s-

Ali's Notes

Try love, Anupam
It's a very rare feeling. There are times when a friend, one of your best friends, goes out of Mumbai and you find something precious missing in the city. You feel lonely and lost because that person’s presence in the city gives you a great sense of confidence. His ability to do things, get things done, his achievements, his ambitions and aspirations give you a feeling of strength. You feel you too can do some thing with him around. He is such a dependable friend, the kind of friend you rarely find. I feel like that when Anupam Kher goes out of Mumbai for a long spell of shooting or some show or some business trip abroad.

Anupam has been out quite often in recent times and one of the things I miss is his tremendous knowledge of books, some of the best books, old and new and some of his quotes. Like just now, I remember one of his quotes from a book. It is about love and it reads: "Love is natural and should be habitual and universal in its application. Discrete or focussed love is not love but only the ego’s substitute. Love should be as effortless as breathing and as indiscriminate as falling snow. Love is which naturally happens when the mind is attempting no shift in change. Love is a state of mind or a vision that handles all things equally. There is no part of love that can be privately kept, and the attempt to use love to hold one’s "own" merely reflects a misunderstanding of its nature. Love can only accompany what is given away, and since all of love must be given in order for all of it to remain, there can be no range to our giving. There is only one kind of love, the uncalculated love."

It is a very complex, delicate and philosophical way of looking at love, a feeling which is losing all feeling, all meaning today. Think about it, think about love because love too demands thinking, thinking of a very high order. So try loving this new way. Who knows you may find true love, the world may find true love, because we have to find true love, because true love is the only feeling that can save the world, millennium or no millennium.

Not by writers alone
It is absolutely and amazingly unbelievable how these great writers (you can find them walking around with their files all over and some of the supposedly most saleable names don’t even write, they only "give" what are called story narrations. They use their tongues, not pens, some even enact scenes before a mirror). I will try and give you a rough idea of how the great writers’ ideas work and you can come to your own learned conclusions.

Most writers who claim to be writers fail to impress our enlightened filmmakers in the very first round. Their stories are rehashed from some of the all-time hits most of the time -- something from Gunga Jamuna, something from Mother India, something from Deewaar and Sholay and even something from the miraculous Jai Santoshi Maa and sometimes from some other successful films which have made an impact on people at some time or the other, on some generation or the other. Some of the better blessed writers (blessed only by destiny or call it luck, not by God, surely) find an opportunity to influence or surprise some bakra (a buyer). The bakra falls for the subject and asks him to go ahead and work on the entire script which includes the story, screenplay and dialogue. He is sometimes given the freedom or is even forced to interact with other writers on the screenplay and dialogue. They demand a hefty fee and then ask for all the comforts -- a cottage in a hill station, a suite in one of the best hotels in some city or even a suite in a five-star hotel in one of the more fascinating countries abroad (one well-known writer even went to the extent to ask his producer to fly him to Sri Lanka "because India is not inspiring enough to write the love story I want to write").

Any way, the writers sit, sweat and slog it out or that is what they say and complete their script. They then give a narration to the filmmakers. They are thrilled. They’ve got all the "masala" for a hit, or even a super hit, they rave. The script then goes to the director who says he has never heard a script like that. He carries the script from one big star to another and all of them are interested but only the lucky one gets an opportunity to work in the film based on the script inspired by God Himself. Every member of the unit freaks out on the "funtastic script". The gullible distributors, exhibitors and financiers who believe they are smart too. The film goes into active making. The money pours in because of the "funtastic script" and the interest taken by all the stars, the lyricist, the music directors, the technicians, even the spot boys. The trials start. Everyone says it’s "great", "really great" "out of the world". The applause keeps flowing till the film is released. And what happens to the "funtastic script then?". It is rejected outright by the judges of the highest court, the people. The film flops, only because of the "funtastic script" approved by the entire team. They now try to find reasons why the film flopped. The writer is branded, blamed and even banished according to my writer friend Javed Siddiqui. But what about the producer, the director, the mighty stars and the financiers and the presenter who never stopped singing the praises of the script approved by an entire team of enlightened men and women?

Dutt jr, a best-seller
The Dutt family which has always lived through fire has also learned how to fight and emerge winners, tougher winners each time. I have given you countless examples of Dutt Sr fighting out all his battles all on his own. I can because I love meeting him, we meet quite often and I have tried to keep as close to him as possible during every crisis, during every trial by fire he has lived through and my admiration for him has only grown stronger.

His son, Sanjay, has always been a little aloof, a good strong soul who loves to live his life own way. The life Sanju has lived till now, a life which I’ve followed very closely too, can easily form the subject for a best seller which would also be a lesson, a source of inspiration to learn for all young ones.

