#
I had a strange dream the other day. I dreamed that while browsing in a bookshop, I ran into
#
the me of 1990 from 30 years ago. He is 16 years old. I am 46. He was walking around
#
in the street in 1990 and walks into this bookstore, which magically also has another
#
door leading out to 2020. The poor lad is bewildered by the books here. I watch him
#
verily as he opens one book to that early page in which the date of publishing is written
#
and then he steps back in shock and horror. He turns around to see who else is there,
#
but I am the only one there. Our eyes meet, but he doesn't know he is me 30 years later.
#
No doubt he imagines his future self differently. And, as I now remember, he also imagines his
#
present self differently from what it is. I look at him with jealousy. He is so slim
#
with all his life ahead of him. I look at him with revulsion. I remember who I was,
#
my anxieties and my prejudices, my unearned arrogance, my foolish vanity. I look at him
#
with pity. He will take so long to learn so little and then it might be too late. And
#
meanwhile, the poor lad is trapped in the future. As I am lost in these thoughts, I
#
see him turn around and walk towards me. I recoil in horror because at that moment, as
#
his young eyes meet mine, it strikes me that he is less of a stranger to me than I am to
#
myself. Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics
#
and behavioral science. Please welcome your host, Amit Verma. Welcome to The Scene and
#
The Unseen. I'm often amazed by how much the world has changed in the last 30 years,
#
perhaps more than in any other 30 year span in history. Technology, social media, globalization
#
have all transformed our society. We normalize change so quickly. So yesterday's miracle
#
is often today's banal. Yesterday's magic is today's science. So some of us don't even
#
realize how much we have changed and are changing. I explored some of this territory in episode
#
137 of The Scene and The Unseen in which the great columnist Santosh Desai shared his insights
#
on the changes in our society in the last 30 years. And my guest today is Paramita Vohra,
#
another columnist who never fails to take me deeper into myself. So much of her work
#
makes me look at the familiar with new eyes. And new eyes, in fact, is a theme of some
#
of her work. Paramita has made films, written many columns, created installations and open
#
minds. Also, she brings to all her work a lens that is different from the male gaze
#
of men with beards, as she calls them, which misses as much as it sees. And as the show
#
is called The Scene and The Unseen, how could I have a better guest on it than Paramita?
#
Welcome to the show, Paro. Hi, thank you. So, Paro, before we sort of get down to your
#
work and all the weighty themes of this episode, tell me a little bit about yourself. What's
#
your journey? Like, what did the seven-year-old Paro want to be? I think I wanted to be a
#
librarian when I was seven years old. I seem to remember that, which is a little bit like
#
a drunk wanting to own an alcohol shop, right? I wanted unlimited access to books, like many
#
of us at that age, in that era. Where was this? Where were you born and brought up?
#
I was born in Pune, but I was brought up in many different places because my father was
#
in the Air Force. And in fact, one of the things, wherever I went, was to find the local
#
lending library and become a member. And when I was seven, we were actually posted in Hyderabad,
#
in Sikandrabad, which is a beautiful Cantonment town, and full of a sense of Enid Blyton-like
#
mystery. Because, you know, since it's a Cantonment town, it still has all those old colonial
#
buildings with very high ceilings. And I don't know if there's a secret passage behind this
#
room and all of that. And my brain was definitely chock-full of having read all that stuff. And
#
I wanted more than anything to have a secret club, except I didn't have too many friends.
#
And there was a very old colonial club called the Sikandrabad Club, and it had a separate
#
room, which was the children's library, like almost like a little house, inside somewhat
#
felt like a forest to me. When I saw it as a grown-up, I was like, oh, it's just a few
#
plants. And there was a very elderly, or seemed elderly to me at that time, Anglo-Indian lady
#
who ran the library. I was a bit scared of her, but she sort of took to this funny kid
#
who would come every day. Every day I would go to the library for a new book, right?
#
Were you the only kid who would go every day?
#
I think I was the only kid who was to go to the library, maybe. I mean, there was a shelf
#
of Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys and that sort of thing.
#
So I read both. I read all very quickly. And I might've been the only kid who was reading
#
the other books in the library, right? And she was very sweet. I was scared of her, but
#
now when I look back, she was very sweet, always looking for books to give me. And I
#
guess this was my idea of heaven as an odd child who didn't have a lot of friends, who
#
was a little peculiar and a bit of a misfit. So I obviously felt like when I grow up, if
#
I'm a librarian, I'll always be at home.
#
And what is that kind of moment where you discover a different kind of literature from
#
the children's literature? Like I remember for me, it was like, I was very privileged
#
in the sense my father had thousands of books at home. And one day I stumbled upon a book
#
titled The House of the Dead. And of course it seemed like a nice adventure book and I
#
picked it up and it was Dostoevsky's account of his time in prison in Siberia. And I was
#
completely hooked. So that's kind of, you know, I can remember that as a moment that
#
changed everything for me. Was it, was it a similar sort of...
#
So I mean, I don't have such a precise memory, but I do think that this voraciousness is
#
a way that you, like your life changes because your appetite is constantly leading you to
#
look for more and more things. And my parents had a lot of books and all the books used
#
to be kept in this study room, which had the television. So, and you didn't really, I mean,
#
back in the seventies, you watch TV once a week for the Sunday movie or Chitrahar or
#
whatever. So that room itself used to feel like a mystery room because you didn't go
#
in there very often. Nobody was staying in that room. And that bookshelf, once I'd finished
#
all my books, I obviously would keep looking. I must confess that the book I remember most
#
was some kind of a porno I found, I think. But yes. And then I got caught reading it
#
and got whacked also. But I mean, I think the first grown-up book that I remember reading,
#
though I don't remember the book now, was Of Mice and Men. And I do think there is something
#
fantastic about reading something you don't really get, but knowing, you know, there is
#
something to get here. There is that feeling of mystery and excitement and adventure and
#
gives you something to look forward to and push towards that I want to become the person
#
who understands that book. And so you start looking for other books along the way. And
#
I think in the same way, a little bit later, we were posted in Baghdad. My dad was posted
#
in Baghdad. And there was a Kendra Vidyalaya there.
#
Kendra Vidyalaya in Baghdad.
#
Yes. And in fact, you know, in the Kendra Vidyalaya, because I had studied in the South,
#
my Hindi was horrible. And I was like, I cannot study Sanskrit. Like Hindi is bad enough.
#
But I mean, Sanskrit suddenly, so I cried and cried and I was somehow excused. And my
#
Sanskrit teacher refused to take that lying down. And she said, I'll give you extra classes
#
in Sanskrit. And I'm very grateful to her because Sanskrit is a pretty systematic language.
#
And because now I see that I'm a conceptual thinker, so I really took to it. And my Hindi
#
teacher was very upset because I got like 100 on 100 in Sanskrit and some 5 on 10 or
#
whatever, 50% in Hindi. And she felt betrayed by all of this. But I feel my teachers at
#
that time also, teachers take an interest in the odd kids who they feel are bookish.
#
And my teachers gave me many books. So I remember that my social studies teacher gave me Alex
#
Haley's Roots, when I must have been 11 or something. So again, while reading it, I of
#
course understood that book, it was not so hard to understand. But it was a little bit
#
more grown up than the stage I was at. But I think all of those things, yes, did help
#
me know that the world is a very complex and interesting and different place. And all the
#
places I'm not supposed to go are the places I should definitely go and check out.
#
No, and it strikes me that back in those days, 70s, 80s, for a curious, imaginative Indian
#
kid, which I also was in the 80s, I can remember there's really not much to do. You read
#
books if you're fortunate enough to have books available to you read them. But today there
#
is so much so I'll ask you to take sort of a step out of yourself for a moment and imagine
#
the seven year old Paramita or the 10 year old Paramita in today's times. Is she still
#
reading as much? What is she doing? How is she driven?
#
I think a seven year old version of me probably would not exist very easily. Maybe they do
#
exist. I think I don't think that a seven year old today would be reading as much. But
#
I don't think that they're any different in terms of a sense of curiosity. In fact, you
#
know, the strange coexistence in India, especially of how on the one hand, kids are very separate
#
from adults. But on the other hand, they're all mixed up in adult life. I think it creates
#
a particular kind of condition. So I do think that seven year olds today are both very grown
#
up in some of the things they understand in ways that we certainly weren't we were a little
#
bit more lost in the woods. But I think there is still a sense of mystery and science that
#
they're very interested in. I think certainly if I was seven today, I would be a little
#
bit more interested in doing experiments and learning how things work because YouTube is
#
the new library, right? I mean, the internet is a new library for kids. And I think they
#
are discovering varied things in it in their own way.
#
Can we explore the thought a little bit further? Like when you talk about how adult life is
#
much more interspersed with childhood life than it was then, is that in some ways maybe
#
a threat to the innocence of childhood? Or what does it mean for the experience of childhood?
#
You know, I am not a fan of this innocence of childhood idea. I don't think that children
#
are any more or less innocent than anybody else. I mean, I perceive myself as a very
#
innocent person still. So I think innocence is a quality that all of us have. And some
#
of us hold on to it till we die. And some of us don't. And one of the reasons that we
#
don't is because innocence has a certain vulnerability involved, right? And when I say innocent,
#
I don't mean naive or unknowing of the world, right? But rather that you're willing to be
#
surprised, rather that you're willing to imagine, like go into something new every time, yes.
#
So one of my favorite pieces of writing actually is William Blake's Songs of Innocence and
#
Experience. And for me, it was a very novel idea when I read it that, well, being innocent
#
is not the same as being good. To know and then be good is very different than to be
#
virtuous by not knowing anything and maintaining innocence, right? So I'm not using innocence
#
in that way, but I am using it in the sense of being open and vulnerable and going in
#
with a childlike curiosity and willingness to be delighted by something. That's why,
#
you know, one of my dhariwala irritations is the way in which people speak as if they
#
already know everything. Yeah, the men with beard syndrome you have often written about.
#
And you know, Twitter has given so much play to that tendency. So somebody will always
#
say, oh, this is just happening because, you know, the liberal does this and now the right
#
wing is doing that and now this thing and that thing. And yeah, I don't disagree. But
#
I also feel that if we can so neatly wrap everything up, then there's nothing left to
#
really learn in the world. And that is never true. There's always something new happening
#
at every moment. And innocence requires being open to that possibility rather than saying
#
that I know what everything is. I think the opposite of innocence is a kind of fear, which
#
is if I don't already know everything, then who am I? What am I? Like, you know, what's
#
my role? So I think there is that. But to go back to your question about the interspersing
#
of adult and child life, you know, I think that it's actually not so much as it threatens
#
children's innocence, but it threatens their individuality. The possibility of being bored,
#
which is something we are talking about as children, that you had to make your own entertainment.
#
So you kind of always were getting into places you were not supposed to. You inserted yourself
#
into adult life, tried to watch movies that were forbidden to you, tried to read your
#
parents' books, eavesdropped way too much on adult conversations in an effort to entertain
#
yourself as much as curiosity about what's forbidden. And I think today, adults insert
#
themselves into children's lives too much. They want to pre-decide, and in a society
#
which already pre-decides so much, you know, in terms of our identity, so much is already
#
set out for the kind of life that we might end up having. Now there's an extra layer
#
of it that your kid is going to like, you know, parenting as an idea has taken hold
#
of middle-class India in a very big way. And especially with more nuclear families, the
#
tendency of parents to be involved in their children's lives to the extent where children
#
don't really have a strong sense of privacy, individuality, fallow time, a place basically
#
to become yourself, because that's really what that time is, that you figure yourself
#
out as you go along, because nobody's really paying that much attention to you. And I think
#
paying too much attention to children is binding adults and children in some kind of an unhealthy
#
circle where, I mean, how do you also grow older if you're all the time in the role of
#
parenting, right? Because becoming older is also a pleasurable new experience, I can say
#
now that I'm growing older, because it's completely different. It's an unknown world, right?
#
That really gives me hope because I'm terrified of it and yet it's happening.
#
I think it's fantastic because you do change and you don't know you. You have the chance
#
to get to know yourself all over again in different phases of your life. And honestly,
#
the biggest romance you'll ever have in your life is with yourself. So this newness of
#
you and even the fact that you're slower or that you think differently, you don't automatically
#
know all the popular culture. You know, I was terrified of this happening to me because
#
I love popular culture. And now that I don't automatically know all of it, it's actually
#
pretty okay because there are some new things that I know or some harder things that I want
#
to do that I feel able to do. And this is all a kind of new discovery of myself and
#
through that a new discovery of the world and other people, right? But I think if you
#
lock yourself into that role of parenting, then this child, this kind of a stunting happens
#
of both parents and children. So I think that childhood then doesn't become the place from
#
which you grew up as it ought to be. And I do see that replicated in a lot of young people's
#
lives, a lot of young people that I encounter, that there is also desire to please the parents
#
over much. There is a desire to excel very fast in a way that is not possible when you're
#
very young. You need that time to become good at something, to learn. The importance of
#
being unimportant, in other words, has really been devalued, right? Because to not matter
#
all that much gives you the freedom to make mistakes and meander. But to all the time
#
be in somebody's gaze is suffocating. And I feel that is really the loss that some childhoods
#
That's a very profound thought. And it also brings me to the question, like both what
#
you said about children suddenly having parents much more involved in growing up and also
#
in the whole notion of the love affair with yourself, like you said, which I imagine for
#
everyone would be a love-hate relationship. Brings me to the question of the construction
#
of the self. Like if I may quote from one of your pieces, you've written an excellent
#
article and all the pieces I refer to will be linked from the show notes. Quote, being
#
yourself is often sold to us as something ineffable, as if there is a virgin self, noble
#
and unadulterated, found in the departmental store of life, between Auroville mindfulness
#
and vintage chic, which we must find and display for best results. Stop quote. And this really
#
spoke to me because it's always struck me that, you know, what all these self-help books
#
talk about being true to yourself and finding yourself and being authentic and all of that
#
is sort of circling around the central question of what are we? It's not that all of us are
#
unique. I mean, I tend to think that all of us are fundamentally the same. We are not
#
blank slates because we are all hardwired in different but very similar ways. And obviously
#
we are brought up very differently and go through different influences. But rather than
#
searching for an authentic self, I think it is more perhaps wise to search for the best
#
self that you can be after you define yourself. And this, you know, when you from the point
#
of view of growing up, for example, just thinking aloud, it seems to me that children at the
#
time we grew up would have a lot more space to themselves to think about stuff and to
#
find what interests them and where they want to do. Whereas now perhaps the anxieties that
#
are ubiquitous in modern lives are onto them much earlier than they used to be. And they're
#
anxious to please their parents, they're anxious to please their peers. On social media, they're
#
anxious to be validated and get notifications and retweets and so on. And dealing with anxiety
#
is something that I think you will have to do anyway in adult life. But now it comes
#
much earlier than it otherwise would. It doesn't. I think like the fact that you're always supposed
#
to be present for somebody else's gaze really is disturbing, you know, because it creates
#
a distortion of yourself. And I have to say that I don't think it's bad to be present
#
for somebody else's gaze. I think this seeing and being seen is not just a social kind of
#
thing. It's also a profound human exchange that when two people meet each other, they
#
see something about each other. That's what makes conversations really happen, right?
