the easy availability of weapons, the dirt-cheap price of life, the art of killing and escaping, the almost daily routine of someone or the other being killed in an encounter or in a straight firing, five bullets, nine bullets, twelve bullets, pumped into a man’s body in a densely populated locality, panic everywhere in the mohalla (area), the grievously wounded man being rushed to hospital and being declared dead before reaching hospital, killing for money, killing to establish supremacy in the ilaaka (area), killing to live, killing to make a better living. I’ve seen all this. I’ve seen all this happening in films too but in no film have I seen it happening like I’ve seen it in Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya. No Mumbai filmmaker has succeeded in capturing the truth about Mumbai like Ramu has. The truth as he has seen it is just like the truth I’ve seen, the naked truth, the bitter truth. This truth obsesses me, haunts me, wakes me up in a sweat. Thank you, Ramu for treating me with this truth. I hope this truth does what it does to me to hundreds and thousands of youth rushing on the wrong side of the road reaching a dead end, an end by death. This truth can save this city, this society, this country, this world. That’s the power of this truth.