A pampered childhood, stardom on a golden platter, his playing with the golden platter and losing all the gifts of stardom along the way, his taking to drugs, falling for it and growing into an addict which almost ruined him and his family, his getting involved in the Mumbai blasts case of 1993, his incaceration in Arthur Road jail for almost two and a half years, the torment and the torture the man who could be king went through in jail and hospital, his being handcuffed to a bed in jail, his self-confessed attempt to end it all by trying to commit suicide. And then his rising like a phoenix with the help of his panther father, the beginning of a new life, coming back to films, being welcomed, his first few films not doing very well, his marrying Rhea Pillai, the girl who waited and prayed for him during the days of the trial of the man she loved, his coming back in a big way with Daag-The Fire and now Vaastav, ("the best role in my entire career, because I always knew Raghu the character I was playing") and his maturing as an actor and making it to the big league inspite of all that he has gone through, battling it out with boys who started long after he had.

And soon all those who ran away from him came running back to his own little empire to please him, to flatter him, to get him to sign their films. Sanjay Dutt is hot property for the first time and he has made a promise not to let this opportunity go up in smoke. He is determined to be known as an actor who knows his job, an actor who is wanted, an actor who will be remembered. He wants to do his father, his sister Priya and Namrata, his brother-in-law Kumar Gaurav and Rhea proud. I wish his mother Nargis was here to see her son and her son’s father on top of the world on their own terms after almost being thrown into hell-fire.

The hunt’s on
Our ingenious, inspired and imaginative writers have discovered one more way of attracting gullible audiences. Almost all their subjects seem to be falling by the wayside. Their films are flopping for reasons which are difficult to fathom. So what do they do? They have to survive somehow. So the latest subject that has inspired them are stories woven around the stories of tribal girls and their exploitation.

At the very outset a writer who is busy writing "a tribal subject" says "when you are making a film on tribals you don’t have to worry about the clothes the girls and women in the film wear or do not wear. All you have to do is to cover them with spotlessly white mini saris with very little to cover their sacred (yes, he used the word) parts of the female anatomy. A young tribal girl frolicking in the rain is suddenly eyed by a group of city-based monster-boys. They follow her. She has not seen monsters like these before. She only has her father, her goats and a childhood friend who is supposed to marry her soon. The hunters forget their hunting and begin haunting this innocent girl. Their hunt continues till they pin her down and gang rape her. It is just the beginning of a war between the city-bred hunters and the tribals. The girl in various states of dress and undress is only used as an excuse to tittilate, to tease, to thrill the front-benchers She is not shown nude at anytime but the clever cameraman focusses on various parts of the female form so that it is there for all the two and a half hours that the film lasts. All this is very fine but where does one find the heroines willing to do such daring roles? These days even the younger new girls are not willing to reveal. This much and no further, they say but these filmmakers who specialise in this genre of films do not give up. They can’t. They have to make films to survive and all those big names treat them as outcastes and are looked down upon. So, they have to follow their own rules and make their films. Asha Parekh and all her opinions can come later.

What’s this Bollywood?
For God’s sake will someone tell me who was the first man to call the Indian film industry, Bollywood? It sounds sickening. I hate it being called Bollywood. What does Bollywood mean? From what I fathom, Bollywood is only a way of looking down on our industry, making it sound secondary to Hollywood? It gives you a humiliating feeling that we, the Indian film industry which makes double the number of films Hollywood makes, are considered a poor cousin, some distant relative, some outcaste, some aise waise log who are second-rate or third rate in whatever we do. Bollywood sounds like a bad joke, a bad word. I have been working myself to anger everytime someone calls this industry Bollywood. I was, therefore doubly happy when Shabana Azmi openly lambasted all those who called the industry Bollywood. Why have we allowed some half-boiled, half-baked critics and so called historians call us names just because Bollywood sounds like Hollywood? We have some of the most talented people working here, some of whom can give the bests of Hollywood a run for their money. We are making all out attempts to take on Hollywood. We know it is difficult but we will not stop trying. We must work hard, very hard till the world is forced to sit up take us seriously and call us "the great Indian film industry". I would even go to the extent of calling upon all my friends who care for Indian cinema to stand up, raise their voice and tell the world that we are not jokers prancing around in a funny circus called Bollywood. We are a serious industry with the aim to beat all those who come our way. Left to me I would even use pressure or force to call all upon those pundits to stop calling our beloved industry Bollywood. What Bollywood? Who Bollywood? Throw out that word into some blazing hell where all things and beings who work against the Indian industry of which we are proud are thrown into.