#
I mean, the fact is that, like, why is dating in India such an arduous thing? It's because
#
people don't really have much by way of the art of conversation going on for them, right?
#
So there can be a dullness about or a kind of by rote feeling about so many exchanges
#
because you're not really seeing the other person and nor are you showing something of
#
yourself. I mean, another version of this is like sometimes women will say that I dress
#
for myself. And they're seeing it reactively because otherwise you're scrutinized so much
#
for the way that you look as a woman. But I think it's all right. It's all right to
#
dress for yourself, but also to dress to please others, also to dress to attract others. That
#
is part of the exchange. Life is all about yourself and others, yourself in the world,
#
right? But I think that to be locked into one thing where you can't withdraw from other
#
people's gaze. Yes, I think that is a terrifying thought for me. So maybe I note it more when
#
it's happening. But I think what I noticed is that, you know, I began living on my own
#
when I was 22 and it was very, very important for me and not in a Virginia room of one's
#
own kind of way. Although it turned out that that's a very important truth. But I mean,
#
I just want, I didn't want to share a place with anybody. I lived very poor in tenement
#
housing, but I knew I had to be on my own. And of course I got some of the snide stuff
#
from my relatives, not my own family, but my extended family about, well, obviously
#
if a girl wants to live on her own completely, what is it for is because she wants to mess
#
around with boys. And I did want to mess around with boys, of course, but I also just wanted
#
not to be scrutinized all the time. I didn't want to account for every minute of my thoughts
#
and movements. I just wanted to come and go as I pleased. It was very hard being 22 or
#
23 and living on your own with very little money. Even simple thing like I didn't know
#
how to cook properly and you know, I didn't have a fridge and there were a lot of logistical
#
things you learn to navigate, but it was the most important thing I ever did for myself
#
because yes, by being completely on my own, I figured myself out and it takes such a long
#
time to do that. So if young people don't have that space to even start that journey
#
and we live in a society that is so social and so family oriented and people are so keen
#
on marriage, when are you going to get that time, right? So I feel yes, that we do need
#
to worry about maybe not social media so much because I think that if you have that sense
#
of relationship with yourself, it gives you a resilience vis-a-vis social media as well.
#
I don't think you become as dependent on that validation if you are given the time and you
#
learn to make it important to yourself. But how many people have that and also what it
#
strikes me and you've written about this very eloquently about, you know, how it's changed
#
through the decades, it's just how one navigates relationships in the sense that like what
#
you correctly said is that, you know, one of my favorite writers, George Simonon, the
#
French author once said that the fundamental problem in all his work was how one person
#
can communicate anything to another person. We are all in a sense strangers to each other,
#
which at one sense is bizarre because we're all in a sense the same. But when you speak
#
about the, you know, the problems of communication between men and women in modern India, which
#
is especially acute outside the elite circles where there are so many anxieties, crippling
#
anxieties and all of that. And it strikes me that it's so tragic. You have a boy and
#
a girl sitting with each other and the boy is essentially dating a vision of the person
#
he wants to be with and vice versa. And they don't know the real person. And when the real
#
people collide, it inevitably results in a heartbreak and you can live in that kind of
#
denial and delusion all your life.
#
You can. And I think so much of it also has to do with the fact that your life is broken
#
down and that's not a new thing, but it's exacerbated now that life is just like broken
#
down into milestones and goalposts, right? So you're, you're just very anxious about
#
getting to the next goalpost. And that also in the dating scenario gets replicated, right?
#
Like, am I going to get to first base? Am I going to get a second base? Am I going to
#
do this? Is this going to be a real thing? Is this going to be no strings attached? What
#
is it like constantly worrying about what it is rather than figuring out what you're
#
feeling at that moment, right? So experiential things are not encouraged in our society.
#
I remember that there was a young woman who was part of a television show that I made
#
and she had come away from Meerut to be an actress in Bombay and you know, I mean, she
#
didn't have much of a chance, but she was there. And then at some point she met Honey
#
Singh at some awards function. Okay. I didn't even know who Honey Singh was at the time
#
we were making it. And in fact, I mean, one piece of footage, she's dancing to something.
#
And I was like, wow, this music is really awesome that she's dancing to. And my colleague
#
was like, that's Honey Singh. And I'm like, Oh my God, isn't the person that everybody
#
hates. But you know, the fact is she loved his music and she got to meet him. And that
#
was kind of like the excitement of the Bombay dream that you may not become the actress,
#
but you can still meet your idols. So there was a magical quality. And it was a show in
#
which women shot their own lives on video for about a year. So she, you know, I remember
#
she met Honey Singh at the awards function and then she goes with her friend on the bike
#
on bandstand and she's so happy that this has happened to her. And she calls her mom
#
and she's like, and her mother says, and her face collapses. And she says, I was feeling
#
happy. But what's the point of it? How does it matter? What's it going to add up to is
#
something that we find a lot that we have to account for. You repeatedly have stories
#
of young people telling you that my parents don't care that I found a job that I really,
#
really enjoy. They just are like, Oh, are you going to be able to buy a house at X date?
#
Are you able to do that? So now if that's what you're boiled down to, you could say
#
she has a innocence by your definition and they've lost it. In fact, in fact, I remember
#
that in one of the scenes, uh, she was waiting for an audition and she started talking to
#
another boy who was at the audition and she asked him, how old are you? And he said 21.
#
And she said, innocent. I loved the way she said it so much. So I also do frequently that
#
were innocent. So, but, but yes, she had that innocence. I have to say, man, maybe that's
#
what attracted me to her as a character that she had the exuberance to be happy, to allow
#
life to surprise and delight her even in the shittiest of circumstances. She was also willing
#
to be in the shittiest of circumstances, right? Because she imagined that something good might
#
happen to which film was this and when was it? It wasn't a film. It was a series that
#
I did for ZTV called Connected Hampton. And it was about five women at a turning point
#
in their lives, real life women who shot their own lives with a video camera for one year.
#
And then we made like these 65 thematic episodes with it. And when was this? 2013, I think.
#
Oh, okay. Have you met her since? Yeah, I've been in touch with her. She's still the same.
#
She's still the same. She's still the same. That's pretty remarkable, right? Because she
#
still hasn't become an actress, but she still thinks she might. The interesting thing about
#
Honey Singh is though a lot of his music and lyrics are misogynist and he is whatever they
#
say he is a specific rape song that was attributed to him was actually fake news. It was by another
#
thing. But he sees misogynist and I think like the outrage against his lyrics, you know,
#
I feel divided about it. But I do think that, you know, if performers can be encouraged
#
to think outside the box, because these are also by rote formats, right? That you're going
#
to write about a girl like this and you're going to do this, but you can actually write
#
something completely different because a lot of it is also about the music and the kind
#
of rhythmic quality of the lyrics, right? So. But just thinking aloud, I guess, in an artistic
#
sense, the more successful you are, the more you're incentivized to play it safe. Because
#
if something has brought you there, Boy Meets Girl songs have brought you there. Why would
#
you try something different? You know, and therefore you only try to do different things
#
where you're not successful. So whatever, you know. I mean, I think there's some truth
#
in that. I think that only people who, the people who create newness and change are always
#
the people who don't, who are not in the system already, right? Who are not the beneficiaries
#
of the system. So that really brings us back to why Dariwala men are so predictable and
#
boring. Why they'll always really imagine that the utterly boring thing they've said
#
is worth saying. It's because the system has rewarded them endlessly, right? For just being
#
guys. And so there's no challenge to that. Of course, the challenge has come because
#
you are seeing a complete change in gender relationships. The challenges come from you.
#
I mean, just Dariwala columnist versus non-Dariwala columnist. I mean, I'm presuming you include
#
me among Dariwala columnists. I refuse to commit to all this. No, I'm just, I'm just
#
saying that like there is a shift, right? There are so many kinds of, I mean, it's not
#
just about women, like the entire trans community poses a complete rethink to how we talk about
#
gender and how we talk about each other for that matter. And I know that sometimes political
#
correctness feels like too much of a schlep and it feels like, oh, but you know, you're
#
being too persnickety. But the thing is, it is the thing that brings a shift in our way
#
of looking at things, right? And whenever somebody tells me that, oh, it's so difficult
#
to use the pronoun they, like, what's the big deal? But you know, there was a time when
#
nobody, I remember that when I would say, please don't write Ms, write Ms for me, people
#
would be like, they'll roll their eyes. See, this is what I mean. Boys love puns, but boys
#
who will become men with beards. I used to always say, I want a t-shirt that says Pushpa,
#
I hate puns because boys are often subjected to the unending puns and I'd be like, stop
#
it. I don't often do this, but anyway, you caught me in a weak moment. If you say so.
#
Yeah. So I think that there is a challenge posed to that way of being and thinking. And
#
I think those people who embrace the challenge will do something fantastic and new. And those
#
who don't embrace the challenge, but who become sulky in the face of the challenge or say
#
that I'm being attacked and what do you people know? You just keep doing the same old thing
#
and you'll become obsolete. So choose. Yeah, I know. And what strikes me is that, look,
#
the universal anxiety that we all have and that humans have, they're hardwired to have,
#
is the anxiety to be loved, to be validated by others, right? And therefore you keep constructing
#
yourself in response to what you think others would appreciate in you. You might define
#
the others differently from people around you, but whatever. You construct yourself
#
that another thing is when society is changing so fast and when the preferences of society
#
are changing so fast, that also means that that constant reconstruction of the self also
#
then the requirement for that gathers a certain velocity. And I can totally see a lot of people,
#
including men with beards, including middle-aged people like me, who are just then the reflexive
#
responses to say no more. What is this shit? I mean, I think change is overwhelming. Change
#
inside you and change outside you is overwhelming. But maybe it also means making a different
#
relationship to time. And I will stress again, a different relationship to yourself. I think
#
I have a friend who feels annoyed by the way that I seem to keep shifting subjects I work
#
on because I do get interested in a topic for a very long time, right? Like I worked
#
on a lot of things about the city for an extremely long time, but just when writing about Bombay
#
and making sense of what Bombay became a cool thing, it felt like I shifted focus.
#
You made a film trying to find Sandra from Bandra. Everybody watch it. Please link from
#
the show notes. You're a rabbit hole person. I'm a rabbit hole person. As in you find a
#
subject you like and you go down the rabbit hole. Yeah, but I go down the rabbit hole
#
is the correct way actually, because it's not like I'm not a completist. I won't read
#
all the books by writer and because I'm not a boy, I'll not get all the albums. But I'm
#
definitely willing to go down the rabbit hole and see what will happen. And then once like
#
the full pleasure of it has been experienced for me. And there must be something perverse
#
that when the really big rewards start coming in, because now that thing has become more
#
established as an idea and more people are working on it, I start to lose interest in
#
it. And I don't feel like doing it anymore. Now, this might just be my personality quirk,
#
but I think it has saved me from some of the things that you're talking about, right? Now,
#
so my friend who's annoyed with me, he calls me Bunky Chidya because he's like, the closer
#
success comes to you, the more inside the forest you want to go and like investigate
#
some new flora and fauna. And I'm like, yeah, but imagine I get to do it. So there are many
#
ways to define success. One would be that I just sit in the same damn tree until the
#
turn of the tree comes around, right? Or the other is that I really like I've worked for
#
30 years doing a number of very different things. I have not conformed to this idea
#
of the brand, right? That you just do one thing in one way and then you become really,
#
really successful. And no, I'm not really, really successful in that sense. But for me,
#
the definition of success is that I want to do certain things and I get to do them. And
#
there's a memorable line from one of your columns that seems to express this where you
#
talk about how the treadmill has been sold as a journey. Yes. And you've basically said
#
that, no, you know, I'm not getting on one of these treadmills. I'm going deeper into
#
the forest. And you know, it's because I have a great annoyance and dislike of being bored.
#
Like I cannot tolerate boredom of the kind that comes from pretense. So I don't mean
#
like sitting at a railway platform for three hours is unbearable. On days it may be unbearable.
#
On days it's pretty okay to drift off. But that thing that you make me watch a movie
#
that is just pretentious. Yeah, it's like there's nothing new in it. It's just pontificating
#
or somebody writes the same old politically correct posturing kind of novel that I'm supposed
#
to hail it as the great new piece of political writing. I refuse. In fact, you've created
#
a hashtag that sort of sums all this up. Why don't you share it with others? Yes, I want
#
to make this hashtag famous. Hashtag bore mat kar yaar. Yeah. Social media, please find
#
ways to make this hashtag famous because it applies to so much. Right. And I also think
#
that if people refuse to be bored, the world will have a lot more like lively work. You
#
know, I think that actually I feel the hashtag is very political because I see so many people
#
do a lot of boring work, but still get to be in really important places. You know, like
#
you'll see the same filmmakers in the same kind of films and everybody's trashing the
#
films, but they're again making those kinds of films and the same opportunities. There
#
are writers, there are columnists, there are all kinds of things. And it is privilege.
#
The very fact that you have gender and caste and class on your side means that you get
#
the right to bore other people. And I think you can boil it down to a very simple experience
#
that of going to a family dinner. And there's always one uncle who bores you, you know better.
#
Let me tell you. And then they'll start telling you about, you know, whatever is a new course.
#
They don't even know anything about it, but they will start to tell you. And I used to
#
always get angry when this used to happen. I used to leave the table. I should say, but
#
my parents would be like, you can't talk like that. And I'm like, he got doctor. I don't
#
want to put it in him. So since subordination wasn't coming out of rudeness or any kind
#
of youthful hotheadedness, it was just like, how can you bore me? Because that boringness
#
is coming out of your right to oppress me. You are taking up my time. You don't think
#
that you have to charm me, please me, engage with me. That is boredom, right? That you
#
think I'm not there. I just have to be this blank and captive audience to whatever you
#
throw my way. But then, you know, that brings up an interesting question, which is that
#
does that mean that, for example, a filmmaker who wants a film to unwind at its own pace,
#
like say a Tarkovsky or a Bellator or whatever, is boring you and is not conscious enough
#
of entertaining the audience, as you say? No, I don't think that boredom is the opposite
#
of entertainment in the conventional sense, right? To engage me, to challenge me is to
#
not bore me. Even when I said earlier that the idea that you would show me the same hackneyed
#
thing, the hackneyed thing pretending to be new is a thing I can't bear. And we have too
#
much of that around. Somebody is supposed to be a cutting edge filmmaker who's not like
#
that. That edge won't even cut butter. So I just feel like I don't want to. I don't
#
want to be part of receiving any of that. I won't see those films. Like now, because
#
I'm older, I also have a new column called Life is Short, in which I put, by column I
#
don't mean writing column, but like it's a section in my invisible notebook that I'm
#
not seeing that film because life is short. I'm not going to do that because life is short.
#
But to engage us, to make us see the world differently, like a Tarkovsky, classical music,
#
Drupad, these are difficult things to learn and to enter sometimes, not always. But I
#
think the invitation to the entry is full of, there is a passion, there's an intelligence,
#
there is a challenge to me. I don't mind being challenged. I may even come out saying that
#
didn't really work for me, but I don't mind if there is that honesty of that artist really
#
wanting to do something, really having something to say, right? So I obviously don't mean that
#
something that is like, I met somebody the other day who said like, you know, people
#
don't have an attention span for more than six minutes now. So the ideal length for a
#
video is, or it should be 25 minutes. Which every listener of The Scene in the Unseen
#
knows is utter bullshit, right? It is bullshit because you know, I think films are as long
#
as they need to be. And they could be very long and very short. So I have made films
#
13 minutes long. I have made films 95 minutes long. I mean, I make the film till the film
#
is there. And I've had people watch the long films and the short films. Somebody can feel
#
bored in a 10 minute film also. I frequently feel bored in a 10 minute film.
#
You can feel bored in 30 seconds. Just to sort of pick up one of the phrases you used,
#
which was hackneyed. And I'm again thinking aloud here. But you know, when I was a cricket
#
writer a decade and a half ago, and one of my constant bugbears was that Indian writers
#
use so many effing cliches in their writing. You know, like Martin Amis titled one of his
#
books The War Against Cliché. And cliches are obviously the biggest. And it happens
#
far more in cricket. And after a while, I realized that no, wait a minute. It's not
#
because they don't know. Or it's not because they can't think outside cliches. It's because
#
especially in places like the Hindu, where the sports writing was supposed to be very
#
good and was extremely bad and cliche written. And you know, verbose and flowery and cliche
#
written. And, and I realized that it is a virtue to know as many cliches as you can.
#
As for example, you know, Ravi Shastri does or a Sidhu does or whatever, you know, and
#
I was blogging back on the blogspot version of India Uncut in perhaps circa 2005-2006.
#
I started documenting Shastri's cliches well before anybody else. And it came to more than
#
a hundred posts, I think, because, you know, it would just, yeah. And, and I find this
#
problem in films also, though I am obviously not as educated in terms of films as you are
#
to be able to speak about it. But I find that one, the problem of avoiding cliches is harder
#
in films, because if you typically set up a scene in a particular way, it almost like
#
becomes a convention ki pehle long shot fir mid shot, koi baat kar rahe toh close up stuff
#
like that. How do you avoid those cliches, which are perhaps harder to avoid, but all
#
other kinds of cliches, like the way a story unfolds or whatever. I mean, am I right in
#
saying that the cliché is a bigger problem in Indian popular culture or?
#
So I think that there is, I don't know if the cliché is a bigger problem. I don't,
#
I mean, like, see, right now there are the protests going on and people are writing poems
#
at like a high, high rate. Slogans are amazing. And you're seeing so much newness. You're
#
seeing a real absence of cliches. Otherwise, you know, protests when you were younger,
#
like we used to cringe because they were a, they were a location of clichés and so much
#
of political language has been ridden by political cliché. But I would like to argue that one
#
can look at this occurrence of what you're calling cliché in two different ways. One
#
is that certainly in India or Indian culture, Indian social culture, there seems to be a
#
great comfort derived from saying something which everybody knows. And there's a deep
#
suspicion of the person who is saying something that seems not so familiar. But more so if
#
that person is trying to say that I'm better than you because I'm saying something not
#
so familiar, right? So yes, the joke, which we all know, will always make a group of people
#
crack up and we always feel like, I mean, there'll be those of us who feel like there's
#
such a cliché joke, why are people laughing at it? But there is something about like a
#
kind of community culture where saying things which everybody knows makes, seems to make
#
urban middle-class people feel comfortable. So there is one type of cliché opting there.
#
The other is writing artistic production where you do not expect to find cliché, which is
#
supposed to be the place where clichés are killed so the new things can be made are so
#
comfortably clichéed, which I think does have a lot to do with privilege. Because really,
#
if a lot of your work, and I'll take documentary film as an example, I think that so much of
#
Indian documentary filmmaking, there have been some great filmmakers here. And I don't
#
even want to preface the word filmmaking with documentary filmmaking, as if it's not a film.
#
I feel very irritated with those who say, I'm going to make a film. And they always
#
mean fiction feature. But really, a documentary is also a film.
#
In fact, you know, this is why in my introduction, I specifically made sure I referred to you
#
as a filmmaker, not as a documentary film.
#
Yeah, so I mean, the thing is, I make documentaries, and documentaries are a kind of film. But
#
I think that while there's been like tremendously exciting work done in Indian documentary,
#
you also have had a convention of the political documentary, which says the same things in
#
the same way forever and ever. And it is more a demonstration of your political position
#
than a real exploration of an idea from your political perspective. These are two different
#
things, right? So I feel like the first which is just demonstrating your political position
#
is simply a reiteration of your privilege.
#
Can you illustrate that? I mean, not with specific people or so on, but you know.
#
So, you know, for example, I would say that there'll be a roster of topics of importance.
#
And communism has always been on top of the list. If you want to show that you're liberal,
#
you have to be anti communal. So for example, speaking about feminism, it's not that high
#
on the list. It's not considered to be that important. So similarly, having a film which
#
will not have a commentary is considered to be a purer kind of filmmaking, because you're
#
letting the people speak in their own voices. These are certain cliches of filmmaking. They're
#
not cliches when they started out. They came from a very particular political place that
#
cinema made it possible, the technology of cinema made it possible for us to record interviews.
#
And why should I impose what something means onto you? But after some time, it just becomes
#
a stock fashion of shooting something, you know, I'm not even really thinking about this,
#
I will make a film in which people will speak in their own voices, they will only fit into
#
a schema of what is liberal and not liberal. But by making that film, what is really happening,
#
I am showing that I am liberal. And because I am liberal, I should have the privilege
#
to decide things for others. And my way of saying should rule the country. So a lot of
#
the enterprise of documentary film was too closely entangled with the idea of the nation
#
state, and how the nation state should be, right. So either it's critiquing the nation
#
state, or it is with films division, expressing the desires of the nation state. In contrast
#
to that, what you do have in, you know, like in the late 90s and early 2000s is a kind
#
of like an efflorescence of filmmaking approaches, where somebody is making a film about their
#
parents, somebody is making a film about body image, somebody is making a film, I made a
#
film about feminism and what it means to me. So you're actually seeing suddenly, that documentary
#
becomes a way to express yourself creatively and politically. And that gets rid of some
#
of the cliches that so what I want to say actually is that a cliche in form or cliche
#
in work is really a cliched way of thinking. It presents, you know, something that is otherwise
#
considered to be a cliche suddenly seems fresh when it is located in a different way of thinking.
#
And I would say we should also be careful to distinguish between cliches and conventions.
#
I don't think that conventions are automatically bad things. I think the convention becomes
#
a cliche when the filmmaker is not really thinking or the artist is not really thinking
#
why they want something in their film, right? So for example, I'll give an example in film
#
criticism. One of the things that you frequently find people saying in India is, oh, you know,
#
Indian films are inferior because they have song and dance. People are running around
#
trees. This idea that realism makes a film more rational, that it makes it superior and
#
serious, and therefore it's an art film and that's what we should aspire to. I think
#
this is such a primitive way to think about something. You know, realism is only an aesthetic
#
because everything is a lie. Every film that we make is a construction. So realism is a
#
kind of way in which I make a film and fantasy is another way in which I might make a film.
#
So you're never realistic. You're just pretending to be realistic is what you're saying and
#
therefore it has as much artifice only expressed differently.
#
Yes, realism is an artifice. It's the same way that when you say, oh, today is desi day,
#
right? So today you'll wear a saree. As if to say you are not desi on the rest of days,
#
but you are desi and your dress is as desi as a saree in some senses. Is English and Indian
#
language is one of those same discussions, right? So what is considered to be the norm
#
and what is considered to be the oddity or the exception then has a lot to do with who
#
is in a place of privilege or what ideas are being privileged, right? So the idea that
#
we now have to shake off this desiness, it's like having some kind of an accent in your
#
English that you have songs in your film, right? That makes the film somehow in-fra-deak.
#
I feel this is really cliched thinking because in fact, the presence of the songs is an act
#
of great sophistication in filmmaking. It's the poetic with the prosaic, right? It's a
#
place of emotion. It's a place of eroticism. We've had great poets write songs in Hindi
#
films. You have amazing song picturizations. The height of sophistication of Hindi filmmaking
#
is in the songs. The height of stupidity is in the criticism that says, oh my God, these
#
songs. So, you know, a stupid gaze can destroy something beautiful so quickly. And the stupid
#
gaze often comes with just privilege, which doesn't recognize that there are other ways
#
of looking at the world. And that's why that gaze is always destined to become obsolete.
#
The person who retains their innocence in a way, which is to say that I could be wrong.
#
I could change the way I think. There is no danger in changing the way I think because
#
I'm not clinging to my privilege at all costs. That person is not going to become obsolete
#
because they will always be open to the new thing, feel delighted by it, and then employ
#
it in their work, right? So, I think that's the kind of cliched tendency which creates
#
boringness. So, we now will have very boring films or very retrograde films in their thought,
#
which look realistic. So, now everybody will say it's very good. And, you know, these are
#
the people who will put India in the international scene. Why do we care so much about the international
#
scene? Like, who's gaze? This performing for somebody else's gaze. I mean, we've got a
#
massive country with massive audiences. I think we're pretty okay. So, you know, that's
#
why I love Shah Rukh Khan because Shah Rukh Khan is like, no, I care about the Indian
#
No, this is fascinating because I was talking about cliches and cricket writing and popular
#
culture and you sort of expanded my gaze on cliches by pointing out that cliches can apply
#
to ideology and politics as well. And what it boils down to is that, you know, another
#
way of thinking about this is that look, the world is deeply complicated. So, we have to
#
explain it to ourselves by making up stories about it, by building frames through which
#
we can look at the world and things make sense. And we build those frames and those frames
#
give us a certain comfort and therefore become a cliched way of thinking. And especially
#
in more than a cliched way, we start to assume they are normal. Yeah, right. And that seems
#
to be especially hardened in modern times by two things. One is, of course, social media
#
has the effect of drawing us into echo chambers and what Cass Sunstein calls group polarization
#
where within groups who agree with us, we become increasingly more extreme than we already
#
were and more hardened. And the other also is that, you know, I feel incredibly thankful
#
that 25 years ago there was no Twitter because I would have said and done the stupidest things.
#
And then because I have put something out in public, I would have felt compelled out
#
of ego to double down on it. And that could actually have become my hardened position,
#
almost forced by the gaze of others that once I have said this and then people attack me
#
and then I double down on it and then I find a tribe that agrees with the original thing
#
I said and soon I am part of the tribe and any independent thinking I could subsequently
#
have done sort of vanishes. And that's that's something that worries me. Do you think that
#
really you never had hardened positions before Twitter in your peer group? Of course I did,
#
but I think they arose gradually. And I also think that the early positions I had when
#
I was in college might have hardened, I'm speculating, might have hardened had I actually
#
taken positions on them in social media and joined a particular ideological tribe or the
#
other and then I would never have been able to leave. Maybe, I don't know, but I think
#
that, you know, already the previous discussion we were having tells us that maybe social
#
media amplifies what is already out there. But I do think that there are so many people
#
who choose something very early in life and then stick to it, no matter what, even if
#
they're miserable, stay in bad marriages, in awful jobs, because I think that's what
#
they ought to do. They've said that this is what they are and now they cannot possibly
#
abandon it. That's a sunk cost fallacy plus inertia of life. Inertia of fear, what else
#
is out there, plus great dependence on how other people see you. So I think like this
#
hardening of positions, for sure I think in youth we all do it to some extent to the other.
#
So for example, a common example of it is when two people you know who are romantically
#
involved fall out with each other, right? And say you've never liked your friend's
#
boyfriend and then she's like, he's this way and he's that way. You're like, yeah, I always
#
felt he's this way. I'm so relieved you're not seeing him. After one week they get back
#
together. It's over, right? Like you're out of the picture because to some extent, so
#
I think it's the fact that people feel like they want to disconnect themselves from that
#
position which they had. That's one way. So they hardened the position for the boyfriend.
#
No, I never said that. You were the one who was saying this, whatever. That would be one.
#
The other thing is that once they have said he's horrible, they're unable to go back.
#
They're unable to go back to the person because they have said he's horrible, right? So this
#
tendency to harden a position, I think it's a human tendency. I do think that, yeah, because
#
social media is so amplified and social media rewards you fast. You have reason to stick
#
with very silly type of things, but I don't think it's any different than real life. The
#
fact that you won't leave a marriage, relationship, job, career choice, house, family that's cruel
#
to you, whatever, all of these things. I mean, when you see the show The Crown, you often
#
wonder why Princess Margaret doesn't just give everyone kick and go off, but she's just
#
embedded in that royal family, its privileges, and wanting their approval despite the immense
#
cruelty to her. So I feel like actually that happens. And social media has created different
#
types of cultural capital and rewarding very quickly. So it's very difficult for you to
#
leave those rewards, but it is exactly the same as life. And in other words, I have also
#
seen people on social media change their positions over time. I have seen them become different.
#
I have been trolled a couple of times very badly online quite some time ago before it
#
was such a common thing. And because it was not so common, it was traumatic for me. And
#
the first time around, I cried, I felt like I'll never recover from it. It felt very,
#
very serious. But I think the impact that it had on me actually was, A, I thought very
#
hard about why it had happened. I didn't agree with it, but I didn't disagree with the essential
#
political thought that it emerged from. And actually, because I suffered so much from
#
its cruelty, it did change a little bit the way I began to write about other people. So
#
I feel in the long run, it did change me and it did change my positions. Since I'm not
#
a person who takes a lot of, I don't spend a lot of my time online. I don't express
#
myself online in the same way. Perhaps I'm not the right person to talk about it. But
#
I do feel that this interactivity with others can yield many selves. And I have seen other
#
people also change the way that they are. I don't think it's impossible. And I do think
#
that through this very hyperkinetic format that we're in, we will also reach a place
#
of conversation, which is more reasonable, I hope.
#
No, and I don't want to be an old man with beard railing against social media and all
#
the work with the younger.
#
No, you love social media.
#
Yeah, I love social media. And one of the things that I think it gives us is an escape
#
from cliche, because we are exposed to newer kinds of thinking than we otherwise would
#
have been newer forms of art than we otherwise would have been. And that sort of changes
#
everything. So I kind of came into this episode thinking, okay, there are three big themes
#
I guess we'll talk about, which are feminism, documentary filmmaking, and desire and sexuality.
#
And instead, we've had this delightfully digressive chat, which we will continue, which
#
we know I'm very happy. I think my listeners will agree this is exactly how a good conversation
#
should be. And we shall continue after the break and also get to those three topics.
#
So let's take a quick emotional break.
#
If you've gotten so far in this podcast, it means you like listening to good audio content
#
and you're thirsty for knowledge. In that case, I'd urge you to check out Storytel,
#
the sponsors of this episode. Storytel is an audiobook platform that has a massive range
#
of audiobooks from around the world. Their international collection is stellar, but so
#
is their local collection. They have a fantastic range of Marathi and Hindi audiobooks. What's
#
more, I do a weekly podcast there called The Book Club with Amit Verma, in which I talk
#
about one book every week, giving context, giving you a taste of the book and so on.
#
As long as Storytel sponsors this show, I will recommend an audiobook that I liked on
#
that platform every week. My recommendation for this week is a brilliant collection of
#
short stories by Hansda Saubhendra Shekhar called The Adivasi Will Not Dance. When I
#
first read this book, it reminded me of Manto. And you can now listen to The Adivasi Will
#
Not Dance by Hansda Saubhendra Shekhar on Storytel. Download their app or visit Storytel.com.
#
Remember that's Storytel with a single L, Storytel.com.
#
Welcome back to The Scene and The Unseen. I'm chatting with Parvita Bora on many, many
#
different non-cliche things. And let's kind of get back to biography. So, you know, one
#
of the interesting things I learned about you while trying to research for this show
#
was that you once worked in the same place as I did, which is Channel V. And you wrote
#
Videocon Flashback for Javed Jafri. For a short time. For a short time. And I wrote
#
Timex Timepass for him a little while after that. You know, both of us also worked with
#
Manu Chopra, who was the lead writer on both those shows. Take me through your journey
#
working while living alone in Mumbai. Like, were you sure from the start that you want
#
to be a filmmaker? What did you want to be? How was that process like?
#
Yeah, I think, I mean, like people often ask me, when did you decide this? I decided early.
#
But it was not decided. I mean, I don't know. I was not a very career minded person. I was
#
very like I wanted to work, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I studied English
#
Literature in college. I went to a great college with great teachers, Miranda House. And I
#
kind of felt like I'll just do my MA now. And I didn't have any plan in life. I had
#
a teacher, Zakia Pathak. She was really awesome. Very strict, very rigorous intellectually.
#
And she used to wear fantastic earrings. So we were all very dazzled by her. And she taught
#
us the Greek classics. And I was quite a chela of hers. And would feel devastated if I disappointed
#
her in any way. In my third, and you know, I had no friends. I was this like misfit character.
#
I didn't even take the U special, because I was so scared of other people. The U special
#
is a bus in Delhi, which is only for the university, the university special. So DTC bus, but it
#
only goes to the university from different areas. But I didn't go in it. In fact, I suffered
#
the bad DTC buses, because I was more scared of my peers than of the molesters in the buses.
#
Why were you scared of your peers?
#
Because that was it. I perceived myself to be very odd. I thought people would mock me
#
or make fun of me, or something. Like I really felt very uncomfortable with other people.
#
And I felt my differentness very acutely. In part, maybe because I had changed schools
#
such a lot. And being the new kid always, you're already very strange and different
#
and bookish. And then you're also the new kid. And I was very shy. I am very shy, although
#
it doesn't seem that way. So I think I found it very difficult. I found it very, very difficult
#
to be a young person. And I wasn't like other young people with that life and those pursuits
#
that young people have. So it's only later in college that I began to make some friends.
#
So I had friends in school, not that I didn't, but I didn't have that kind of youth lifestyle
#
that many of my peers did, my cousins, my sister, all of them. So anyway, in the end
#
of my first year, I came second in the university. But I know there have been the doldrums academically
#
for quite a long time. So suddenly it became famous. And that gave me a certain amount
#
of confidence, which is why I also have this belief that, you know, people always telling
#
you that you must learn to love yourself and only then the world will love you. But I don't
#
think so. I think sometimes when the world loves you, you also learn to love yourself.
#
And certainly when people began to take me seriously, because I had got some kind of
#
academic rank, I also took myself a bit seriously. I felt a bit more confident as I started making
#
some friends. And then I made a lot of friends and I became extremely sociable. And by the
#
time I hit the third year, I was like, anyway, I didn't like the third year syllabus so much.
#
And I began doing a little badly, relatively. And one day, Sathya Pathak met me in the corridor
#
and she said, Parmita, what are you planning to do after college? And she had this very
#
clipped way of talking. Like, I don't know, ma'am, I think I'll do my MA. Also said it
#
in this very like, I'm so stylish, I don't know what I'm going to do. And she said, this
#
is an extremely non-serious approach. It's very nice to be popular, but that doesn't
#
mean that your studies should suffer. So I said, no, ma'am, I don't know. I immediately
#
became Siddha. And I said, no, I think I'm going to do my MA. She said, you know, like,
#
we would love to have somebody like you in academics, but it's very important to go out
#
into the real world and see what else there is. And if you don't like it, you can always
#
come back. I'm so happy she said that to me, because I kind of took it to heart, you know.
#
And then my friends were going to apply for this mass comm thing. So I said, ma'am, we
#
can let you. And by then I knew, like, people used to let me be a journalist. I didn't want
#
to be a journalist. I knew I wanted to do something creative. And documentary films
#
sort of like made its appearance on my horizon. And I thought like, maybe this. And then I
#
came to Bombay to study at the Sophia College at the Polytech doing mass comm. And the first
#
Bombay documentary festival happened when I was in college. And we got that week off
#
to watch films. So every day from nine in the morning to nine at night, I watched films
#
nonstop. And I think it was fantastic because I saw that documentaries are very open ended
#
form. You can make anything. Everything is a documentary, right? And it was also because
#
there were not only Indian films, but films from all time in India. So I saw filmmakers
#
like Shastri, Sukhdev, etc. who've seen a resurgence and rediscovery in the last few
#
years, but whom we didn't know in the 90s. And I also saw great filmmakers from around
#
the world. It was like an amazing edition of the festival.
#
Who are the people who struck you? What are the films which struck you in particular and
#
Well, I think I remember that I saw India 67 by Sukhdev and felt amazed that this was
#
a film I could make. You know, Anand Padwaladhan came to show us Bombay, our city, and it totally
#
like galvanized me as a young person. I felt full of political fervor. But of course later,
#
Jean Rouch, Chronicle of a Summer is my favorite film, favorite film. I adore that film. And
#
it's just my desire to make a film like that someday. And Agnes Varda, whom I love very
#
much. So these, you know, Chris Marker, I think these are all filmmakers. And as you
#
can see, Chris Marker is a very abstract filmmaker. So to go back to our earlier conversation,
#
although I believe that things should be engaging and pleasurable, I do think pleasure is also
#
intellectual. I think thinking is the greatest pleasure in the world. It's the most luxurious
#
and voluptuous thing that we can have is to just think. So all of these filmmakers actually
#
think in different ways, and they have created different forms for the way they think. So
#
I love that. And I felt this is a form in which I can be political, creative, expressive,
#
and I can be myself. I can find myself. I'm saying this retrospectively. I don't think
#
I had this thought at that age. But I felt ki haan. I mean, if you look at it biographically,
#
perhaps the story of my life is the story of hiding from my peers at all times. No one
#
else from your mass comm class went came to this documentary? No, actually, I'm trying
#
to think is anybody else? No. I was the only person who who makes documentary films from
#
my badge if I remember right. Some people might have applied for the internships, like,
#
you know, whatever, I got to do my internship with Anand Bhatwardhan, which is also very
#
lucky for me because it was right at the heart of what I wanted to do. And I worked for Anand
#
for three and a half years, which was, I would say a great political education. Imagine you're
#
a middle class kid, and you end up working for a political filmmaker. There I discovered
#
textile mill workers union. I discovered organizations like I was in this one. I mean, there was
#
just a whole world of independent artists and political people, actors, filmmakers,
#
all sorts of people coming in and out of Anand's house. He did all his work on his own, right?
#
Like all the he owned his own equipment and edited his own films. So for a young person,
#
it was a great exposure to filmmaking as well. I was also lucky because it was at one of
#
the most fertile periods of Anand's life. And I think it didn't hurt that he had a very
#
obsessively hardworking assistant like me to augment that a bit. But he made three films
#
while I worked with him. So I also got a lot of learning from it. And you know, I have
#
my differences with his kind of filmmaking. And we've argued about that. But I think it
#
opened up it opened up a world for me to help me to add even the fact that I had differences,
#
right? The fact that I sat for three years and watched him edit allowed me to think that
#
I don't think he should do this. I don't think I don't think we should talk about this in
#
this way. And that's a big thing. To be able to work with an artist for a long time, to
#
see how their voice is, to not only be thinking of what kind of film you want to make, just
#
to be immersed. It is such an amazing experience and a very great learning, which I think young
#
people really deprive themselves of nowadays, because everybody is very keen to make something
#
of their own fast. But I think this being a bit Luka, and being an assistant for a long
#
period of time was good for me. When I quit my job there, I worked with a couple of other
#
filmmakers, Richard Joshi. But then also, I was living in Bombay, and I had to earn
#
a living, right? So I ended up doing like I directed a couple of episodes on one show
#
you might remember called show theme. Do you remember? No, I don't remember which. It used
#
to be on Doordarshan. And it was one of those early, in the 80s, a show where there would
#
be a theme. And there will be an anchor talking about that theme. And then there will be scenes
#
from films or songs from films around that theme. And I directed an episode where Bhagishri
#
Patwardhan was the anchor. So I was quite excited. So yeah, I worked with Manju Singh.
#
I don't know if you would remember her Manju Didi. She used to do one children's show.
#
The name is familiar. I think I'm a few years after you. Yeah, four or five years. But the
#
late 80s is like, I don't know. But you've seen Golmal, the Rishikesh Mukherjee. So the
#
person who plays Amol Palekar's sister, she was like this famous Manju Didi of Doordarshan,
#
right? And so I worked with her, which was, yeah, she was already, not many people knew
#
her anymore. But she also had produced this great series called Ek Kahani. Yeah. So, you
#
know, I mean, it was already at the end of her glory days, but still it was an interesting
#
thing to go into all these different universes. Then Channel V happened and I worked there
#
for a while. I wrote a soap opera, which had never got made. I did a bunch of different
#
things and I'm very grateful for that chance. I worked on Sanjay Leela Bhansali's film Khamushi.
#
I wrote some of the scenes in that film. Horrendous. I just said horrendous in response to Bhansali.
#
I'm sure your scenes were very good. I mean, actually I'm a great fan of Bhansali's, but
#
Khamushi is actually a pretty good film, but I'm not a fan of his later work. I have to
#
confess. Well, I love Ram Leela. But yes, I got a lot of gullies for writing a column
#
in which I prayed Ram Leela from my friends because they went and saw it. They were like,
#
what do you mean? You are trolling us now. I feel like Bombay afforded all these possibilities.
#
Two things really. One is that you could go into completely different universes. You know,
#
it's not just that you're stuck with your own kind of people. It's not like you move
#
to Bombay and stayed in the Bandra-Versova stretch and hung out with other hipsters and
#
try to make it in a fairly sanitized media industry. But really here, to make a living,
#
you did what you could do. So it was on the one hand, what would now be called hipster
#
space of Channel V. There was a very political space of political documentary. There was
#
a slightly like seedy space of the big television and sometimes writing some file to script
#
for somebody, whatever. Corporate films. I worked for a corporate filmmaker for a while,
#
but it was so good. I worked on a couple of ad films. So to have this very agnostic kind
#
of Catholic exposure to learn that I really don't want to do this, but oh, I see what
#
is needed to do this. I think it was really good for me. I think it somehow was formative
#
in a way I didn't understand at that time. And I think it was lucky for me because it
#
mirrored my personality without my realizing it, because I am very eclectic in my tastes,
#
in my work and in the worlds I like to belong to. So this kind of a queer existence you
#
could say. Did it also shape your personality as much as mirror it? Who can say? I think
#
certainly the fact that you go into different places allows you to see things from different
#
points of view. When you're working on a film, your job is to do whatever is needed to be
#
done for that film. So in a sense, you sign on to the enterprise and you see it from the
#
point of view of that enterprise, whatever is needed to be seen. You may disagree with
#
it. You may say that I don't like this, I shouldn't make this film like this, whatever
#
and leave, but you have been through that whole journey. So I think this is valuable.
#
Maybe it does shape your personality in that you learn to be more relaxed about yourself
#
because you also become more confident about what you think. Whereas if you always exist
#
only in one universe, you may lose some of that confidence in yourself because you become
#
very dependent on the dynamics of that universe.
#
What I see in a lot of young people today, like you mentioned earlier, that they want
#
to make their thing very fast and there is a sense of entitlement that the world sort
#
of owes them something. And your experience seems interesting, not just in terms of the
#
fact that you had a long apprenticeship in various places or that the eclectic nature
#
of your learning, but also would you say that part of growing as an artist, one quality
#
that is important to be able to grow as an artist is also humility, where you're willing
#
to learn from others and from different sort of setups, even if you're not looking down
#
and saying, oh, this is B grade, I don't want to do this. But it's like, no, what can I
#
learn from this? It's not a big part because it seems to me that one of the follies of
#
youth and certainly one of the things I lacked when I was younger and have only gradually
#
come to appreciate, is that humility where you are not the center of the universe.
#
I think not being the center of the universe is very well put. It's very important. I come
#
from a mixed family. My father was Punjabi and my mom is half Bengali and half Koja.
#
And when my mother experienced the full and pleasurable force of Punjabiyat, I would say,
#
because I love being Punjabi. She always used to say that, you know, something would happen
#
and she'd say, oh, PMS, which was not premenstrual syndrome, Punjabi male syndrome.
#
Twitter kindly note, this can be another hashtag. But it will be about how much boys are valued
#
actually, that mothers love their sons more than they love their daughters. But the way
#
in which we value boys and don't value girls means that boys don't really know what it
#
is not to be the center of the universe. And in a sense, what we discussed earlier about
#
young people or children, the fact that children are always at the center of their parents'
#
universe. So that becomes a crisis when you're not at the center of the universe. You feel
#
anxious and you feel you're failing if you're not called the time at the center of the universe,
#
which is a lot of what accrues through social media validation, right? That, okay, I'm at
#
the center. I'm at the center of the conversation. So I think, yes, not being at the center of
#
things was very important for me. It did, maybe it suited my personality because it's
#
scared of everybody and wants to hide, but it also did shape my perspective. In fact,
#
it allowed me to come to the center from time to time without feeling I have to be there
#
all the time, right? And this idea of a dance, like I like the metaphor of the dance in so
#
many ways, because it is about somebody leads, somebody follows. You can take turns doing
#
that, or there can be a group of people. You can be a backup dancer for some time, and
#
then you can be the central dancer for some time. And sometimes when you work on a friend's
#
film, it is that, right? I've had friends who are filmmakers work on my films. I have
#
worked on my friend's film in any sort of capacity sometimes. Recently, I directed a
#
video and I had very bad assistant directors on it. And I knew that I was going to get
#
screwed if I didn't get better help. And I called up my friend and three of my women
#
friends were all directors who've all made feature films and are accomplished directors.
#
They came and they assisted me like they were writing things on cupcakes and they were just
#
doing everything. And this other friend of mine who'd come to the set was like, wow,
#
these women are amazing. And look at the way they've just taken over and they know what
#
to do. And I'm like, obviously they're filmmakers, but they didn't have any hangups about coming
#
and just doing that. And I think I feel the same way, right? So I think what that gave
#
me, it's not only about it's okay not to be at the center. It gave you a tremendous enjoyment
#
of life, right? Like it is so enjoyable not to be the one who's responsible. When you
#
are working on somebody else's film, you're having all the fun of being on a project without
#
a really big responsibility of putting it around.
#
You share in the pleasure of the work without the pressure so much.
#
Yes, like being an aunt, right? Like you get the fun of the kids without having to change
#
But you're also there as a support to your friends and you experience that. What does
#
it mean to be part of a group in a positive sense while being an individual? Actually,
#
you get to experience that. That's one thing. I think the other thing that it taught me,
#
which is very important, is to get out of that cliched thinking. No thing is automatically
#
better or worse. You look at everything for itself. One of my favorite lines is a line
#
from a Hindi film song, a very old Hindi film song. And it is, badli teri nazar toh
#
nazare badal jaye. If you look at something differently, it looks different, right? It's
#
what gaze you bring to it.
#
I think your film Unlimited Girls has this quote about her changing your eyes instead
#
Yeah, the now very famous Marcel Proust. Yeah, the journey of discovery lies not in seeking
#
new landscapes, but in finding new eyes.
#
No, it is a beautiful thought. It's an important thought. Love is that kind of a thing, right?
#
That when you look at something with the gaze of love, you see it very differently than
#
when you look at it with a cold gaze. So very bad behavior looked at compassionately and
#
with love becomes explained that somebody is hurting, so they are behaving badly. And
#
you understand that. As opposed to when you're not looking at them with love and you're just
#
like, what the hell is this behavior? And both gazes are important and valid in their
#
own ways. So I think I learned the value of that. It also opened me up in very interesting
#
ways. So for example, while making my films, I found this peculiar experience that often
#
people whose politics I agreed with would behave very obnoxiously. And people whose
#
politics I was opposed to would behave very nicely with me, right? Like you're interviewing
#
some fundamentalist, moral policing type of person, and they're calling you to their
#
house and taking out their best china and giving you sarson ka saag and makki ki roti.
#
And there's somebody whose politics you admire and they keep you waiting, they cancel at
#
the last minute. And this, to be open to understanding this, that you know, people can be, you can
#
agree and disagree with people at multiple levels. I can disagree with your behavior
#
while agreeing with your ideas and vice versa. Actually, it also changed my political perspective.
#
So I feel like traversing all of these different universes allowed me to be politically much
#
No, and, and this is something like what you just spoke about speaks to this fundamental
#
truth of what Walt Whitman expressed in, you know, I contain multitudes. And the thing
#
is in today's day and age where everything is, oh, there I go on my man with beard social
#
I made you so self-conscious.
#
You made me so self-conscious. I actually shaved today before coming to this. So, but
#
not that that takes away my beard, but yeah. So, you know, we often want to see the world
#
in binaries and we refuse to accept that people can have so many multiple sides to them. But
#
there is this almost this need to condemn anyone as a hero or a villain and anyone who
#
tries to find nuances basically shat upon by all sides. You know, for example, when
#
Vajpayee died and it was all a binary and the truth of the matter is that he enabled
#
fascism to a certain extent. At the same time, he was an excellent prime minister and there's
#
no harm in sort of, you know, accepting both those sides and even within those sides, the
#
different sort of journeys that he made. And it's, you know, the same with Nehru, for example,
#
you know, again, a great man, I can say a lot that is good about him and a lot that
#
is bad about him. But today it's like you only see a Nehru, which is a caricature, not
#
a real fully, you know,
#
just a person who was trying to do something, right? Actually, when you think of it.
#
And you never consider the circumstances of the times or what those people are sort of
#
responding to or reacting to or whatever.
#
No, I think that what you say, thinking in binaries is a great affliction of our times,
#
you know, and the internet.
#
Spoken like a man with beard, honestly.
#
Well, in a while, we take your privilege for ourselves, just as a little bow, not the whole
#
world. But I think that, you know, eventually we can't remain in that binary, you know,
#
human beings can't. And we will always shake ourselves free from it. And then the binary
#
tries to impose itself on us and we shake ourselves free from it. So I do think that
#
things like poetry, art, feminism, all of these things, they exist to demolish that
#
binary and the queerness of being politically, humanly, sexually, emotionally. That's life.
#
It's actually where life happens, you know. The truth lies in the middle, as they say
#
sometimes. But I think that's not a fashionable viewpoint right now. I think that why it's
#
particularly difficult is because if you're not willing to see things like step out of
#
them for a second and see them as processes that are occurring, people play a certain
#
part in history and certain really good intentions can have really bad effects at times. We see
#
this in individual life and we see this in historical moments. And if we're not able
#
to do that for ourselves, we will always feel very afflicted. And I think we'll find it
#
difficult to, we'll be anxious all the time. Like our anxieties will, it'll ratchet up
#
our anxieties. And we do see that as well, right? So I guess we will find a way as human
#
beings to move away from these binaries. I do think that a lot of the protests that we
#
see around us right now in this political moment is actually a push back against this
#
very, very constricting way in which both liberal and right-wing politics have often
#
constructed reality and politics for us. You are seeing now people redefining that politics.
#
And I think we can't look at these protests, for instance, only in terms of the immediate
#
result, but in a long-term sense, they signal a shift in the way people are thinking about
#
who they are, how they should be, how politics should happen, who should make that politics
#
happen. What we call leaderless revolutions is not an easy thing, but it is there. It's
#
a real thing that's happening, right? There are multiple leaders, multiple voices. So
#
I think it indicates that we want to get out of the binary and we're looking for a way
#
to do it. That's why a lot of it is happening offline. It's not coming from the online,
#
which has become rigid as a structure. That's very true. And a reflection of that is perhaps
#
these spontaneous protests that are happening throughout the country over the last few days.
#
And they're not led by anyone or even any particular ideological core or whatever. They're
#
just spontaneous outbursts and within them, they contain so much diversity. And yet they
#
are all responding to the times in this passionate way, which is so... And perhaps it was important
#
for some time to assert our differences. Maybe that was needed to not say, hum sab ek hai,
#
because hum sab ek nahi hai. To assert that differentness, to talk about caste, gender,
#
sexuality, class, language, ethnic identities, all of these things, maybe we needed to do
#
that in order to come to a place of some commonality. So I do see it also as that kind of a cyclical
#
Yeah. Let's kind of get back to the first of our themes I wanted to pursue, which is
#
don't give that embarrassed look. I'm thoroughly enjoying this. This is my model conversation.
#
I sadly booked the studio only for three hours, so we have an hour and a half only to go.
#
Let's talk about documentary filmmaking. And one of the things that you've spoken about
#
is how there were these traditional notions of what documentaries are and your journey
#
through discovering documentaries and making them yourself changed those notions completely.
#
Can you elaborate a bit on that?
#
So I think the kind of documentary film orthodoxies that I inherited were very much about the
#
political activist documentary, which chose an issue, followed that issue, interviewed
#
people to get their perspective, critiqued the kind of structures of privilege that were
#
creating those inequalities. There was, as I said earlier, a roster of important topics.
#
So you talked about communism, labor, caste, very much lower down the line, gender. Sexuality
#
was nowhere on the scene for sure in the films. You also had what I call the pan-Indian documentary.
#
Documentaries that were made often represented themselves as being about India. And these
#
issues were supposed to represent the concerns of all of India. I think when I started making
#
films as an assistant, this was the orthodoxy. But there were other, see, there was also
#
a partial history of documentary that you received since this was the overwhelming way
#
in which a documentary was considered important. Like how did a documentary attain significance
#
if it had all of these qualities? Then it would be circulated among certain spaces because
#
it's not like it was going to the market and then people were liking it or not liking it.
#
There was a completely different logic by which documentaries circulated. So it conformed
#
very much to fulfilling these notions of what is a good documentary. However, that said,
#
there were a few filmmakers, both who existed before. Like for example, Films Division was
#
considered government film. But as we now know, there were of course great filmmakers
#
working in FD in the sixties and their films are now, like when we watched them, I feel
#
very modern, very exciting, critical of the government, all of that is also going on.
#
But we never really got to know about those films when we were young people. Insofar as
#
anybody got to know anything about documentary. But I'm saying even working in documentary,
#
the people and the filmmakers you got to know about were all of them who were involved in
#
the political documentary. But a few filmmakers were on the scene. Reena Mohan made this exquisite
#
film called Kamla Bhai about the first woman to be on the Indian screen, Kamla Bhai Gokhale.
#
It's a very unusual film because it's only Kamla Bhai talking for 40 minutes and she
#
is indescribable. She's very profane and full of character and sharpness. She's 88 or something
#
in the film. She's very old in the film, but it's incredible. And I had never seen a film
#
like that. And it's very important to see Indian films, which are different, right?
#
Like it's not enough to see films from other countries. You need to see something which
#
is of your context. There was Madhu Sridhar. I would say a number of women filmmakers who
#
were emerging on the scene who were making films quite differently, who were looking
#
at the idea of biography as history, for instance, which is another way of saying the personal
#
is political. So there was a beautiful film called Sagira Begum by Sameera Jain, which
#
was made in the nineties. So a little bit of this was beginning to happen. By the time
#
that I started, when I started to make films, technology was also changing. So video was
#
coming in. So you have to understand that when first films were made on celluloid, before
#
liberalization, you had to get permission to even buy a roll of film. You had to apply
#
for a permit. So it was expensive and it was difficult. But then with video coming in,
#
a certain kind of democratization of access starts to happen, but it was still expensive.
#
So I made my first couple of films on a format called Betacam. And then digital video came
#
in and it coincided, I think, with the fact that we'd had 10 years after liberalization.
#
So many of the traditional audiences of documentary film had actually scattered people's movements.
#
All of that had, to some extent, been decimated trade unions and even women's organizations
#
to an extent, NGOs had come in. A lot of shift had happened on the political landscape. So
#
I think there was a need to build up a new political audience or a new audience. And
#
I think that my generation of filmmakers, if one were to think that there were people
#
who entered documentaries from a purely political perspective, a generation after that that
#
entered documentaries from a kind of, they studied filmmaking and they were also looking
#
at it filmically. And then I think you have a generation like mine, which is coming at
#
it from a very creative and personal and political everything perspective. And I'm going to say
#
that I'm generalizing. I mean, it's not that, I mean, everybody has a creative impulse,
#
but because it coincided with the coming of digital technology, it enabled a lot of experimentation.
#
And I think when I made Unlimited Girls in 2002, I was also able to fully express something
#
that I was feeling filmically, like to bring into it every format almost that I had poked
#
my nose into in the last 10 years of working and living in Bombay. But I also, I think
#
I wanted to politically express what I was seeing in the world around me. I didn't want
#
to replicate the political orthodoxies that I was being given. And I think that was a
#
significant shift that you are making a film with an observational politics. Your politics
#
is not pre-decided. There is no schema. You have a question in your heart. What was my
#
question in Unlimited Girls? If you're a feminist, can you still have love? Right? What makes
#
feminists, what makes people say, I believe in equality, but I don't know if I want to
#
call myself a feminist. It's the fear of losing love. It's the fear of losing belonging.
#
And this was a thought that I, as a 30-year-old who had lived a feminist life for 10 years,
#
was thinking about. And I didn't think that the answer that you get from many movements
#
that you'll always have the sisterhood was really an answer that worked. So that question
#
drove the making of that film. That film was full of all the things that I love from yellow
#
nail polish to internet chat rooms to making these fake ads. It was full of my desires,
#
my pleasures, what I had seen in the world, what I found amazing. And it was also full
#
of my own personal political experiences, which was of living on my own, decorating
#
my own house, feeling the excitement of being a grownup person in a city where you have
#
your own power allowed to give you your own power. It's not the power that is delivered
#
to a parent's house or your aunt's house, your own newspaper bill. Even these things,
#
your own house key. They're such crucial, exciting bits of being a grownup. And all
#
of that is in the film actually, having my own camera. And also actually this thing that
#
I call feminism and think about partially, what is it actually? To go on a journey of
#
discovering it. And I think it paralleled both my own personal needs and desires, as
#
well as something that perhaps other young people felt in a language that was very much
#
of the time. John Waters, a filmmaker whom I love, has this thing that he says, artists
#
are never ahead of their times. Artists are off their times. People are behind the times.
#
But anyway, I think yes, some films come along, which are off their time. They're so deeply
#
off their time that they will always remain contemporary for that reason, because they
#
were contemporary in the moment. So they're not created in order to mirror their times.
#
No, and I mean, you made Unlimited Girls in 2002. And I'm ashamed to confess, as I did
#
to you, that I only watched it recently while after I invited you.
#
You're in a big shameful group of people. Don't worry.
#
I'm in a big shameful group of people. But again, what you said really strikes me as
#
true because it is not of 2002, although it has a lot of delightful, artifacty things
#
like a computer booting up and a Yahoo chat room. But it is really of this time. And I
#
was particularly struck, one, by how in such an entertaining and empathetic way you documented
#
what was essentially your intellectual journey of discovering what feminism was, which I
#
thought was sort of that central quest, and two, also how it was constructed. Like, you
#
know, one of the things that you have sometimes spoken about is the artificial distinction
#
between fiction and documentary and the power of the camera. And it also strikes me that,
#
and again, this is something common to documentaries and social media, that wherever you are in
#
either of these, you are supposed to be real. You're pretending it's a real you, but it's
#
performative. You're performing for the world. So as a documentary filmmaker, also you're
#
observing what is performing. I mean, in some sense, of course, you know, as we chat with
#
each other, we are performing for each other and the audience. So and what is interesting,
#
what I found really lovely about Unlimited Girls is a lot of it is fiction, you know,
#
like those, the chat that you portray and all of that and all of it is some of it isn't,
#
it is so crisply put together. It is such good storytelling.
#
Thank you. I mean, I think, you know, I also, filmmaking is a collective enterprise. And
#
I mean, my editor, Jabeen, my cameraman, Mrinal Desai, or everybody who was part of the film
#
and so many people, like, I feel that the greatest artifact of Unlimited Girls is the
#
credits. The credits are very long. And if you read the credits, you'll see the names
#
of many people who went on to be independent filmmakers. So really, I think like there was
#
a big scene that was also part of the making of Unlimited Girls that helped me to make
#
the film that I made, right? Like I was part of that scene. And that's amazing thing to
#
have. But I think that there was a way, like, there was an idea, right? Like there was primarily
#
a creative idea of how the film would be told. And it came from a political idea. I will
#
not make a film, which is a debate between patriarchy and feminism, which is going to
#
be a zero sum game. I'm not interested in that. I want to talk about feminism for all
#
the fantastic things it is, like what feminism has made possible for me and made possible
#
in the world. So this is a film about feminism, which will not waste its time talking about
#
patriarchy. In part, because it's a waste of time to talk about patriarchy. Like, why
#
will I pay so much attention to something I don't like when I could spend so much time
#
talking about something I love? And two, I do believe that many films have been made already
#
before I made Unlimited Girls, which critiqued patriarchy. So there is no need for me to reinvent
#
that wheel. I'm going to assume that people understand that. So I'm not going to think
#
that my audience needs to be indoctrinated. I am not making the film to indoctrinate my
#
audience, but to have a conversation with my audience. So I want to make a film about
#
two people who are a little bit separated on the spectrum, Chunky Girl and Fearless,
#
who are both feminist-ish, as I call it. But like Fearless is like, yeah, I mean, I guess
#
I am one, but I don't know. It's a label, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So let me figure
#
it out. And at the end of the film, Fearless is like, yes, it's a compliment to be called
#
a feminist. So she makes that journey from ambivalence to ownership.
#
So you're of course voice Fearless in the film, but did that also mirror your own development?
#
No, I never had any ambivalence about being a feminist. Like the first time somebody said
#
that, oh, don't listen to her. She's a feminist. Before I really knew what the word meant,
#
I was like, sounds good. Yeah. Because if the thing you're saying, don't listen to her is
#
a problem for you. And I love that thing. I'm cool. Call me what you want. So I've always
#
owned that word. And I have really, my life has been illuminated and animated by the idea
#
of feminism, among other ideas. But I think that this idea that there'll be a conversation.
#
And also when I began researching the film, I found so many well-kept, cyclostyle notes,
#
because cyclostyling is another artifact, another type, which were of all these conferences
#
and all these meetings that had happened. And so many disagreements, right? So many
#
disagreements. At one of the feminist conferences, there was a whole discussion on whether lesbianism
#
can be a feminist issue. And it was decided that it's not. And there was a sense of deep
#
betrayal because there were so many lesbian women who were also in the feminist movement.
#
But you saw the same people coming back to another conference two years later, you're
#
seeing a shift. So actually it was kind of fantastic to read all those notes and see,
#
okay, these people keep arguing with each other, but they keep coming back to the table
#
and they keep changing. And when you look at the history of the movement, one of the
#
reasons that it has remained as a movement in a very strong sense is it has always tried
#
to learn from its mistakes. It may not always have done so successfully, but Shah Bano,
#
Bhavri Devi, these have been landmark moments in the history of the Indian women's movement,
#
which have shown a mirror to privilege and forced women to reassess what it means to
#
be a feminist in India, right? So I think this is a great quality, this conversational
#
quality of the movement. And I wanted to replicate this conversation without having what a famous
#
filmmaker Deepa Dhanraj calls, well, her cameraman, Radha Navro's contractor calls women sitting
#
in a circle talking, which was a kind of motif of many feminist films. And I was like, how
#
do I get these women in a circle talking?
#
Take them out of the circle, put them in a chat room.
#
Yes, I put them in a chat room. That is exactly what I did. I put them in a chat room. And
#
the chat room itself is a mixture of fiction and nonfiction, because some of the voices
#
are the real women's voices. Some are actors. Some are lines that people actually said.
#
Some are lines that I wrote to make the conversation more seamless. So, you know, the film does
#
feel crisp and seamless because it is constructed in the way a fiction film would be constructed,
#
but using reality materials. And I also don't believe, as you know, I've already said ad
#
nauseam in this discussion, that realism is just a costume like any other costume. And
#
I think that the whole idea of the documentary is very intertwined with the idea of the nation
#
state. And the fact that it has been removed from the market has been very bad for documentary.
#
Because had it been part of the market, just like every other film, it would be meaningful
#
and it would keep changing in different ways. I think what is very significant about Unlimited
#
Girls is it was a film very deeply in relationship to an audience. And all my films have been
#
very much in relationship to an audience. So it's not like I have a position which is
#
very pure and now I'm going to tell it to you. But it's like, I want to dance with
#
you. Come, let's dance. I'm leading the dance, but let's dance. You're free to interpret
#
the film in a different way and disagree with it. I keep the film structures very open in
#
ways that I don't mind if people disagree. There's enough places for you to disagree
#
and agree. So that is also how the film is constructed. There is not a unitary. My position,
#
I think, is very clear. You can make up in the films what I actually think. But I'm,
#
I feel happy that I found a structure of work which allows for other points of view to be
#
kind of framed. And I think this was significant about Unlimited Girls. And in the years since
#
I've had many, many young filmmakers tell me I never was interested in documentaries
#
until I saw Unlimited Girls and I thought, oh, it's possible to do it this way. So I
#
think it's also important that something gets made so that the way that I saw other people's
#
films and felt like, okay, I can do this. This is possible. Yeah. So you keep increasing
#
that possibility. The other thing that you're really doing when you're doing that is that
#
since you're refusing to replicate the positions and the formats that came before you, you
#
are actually also forgoing that privilege. You are unmaking privilege. And I can't stress
#
how important I think this is. The thing is, I want me, I don't want to be disingenuous
#
and say that by making films in the way that I did, I lost privilege and also I didn't
#
get to be in the A-list festivals and I'm always in some peculiar position, but of course
#
she matters, but exactly how does she matter kind of is a question in people's minds. And
#
you also pointed out about how you never got any awards and someone who was on many of
#
these award panels once told you that, you know, I love your films more than all these
#
other people, but you were too entertaining. Yes, you're too enjoyable. You're too enjoyable.
#
It's not entertaining. It was you're too enjoyable. And I thought, how sad for you that you doubt
#
your own enjoyment so much. What happened to you that you don't believe that the thing
#
you like is worth embracing in public. And that is a story of most people's lives. The
#
thing that they love, they do not have the confidence to own. You could call Shakespeare
#
enjoyable. Shakespeare is enjoyable. He is and in his time, he was, he was, he was commercial.
#
Like Much Ado About Nothing is one of my favorite plays because it's just so enjoyable, right?
#
So I think that this idea of enjoyment, it's a deep discomfort with the body, the body's
#
pleasures, simple human pleasure. That art must take effort and if I'm consuming it effortlessly
#
and laughing, then maybe it's not art. So the thing that thinking can be pleasurable,
#
like all of this is woven into our miracles. But the thing is, what you said earlier, the
#
power of the camera. I was interviewed for a film and I started crying and I was shocked
#
because I thought like, I'm a filmmaker. I know what's going on and I'm, I don't want
#
to be seen crying on camera, right? So I think that it made me very conscious that the camera
#
has a power dynamic beyond and above everything. This is under the skin or something. Skin
#
deep. Skin deep. Yeah, sorry. But I think that what it helps me to do is think hard
#
about how can I tackle this problem of privilege? And one of the ways in which I did it is,
#
you know, creating this persona of fearless or the persona of goddess Annapurna. There
#
are all these very strange characters who are telling the tale of the film who you can't
#
fully trust. So it's a way of telling you that you don't need to trust a filmmaker.
#
I form no intimate relationships with my subjects. In fact, I don't have, I mean, I have what
#
I call an intellectual intimacy in the format of interview that I do, which is a bit like
#
what we're doing. Like it'll be a lengthy interview, but it won't be very intensely
#
personal. Like don't spill your guts. I don't make friends with people. I don't lie to them
#
about my political position, even if we are opposed, because I want to do the maximum
#
possible for you to not tell me anything you don't want to tell me. And I might still try
#
to get it out of you, but you should have some agency to deny me, right? Now I don't
#
believe that I'm always able to achieve this perfectly, but it's my desire. And I think
#
as a filmmaker, I do have that much ego, but even if you don't give me everything that
#
would make it an easy interview to cut, I can still do something to make this good,
#
right? So I think Unlimited Girls was all of those things. And in the films that followed,
#
I guess I explored this path in different ways and, you know, the different films obviously
#
had different kinds of results, but these were the central questions.
#
No, and in fact, Unlimited Girls will be linked from the show notes, so please do watch the film
#
there. I want to talk a lot more about feminism, but first I have a couple of questions about
#
filmmaking that I'll sort of get out of the way. One is an ethical question and the other is an
#
aesthetic question, but also with an ethical component. And the ethical question is that,
#
you know, you have once said, quote, the central dilemma of documentary is that you're taking
#
someone else's story and making something with that, stop quoting. This is also a question
#
asked to, for example, many narrative non-fiction writers or long-form journalists, that you go
#
into someone's life and you spend time with them and you take their trust and you take their stories
#
and then you just go away and it's for your own self-interest. You build something that will
#
benefit you and not them. This is clearly something you've grappled with.
#
Yes. And I think that my discomfort with that, you know, that I take somebody's story on what
#
pretext that is going to, is politically important. That's what people always told, right? It's very
#
important to tell your story because it will make a difference. But will it make a difference
#
to that person's life? Oftentimes not, right? And I think it's only by confronting that,
#
that I arrived at a different form of filmmaking, which did not require people to expose themselves
#
on camera, but only to say what they think about something. So in fact, you know, I made a film
#
called Q2P, which is about public toilets. Swachh Bharat Abhyan. There was no Swachh Bharat Abhyan
#
then. There was a Shat Prati Shat Swachh Bharat Abhyan. It was called that in those days.
#
Which later movie renamed, of course.
#
Yes. So I think even in that film, a lot of it is like, what do you think about this? What
#
do you feel about this? Right? So I could use that kind of an intellectual conversation.
#
And even so, some lines get crossed. Like I shot this woman bathing her little baby and
#
that's always an uncomfortable sequence, right? Because she's on the road. So I filmed it.
#
Would I go into your house and film you bathing your baby? I couldn't without your permission.
#
And sometimes you try to build in something which is self-reflexive into the film. But I
#
feel that's also a little bit of a disingenuous thing. But that said, you know, this power dynamic
#
will remain. It will remain in research. It will remain in any time that we engage with each other.
#
You may edit some things out of this interview. I'm trying to retain agency or trying to give
#
me some, but yet we have some desires of our own. And I think this is part of human life.
#
I never actually edit anything from interviews. You're so ethical, but since I edit a lot.
#
But I think there is a way in which we are always trying to get something from each other, right?
#
All relationships are about that. So the question is what's the max ethical place we can bring our
#
relationship to? What's the max ethical place a filmmaker or a person working with non-fiction
#
can bring their work to? I think different artists address and solve this question differently.
#
I think I solve mine by introducing huge elements of fiction so that the onus is not on the non-fiction
#
story. I don't make films which are character driven. I'm very uncomfortable with a single
#
character film. Not all. There are some great ones. But mostly I also don't make films about
#
topics which are like other people's suffering mind for importance. I don't know if it's right
#
or wrong, but this has been my way of addressing it. So I guess I have ended up making what you'd
#
call an essay film, which really thinks about a concept or an idea rather than takes one
#
particular reality and then tries to make a story out of that reality, which will stand in for a
#
larger idea. It did strike me about Unlimited Girls while I was watching it. There is no one
#
in that film who would feel exploited by your having shown them in that way. And I sort of
#
go by Kant's categorical imperative of never using another person as a means instead of an end.
#
And the means versus end informs a lot of my value judgments, which is why, for example,
#
I'm completely opposed to string operations, because whatever the higher cause is,
#
it's based on deception. You're deceiving someone. But the way you are tackling that,
#
if I got you correctly, is by being very straightforward with the subject on what it
#
is exactly, then what you're doing. And then they have the agency to deal with that, how they will.
#
And although the larger structure of the film doesn't depend on them. Actually,
#
the larger structure of the film depends on my artistry, right? So I make myself vulnerable.
#
And I feel like you have to put your ass on the line. There's hiding behind the subject
#
in order to get political importance. I am strictly opposed to it and I hate it. And I
#
feel there's so much of what we call virtue signaling, right? Online. So you see that online
#
also, but you saw that also in political work. So I think, yeah, but at some level, I also feel like,
#
you know, if you look at the history of art, art has almost never used reality until photography
#
emerges. You don't have realistic forms of that kind, because even when you make a botanical image,
#
we know it's an image. The artistry is present. So we never believe that it's the thing itself.
#
So this idea that I shot something and that thing is the truth. So I am very good because I showed you the truth.
#
That idea only emerges very late in the history of art. So if you look at Indian culture,
#
we don't have this realism at all, right? Like you look at all our forms and the closest you get
#
to something that engages with factuality or reality around us, actuality, as we call it,
#
is the Bhairupya. So the Bhairupya wears, dons a persona. And then there is, it's not on a stage,
#
but it's within real life, right? So I might don the persona of a milkman and come to your house
#
every day, but you don't know I'm the Bhairupya who's pretending to be a milkman. Well, I might
#
dress up as Lord Shiva and roam around and am I Lord Shiva or am I the Bhairupya? People respond
#
to me differently, right? So this notion compels me in a very interesting, I find it very interesting
#
that the closest we come to an actuality form is one which actually mixes fiction and non-fiction.
#
And it does so in order to comment on the world because how you respond to the Bhairupya says
#
something about you as well as how well the Bhairupya has done their job. And when you really
#
look at the history of Bhairupya practice, you know, Bhairupyas are not allowed to stay in their
#
mask, I mean, in their persona for more than a certain number of days. I forget the number of
#
days now, because you should not become the mask. And I mean, this is a very interesting question
#
when it comes to online anonymous accounts, like Twitter accounts, which are anonymous.
#
They are Bhairupyas which become the mask, perhaps.
#
Yes. And when you become the mask, you become attached to the power of the mask. That is why
#
you must not stay in the persona for too long, because otherwise you get attached to the power
#
of that anonymity. And then it will lose its meaningfulness to destabilize reality, right?
#
The jester or the Bhairupya destabilizes reality. But if you keep on and on being that,
#
you will become part of the power structure, because you have a power by being hidden.
#
So it should remain at the level of vulnerability for both of you,
#
which is exactly like love, right? It should remain at the level of vulnerability for both of
#
you. Otherwise, it's oppression. So I think that it's an interesting thing to work with a form
#
that uses fictional methods and the fiction inside the non-fiction to think about reality.
#
That's a fascinating insight. My next question, which I promise, which is really an aesthetic
#
question, is that, you know, I noticed in Unlimited Girls, for example, and it's probably
#
selective noticing. So tell me if I'm overthinking it. But you had a lot of shots which were very
#
unobtrusive in the sense you're shooting them from a low angle or from the side and you're not in
#
their face. And is that a deliberate thing in terms of you don't want them to be conscious
#
of the camera? So in a sense, you're hiding it out of their natural line of sight or?
#
No, the camera was never hidden because of the camera person.
#
Well, no, it's not hidden, just in the sense that it's not immediately visible right there.
#
Yes, I think that you take the camera out of the action, so to say, and it's just so.
#
But I think it wasn't so much in order to make them feel that way. But there was this idea that
#
you would not see fearless, but fearless would kind of stand in for the camera. It was like a
#
virtualness of you being in fearless' body. But also because I was really experimenting in
#
Unlimited Girls with this conversational interview thing, which means I was doing interviews for two,
#
three hours. And so I wanted the conversation feeling rather than the interview feeling to be
#
there. So that's really why the choices of camera angle were made in that way.
#
Let's kind of talk about feminism. Like in your film, you ask, I think, Urvashi,
#
the very direct question, how did she become a feminist? So since you have asked her that
#
almost a seemingly lame question, it gives me the freedom to ask you.
#
So obviously, I don't know the answer to it because I think I always naturally was
#
natural born feminist. But I think, you know, I arrived at the idea of feminism in a very strong
#
way through the feeling of not belonging to whatever were the normative structures,
#
not because I was cast out of them necessarily. Although, yes, in part, I didn't fit in many,
#
many senses, but because I also didn't like them. Like I didn't feel comfortable. I didn't feel
#
comfortable being the fat girl who's always supposed to be jolly and please everybody and say,
#
I know, I know I'm fat, but that doesn't mean I'm going to try and look good. Don't worry. You know,
#
meaning I didn't want to fit into all those categories. I didn't want to be the entertaining
#
person who's also not very intellectual or the intellectual person who's automatically boring.
#
Like I didn't want to fit in any boxes. And I think that's where it started for me that I
#
won't fit in the box and I don't feel the space. So why can't I say it? I want to do this. So why
#
can't I do it? I blame my parents because I grew up in a household where pleasure was paramount.
#
You were encouraged at a very early age, not encouraged, but it was just the way everybody
#
was. What do you like? What music do you like? What do you feel like wearing? What your tastes
#
were and what your enjoyment was, was given a lot of importance in my house, both in my father's
#
house and my mother's house. So there was that and there was the fact that my grandparents
#
were both in the movies and my grandparents were separated. So I also had this kind of a model of
#
unconventionality in a more literal sense. And I felt that I got a lot out of that. I got to be
#
whoever I was and discover the world because of all these things. And I think the more that other
#
people described me, the more irritated I would feel. And the need to describe myself on my own
#
terms was very, very important. And I think that led me to feminism in a more formal sense.
#
I don't think, I mean, although because people think in more conventional ways,
#
it's not like all my work has head on addressed feminism or feminist issues. I don't think of
#
feminism as a topic. I think of it as a lens. And it's a way of asking questions, as Fearless says
#
in the film. It's not the answer. It is the question. So feminism is always the question
#
that I bring to something. And it can be to filmmaking. It can be to the way we talk to
#
each other. It can be to the way I dress. It can be to thinking about how to decorate my
#
house even sometimes. And of course, to think about how politics works. So I think that is
#
what made me a feminist. Yeah. And in your film, you have a character musing about is feminism a
#
choice? Can you choose to be a feminist? And your position on that seems to be, you use the phrase
#
live feminism, that your feminism is something lived. And your position on that seems to be
#
that you have no, that once you realize you're a feminist, you're a feminist. It's not a choice.
#
And, you know, and I equate it to, for example, my atheism, that you don't choose to be an atheist.
#
You just figure out one day that all this is bullshit. And, you know, why should I believe
#
in something, you know, and it's not a label that you walk into. It's a label that you find to
#
describe yourself. There is a character actually in Unlimited Girls who says that I won't be defined.
#
I'd be described by being called a feminist. And I felt that was a very powerful thing. She said
#
that it's something that you say, Oh, that's what I am. That's the name for people like me. Right.
#
And it's very important to find that for yourself. That's not the only thing I am is also what people
#
are saying. And another interesting take I found in the film, which is also relevant in modern times
#
is where one character talks about how, I think, fearless only, where you'd like to define feminism
#
by, quote, identifying yourself through the things that you like, stop quote. Whereas a lot of modern
#
feminism, and in fact, a lot of modern Hindutva seems to be defining itself by the things that
#
it is in opposition to. Can we elaborate on that a bit?
#
Yes, actually, Urvashi Bhutali also says this in her interview that, you know, we knew what we
#
didn't want, but we didn't always know what we did want. And that was difficult. I think we all have
#
to be so careful not to become scolds, because then we'd all become Dariwala men, you know,
#
like always telling other people how you ought to be. I think of feminism as an idea, which really
#
gives you a lot of play in thinking what kind of person you want to become. Do you want to fit into
#
the predefined schemas of gender that society offers you? Or do you think that you actually
#
can walk down a road and figure out, you know, which flower you are in the garden of life in a
#
way, so to speak, that everything is not in these neat beds? So I think that feminism is, and for
#
women, because it is something that was drawn from the experiences of women, hence it has certain
#
tenets. It's not that it's just everything. Just because I say I'm a feminist doesn't mean every
#
single thing that I do will be feminist. And I think that's something to be very careful of,
#
because you should not go into that purest, basically inquisitorial mode that I am the priest
#
of this thing and now I will see whether you are pure enough or not. It's something like a
#
fantastic magic thingy, like something in Harry Potter. And because you're feminist,
#
you can both do things which are feminist and do things which are just things and do things which
#
are not feminist at times. Yeah, so you're not, like once I went on a date with a guy who kept
#
asking me, like one after the other, like, so what do you feel about 498A? But what about this? But
#
only things are, you know, after that I was like, okay, you know, I'm not like the feminist answer
#
generator here. Can we just talk about, like... Somebody should build a feminist answer generator.
#
Twitter, take that up also. Oh my God, it's happening. So he's like, but I'm not a feminist,
#
you know, I'm just trying to talk about topics that interest you. And I was like, well, a lot
#
of things interest me and your limited understanding of feminism is not really interesting to me. So
#
that's the other thing, right? That people never make an effort to understand what something that
#
they don't already know is. So most people define feminism by 498A is a topic you're supposed to
#
discuss. Do feminists hate men or not? Equality sometimes enters the conversation. I want to do
#
something for the upliftment of women. This is most people's notion of feminism, right?
#
Feminism, those are like some tiny little dot parts of feminism. Feminism is about imagining
#
a different world. It's about imagining ourselves as different people. It's about re-imagining
#
relationships between people. And I mean, I've often said this, it's about looking at the world
#
with a look of love, giving importance to things that were not considered important in the old
#
structures, right? So for example, if women sat together and discussed their personal experiences
#
and understood, hey, this is not happening only to me. It's happening to many women and it's
#
happening to us because we are women. There was a click moment for everybody. They felt a sense of
#
coming together. This oral experience, which was never given any importance, you know, in a world
#
where everything has to be written. The fact that I have experienced something, my experience was
#
given importance. It contributed to an understanding of the world, right? This is something that
#
happened in the movement and it happens in oral culture with many communities, right? Adivasi
#
communities. We have sung songs and remembered people for a long time. We give that importance,
#
let's say. So I feel like this way of thinking is very central to feminism. The personal is political
#
and the political is personal. That you make sense of the world also through your own experiential
#
relationship with it. And that's also why the unspoken or the unseen, as you might say, is
#
important in feminism. That you may be talking to me respectfully, but I may feel disrespected.
#
You may say that, like the person who was asking about 498A, et cetera, perhaps thought that they
#
were trying to talk to me about feminist topics. But actually, I was finding it violent and annoying
#
because I just thought like, you're not even trying to understand what I think. You're just
#
telling me what you think I think, right? So in some sense, it's not doing that, but allowing
#
things importance to manifest itself and to learn about a thing and then to value it for what it is.
#
That's what feminism enables us to do. And I think that it is important to read the debates that have
#
gone into feminism. I mean, it is important to read feminist writers. And there's, you know,
#
Dopaiseka feminist ideas that people espouse. I don't believe in it. I mean, I'm a highly serious
#
person. And I believe that you should study anything that you're interested in. Sonal Shukla says
#
this awesome thing in Unlimited Girls, and she's at a library, so it's quite fitting that she says
#
it. That, you know, if any other topic, you would have to read, you would have to know the history
#
of something. You won't say you're an economist, but you don't read anything about economy, right?
#
But for feminism, everybody feels they can comment on it without ever, ever finding out about it,
#
including people who say that they are feminist, who never look at the history of feminism
#
in the world in India, like it's okay to just pick up some stuff from the ether
#
and read a few things. I've had feminist women, young feminist women saying to me,
#
like, why do I have to read 10 books? And I'm like, why don't you want to? Why don't you want
#
to see what other people have said? You don't have to do the same thing. I mean, in a sense,
#
I have the same grouch about economics that nobody will comment on, you know, how a jet engine works
#
unless they've actually studied, you know, that, but everybody feels like they're an expert on
#
economics or kuch bhi bol do. And it's very interesting, you know, I caught you when you just
#
earlier you were talking and saying, I'm entertaining, bor mat karaya, now suddenly
#
you're a highly serious person. But seriousness is not boring. Fine, fine. But for a moment,
#
I thought I busted you there. You didn't bust me. I mean, I think that, you know, seriousness is the
#
most entertaining thing there is in the world, right? Because it's so rich. I would bloody well
#
hope so, because I'm told I'm too serious. You know, so I've just launched this new book show
#
on Storytel called The Book Club. And on the second episode, which released yesterday, or which is
#
going to release the yesterday of the release of this but hasn't yet released at the time.
#
Okay, we're already all lost, but okay.
#
Forget it. But yeah, is on a book I really love, A Vindication of the Rights of a Woman by Mary
#
Wollstonecraft. And one of the reasons I love Wollstonecraft goes to what you're saying,
#
which is where she talks about, I mean, first of all, she's not just an early feminist,
#
she's a serious political philosopher, wasn't given that credit in her day, because of course,
#
she's a woman. And I wish she was given that credit today. And what she does, which I love,
#
is that she takes ideas from John Locke, who is called the father of liberalism, and is indeed
#
my hero, I mean, where I get my liberalism from, and my notions of individual rights, and so on,
#
and points out what in those days was a radical notion that human rights have to apply to all
#
humans, not just to men. And she draws her feminism so beautifully from there, that it is
#
immediately apparent, and what I've also always believed, that if you're liberal, and of course,
#
the word has many meanings nowadays, but in the sense that I mean, that if you're liberal,
#
you are by default, a feminist. And this goes to one of the things that you said in your film,
#
where you said, quote, feminism is reported as if it is one room in a house, you're not talking
#
about changing the whole house, stop quote. And I've always seen feminism as not just something that
#
relates to women, but relates to men, particularly in the sense of the male gaze. And we are talking
#
about the seen and the unseen. And I think all men live in a sort of reality, which is so different
#
from the way women live in, in the sense that when women are out in the street, they are so much more
#
hyper aware of everyone who's passing them. Or if they get into an elevator with someone, they're so
#
much more aware, their being a woman makes them aware of so many other things, which are unseen
#
by men who don't give a shit, who are just nonchalantly, they can walk into a lift, or
#
they can go wherever. I mean, I mean, would you agree with this sort of? Yeah, I think men don't
#
look at their surroundings, because the surroundings have been built to facilitate them and don't
#
threaten them. Yeah, they don't threaten them. Sure. But men feel very threatened by the presence
#
of women. Like there have been these studies done where, there's a study, I'm not saying it,
#
that men have reported saying that 50% of the people in the room were women when there were only
#
like 15%. So like any women are too many women for men, right? And similarly, if you have one
#
woman's perspective, you feel you did your job. You know, like you don't, that there should be an
#
equal number or a sizable number of women and trans people and queer people and all kinds of
#
people quite effortlessly speaking in a newspaper or on a television show or part of your set of
#
interests or the realities that you take into account. This does not seem to occur to cis
#
heterosexual men, right? And to cis men in general. They're like, this is normal. And they believe
#
that they're feminists just because they're not beating their wives. Basically, the bar for what
#
makes you a feminist in men's minds is so low, right? And I do think that men also continue to
#
get congratulated for the very, like people are always giving lollipops to boys for doing nothing
#
much. For basic recency at most, you're suddenly a big hero. No, he really tries. Yeah, like I've had
#
like women also say that to me that I think so and so pretty good. I'm like, abhi uska naam
#
meeton mein nikla to tumhe abhi be good lag raha hai? I don't know. I never imagined. I'm like,
#
come on, dude. I mean, you are so busy being grateful to some guy for, I don't know, just
#
talking about sexual violence or just making dinner one day or just like talking the talk. Don't be
#
grateful. Be demanding. Be assertive and say, hey, you've got to shape up. So anybody who thinks
#
that a man is well-rounded, if he has not read a bunch of women writers, I really think you need
#
to change the way you think. And you wrote in a column once that, you know, when the whole me too
#
thing happened, a lot of the men who were named, whoever you had met personally, you knew you were
#
not surprised. What is this radar? Kindly explain. Well, it's the radar of men who are not interested
#
in women at all for themselves. It's a pro forma interaction they do. Yeah, because I never liked
#
them. You know, I mean, I always felt like, first of all, he's a solid bore and he's just going on
#
and on talking at me. And, you know, I'm very talkative as is clear. And so I think, and he,
#
I can feel that he's not interested in what I have to say. I can feel it. And so I don't want to
#
listen to his boring jokes and his extremely ordinary insights. I think my insights are better
#
than his insights. So my ego, in a sense, my intellectual ego allows me to see that this is
#
not a person who truly, truly respects women as people. And I have met enough men who do respect
#
women as people to know that it can be different, right? Had I never met any other kind of man,
#
had I never had a father who really liked me as a person, even if he was fed up with all my choices,
#
perhaps I wouldn't have known what that looks like. And you also mentioned that, you know,
#
when you were at your father's house and relative's house, you were always asked what you liked,
#
what you were, did that play a part in making you a feminist by default in the sense that
#
you weren't then indoctrinated so much in the ways of patriarchy?
#
No, not at all. I mean, of course there was some amount of, you know, girls boys thing,
#
and especially when you grow older. But I think I was very lucky in that sense that
#
I remember a moment when I was in the car with my dad going to the market or something. And he said
#
to me, we had just moved to Delhi. And so we were close to the rest of the family for the first time,
#
otherwise we just visited on holidays. And he said, you know, you're not going to grow up and
#
just get married after college. Like some of your cousins, you know that, right? Like you're going
#
to be somebody. And how many people's parents say that to them? Yeah, it's fantastic. And the other
#
very important, like I have talked about this often to my friends moment is, so my father was
#
really not very happy with most of the choices I made. And even the way I dressed and like generally
#
he did find me quite like jungly and what are you doing? And I was a bit of a disappointment,
#
like she's such a bright girl, she's making documentaries. And thank God I started going
#
to America and all that. People of this generation don't get why going abroad is so routine, but in
#
our generation, if someone's gone abroad, it's such a huge deal. It's like having five million
#
one trip is all you need. So, but the thing is that I went to film festival. My father was very ill.
#
This was a little while before he died. I went to film festival, I won an award, a rare enough
#
occurrence for me. And then I came back to Delhi and my friend called from abroad and my father
#
answered to landlines and extensions. So my father answered the phone upstairs and I answered the
#
phone downstairs and I was listening to their conversation. And she said, uncle, you must be
#
so proud of Paramita. She's going to all these festivals. She's winning all these prizes for her
#
films. He said, yes, I'm proud of her, but I'm really proud of her because she's a very honest
#
girl. And I thought like, wow, that is, it's so nice to hear that your father sees you as a person.
#
But did he ever tell you that?
#
He did. Actually when my father was sick, you know, we became, I mean, we were close, but
#
there was a lot of personal conversation between my dad and I. And I think this was very special.
#
Like I think the fact that my father was very emotional person also, he was not a very alpha
#
kind of person, but very caring parent, all of that. And the thing is this thing, disagreeing
#
with my choices, but letting them be not forcing or trying to force me to be otherwise continuously
#
complaining also like forever. My father wanting me to open a PPF account, I've written a column
#
about it that he just kept on saying, beta open a PPF account. I would be like, I don't have money
#
to put in a PPF account. And then we had a very big fight about it. He said, okay, I will never
#
tell you again. You know, I'm your well-wisher and you're not listening to me. I was like, great,
#
never tell me again. Thank God. And three years went by and my dad never discussed the PPF account
#
and then one day when I was like, relax, he said, beta, if you would just open your PPF account and
#
I was like, okay, let's go tomorrow and open it. And my father was so, so happy, right? So there
#
was a way in which, yes, he would complain. He would try to push me to do things that he thought
#
were the right thing, but he never forced a conversation about marriage. He talked to me
#
about it once. I said, I don't want to get married. He said, but, and he didn't say you should because
#
people do it. He said, but beta, you need to share them with somebody. And I said, no, papa,
#
I think I'll really be okay. I have a lot of friends that really think I'll be okay. And he said,
#
okay, if you say so, and he never raised it again. Amazing. Right. So I do think this is very
#
important. I'm not setting my dad up as some kind of great model of feminism. No, but for a man of
#
his generation, like my God, yeah. But it was sweetness in him. It was the ability to love me
#
that made him do it. It was not because of being feminist. What I'm trying to say is that he was a
#
very loving person. He loved people. People loved my dad. He was very caring as an, he took his role
#
as somebody who was an elder person, thinking about younger people very seriously. And I think
#
it's an important thing to do. Now I had older people look out for me. It was important for me.
#
I feel I must do it for others. I feel that the parenting thing that we spoke about in the
#
beginning, it discourages the idea that all children are our children. That's why it discourages
#
us from understanding that public university is very important because it's not just my kid going
#
to Ashoka. It's about all kids getting the chance to study and do well. Right. I should care about
#
it at a social level. And I think he had that. It was a very ordinary Indian quality, I think,
#
before. And I think that just created a sense of, a sense of it's okay to be who you are. You will
#
still be loved. Right. So the question of feminism, that if I'm a feminist, if I go against everything
#
that is taught to me, will anybody still love me? So when you are taught at a young age that you
#
people, you will still be loved, even though you won't be agreed with. This is a very big learning.
#
And I think that even though I was an awkward kid, even though I've had lots of difficulties fitting
#
in and continue to be rude to people and struggle actually with the real world, so to speak, I don't
#
think I'm very savvy person. And I do find it a struggle, but it's okay. You know, I feel that
#
something will happen. And I think this was an early learning. And I think it's a very enabling
#
thing for feminism. Your friends having friendships, being encouraged to have friendships.
#
I don't think many families give kids that, right? Like make friends, go out, let your friend come
#
over and stay the night. You can go and stay the night at your friend's house. Very early on, this
#
kind of social relationships with others. My parents had a lot of friends. So I think these were
#
great learnings that helped me in my feminist journey. And this empathy and this openness to
#
others that you talk about is, I think, also relevant in current battles in feminism nowadays,
#
because, you know, for example, there was this book Christina Hoff Sommers wrote in 1994,
#
where she coined the terms equity feminism and gender feminism, which, you know, for the benefit
#
of my listeners, I'll quickly give a summary. Equity feminism basically comes from the view that
#
men and women should have equal treatment in the eyes of the law and basically equality of opportunity
#
and so on and so forth. And gender feminism looks deeper at the sort of structures that have led to
#
women being oppressed, like the patriarchy, and so on and so forth. And I actually hold that there
#
is truth to both. I don't see why they have to be two separate things. But what gender feminism can
#
also often go into is what is the current identity politics of today, which is not just within
#
feminism, but in different domains. But what that identity politics seems to do is that as opposed
#
to the empathetic view, it takes a view that others, the other person, where suddenly,
#
patriarchy is not only the enemy, men are the enemy. And therefore you have these very harsh,
#
strict binaries, which is why, you know, Steven Pinker in his book, The Blank Slate had once
#
speculated that the reason behind the bizarre thing that a lot of women say they are not
#
feminists is that they are put off by this second kind of feminism, where you are treating men as
#
the enemy and treating yourself as a victim. And that actually, like, I of course, look at feminism
#
from the Lockean Wallstone craft, you know, equity feminist kind of way, shit, you're smiling like
#
you're thinking, but I'm just sort of, yeah. So that's kind of how I look at it from my individual
#
rights view, which all my listeners are sort of aware of. But there is also this identity politics,
#
which I think is in opposition to this, because, like, I understand that identity politics is real,
#
it's all around us, we suffer from it, women suffer from it. But I think the answer to identity
#
politics is on emphasizing individual rights and the autonomy and dignity of every individual.
#
And I don't think that you can fight identity politics with an equal and opposite identity
#
politics, because you just then enter into warfare. I think that, you know, to go back
#
to the discussion about how feminism gives value to many different things, and in that sense,
#
is an inherently queer theory, because it says that there is not only one way. Patriarchy insists on
#
these unitary identities and hierarchies, right, that one thing is more important than another
#
thing. Whereas feminism is actually saying there are different values, everything has its own different
#
value, and its own place, in a way, right. So I think that identity politics is very important,
#
because when you talk about a rights framework, we do live in societies that afford rights to people,
#
and where if some people get more rights, or some rights don't work for people, because they don't
#
take into account centuries of inequality, structures that are rooted in that inequality,
#
and to replicate inequality. I once worked in a television company for a short time when I was
#
being in that show, and I was appalled at how the structure is essentially constructed to produce
#
mediocrity. It's not that people want to be mediocre, but anybody who is not going to be
#
mediocre is going to suffer, and is going to be disliked by that system. Which is actually
#
a structure at a lot of big corporations. Yes, it's corporate structure. That's definitely true.
#
So I feel like, similarly, patriarch is also a corporate structure, which is designed to create
#
mediocrity, actually, and call it meritocracy. Caste is that kind of structure. It creates
#
mediocrity, but says it's merit, right. So I think that identity politics is important when
#
we are talking about rights, so that we can foreground that there are diverse populations
#
with diverse sets of experiences, and they all need to come to rights from a different place.
#
That rights are not also some unitary kind of notion. It's important to challenge also
#
day-to-day normalizations of social relations, which we don't question. I don't agree that women
#
don't like to say they are feminists because they feel it's a man-hating thing. I think women who
#
fear losing privilege and privilege always accrues from men. Unfortunately, we are still in a world
#
where men get to decide what's important and not, right. You would have to be a really
#
bloody-minded person like me, because I really do not care what men think. In fact, I don't care
#
what anybody thinks. I think this is important. I'm going to do it, right. So I think that's got
#
its own costs and its own advantages. But essentially, men decide if you're important,
#
if a man chooses you, decides to look at you, listen to you, you feel you are important. So
#
those who are still very tied to that power structure fear losing the privileges by stepping
#
away from them. They are very well aware that they will lose their privileges. They will not
#
be part of that scene. Sooner or later, that's what I see happening with a lot of older women
#
who've not left the privilege structure. That said, eventually identity politics also has to,
#
I feel, what you're calling empathy, I would call imagination, which is the point of it is
#
to loosen the grip of that identity on yourself. And it's very difficult to imagine yourself
#
changing if you can't imagine other people changing. So you have to conceptualize change
#
within identity politics. And that's got to somehow at some point, see, there's an evolutionary
#
thing also, right. So there'll be an evolutionary moment where there'll be a lot of anger and
#
hardline positions and a feeling of enmity, because there is an enmity actually. People,
#
identities are inimical to each other. By expressing myself in certain ways has to be done
#
with difficulty because the world doesn't let me. So in that sense, there is an enmity and the world
#
is inimical to my progress. So there will be a time of conflict. But yes, of course, we cannot
#
harden into that because then we are not going to be able to change. Even I can't change if I can't
#
imagine that you can change, right. So in order to have that imagination of change, what's the
#
language of conversation we're going to have? How am I going to point out your privilege to you
#
without saying that you are incapable of changing? This really becomes a question.
#
Or rather, how are you going to point out my privilege to me without me feeling that you're
#
attacking me personally? Well, how are you going to look at your own privilege? Or how are you
#
going to learn not to feel attacked when your privilege is pointed out is also where I can put
#
it, right. Like I think a lot of people feel attacked just by having their privilege pointed
#
out. And to some extent, you have to get over it. So to go back to the time when I got trolled,
#
you know, for a minute, I did stop to think like, why did I get trolled so badly? I wasn't doing
#
that. That's what I meant. And I say that I don't think it was fair what happened to me. But I could
#
see a friend of mine was irritated with me and said that don't do that. Like, don't see his point
#
of view, because that's like just, you know, hurting yourself. And I'm like, actually, I don't
#
agree with him, but I see where he's coming from. And I have some other gain about thinking this
#
through, you know, so we are going into details about that. I just feel like it's, it's not always
#
the onus on me to attack you nicely. It's always also the onus on you to not be reactive to my
#
attack. And that is also why I think the look of love is important, that sometimes when somebody
#
attacks us, we also have to look at them with the thought that, oh my God, there's decades of
#
privilege, I mean, centuries of privilege on my side and centuries of lack of privilege on the
#
other. For one second, let me not get upset. It's upsetting, but let me not act on my upset. I mean,
#
one can also conceptualize that, right? And I think it is, again, a two-way street, right? If
#
you forever and ever, despite my trying, say that, oh, you cannot change, then no change is possible,
#
because without unmaking privilege, how will we remake privileges? So I think this is an important
#
question, but I would say, again, it's not a question of interaction, it is a question of
#
imagination. And for example, the term toxic masculinity, which after some time starts to
#
stand in for all of masculinity, that masculinity is automatically toxic. When I have that imagination
#
of masculinity, I'm basically telling you, you can't change. If you're a man, well, until the
#
great feminist utopia arrives, you are doomed. So this determinism, I think, is an absence of
#
imagination. I wrote a comic about acid attack victims, right? And in which the main villain
#
was called Ahamkar, and he spews acid. It's very complicated. He gets a boon and somebody makes
#
him drink acid, but basically he becomes this guy. Ahamkar spewing acid, though, is very well done.
#
So he has the power to spew acid, and then he brings all these women who are victims of acid
#
attack into this island, where he says, nobody wants you, but I will look after you. Now, this
#
is actually a liberal kind of position at one level. So it's not what you imagine. The protector
#
of these women will actually be weakening them by saying, nobody wants you. And then Priya,
#
who's a super heroine who comes and saves them, she actually has this mirror, magic mirror,
#
and it's the mirror of love. So when you look at yourself in the mirror, you see what you really
#
are from inside. And you're reminded that you are not only the wounds that you have sustained,
#
but you're much more than that. And you liberate yourself from Ahamkar's grip. When the women
#
liberate themselves from Ahamkar's grip, Ahamkar ceases to be a demon. He becomes very diminished.
#
And Priya gives him the mirror and says, look at yourself. And he refuses. And she leaves the
#
mirror with him and all the women leave. And she's like, maybe one day he will look at it. So for me,
#
it was always a conception that Ahamkar could change if he wants. They don't want to sit here
#
and now try to reform him. They have liberated themselves. They're off. Now, if he wants to sit
#
on his stupid acid island and feel sorry for himself, that's his problem. I think the
#
diminishing of Ahamkar should be everybody's personal quest. I just want to say I agree with
#
everything you said. The clarification I want to make though is that what I meant about identity
#
politics is that one, it is real. All these structures you speak about, the oppression of
#
the patriarchy and so on are all real, indisputable. I think they're very useful at the level of
#
analysis. I think when you actually start engaging, bringing identity politics can become a bit of an
#
issue. For example, if I am in a discussion online and people are saying, check your privilege,
#
that stops a conversation immediately. When people say that, oh, you are Savarna, shut up.
#
And I'm immediately removed from the conversation. That stops the conversation immediately.
#
It might be true that what I am saying is influenced by my privilege. But bringing it up,
#
I think, poisons the discourse because I strongly feel that the discourse should always center on
#
argument and not on the people making the argument. So in that sense, I think identity politics at
#
the level of analysis and just understanding what is wrong with our world is essential. But at the
#
level of action and actually bringing that identity politics by othering people and treating them with
#
contempt, even if they are the people with privilege and positions and power, doesn't help the
#
discourse and therefore hinders change. I mean, I think contempt always hinders change. So I would
#
agree with you there. Check your privilege has come to be a term of stopping people from talking
#
rather than a term that is just what it is. Exactly. So I think like all of these things,
#
like toxic masculinity, which has come to be a meaningless term, right? You just use it.
#
You just chop it on anything and then that's it. Actually, I use it a fair bit, but I don't.
#
I am like Ahamkara. I am getting so diminished by this conversation with you.
#
Like I think we should all think a little bit about the language we use. I agree with you
#
that is this language conceptualizing a movement forward or is it not? And you know,
#
I wouldn't argue with you if I feel like many right-wing people, when they say horrible things
#
to me, my latest ploy is to say, you are being very silly or like you should behave like a grown
#
up or something. Then they get a little confused by this auntie G kind of response. But I think
#
millennials won't know what it is, but you were auntie three, not three young kids who don't know
#
what that is. So we might come up with various modes of engagement, right? But I feel like
#
yeah, if there is a person who's unable to see their limitations, I usually don't engage with
#
them at all. I don't have a great desire to engage with them. And I do feel there's a lot of work
#
in sometimes not engaging. So I feel the compulsory engagement, which happens online is what also
#
drives us to these absolute positions, which makes it impossible to have a conversation that
#
imagines change. And I think that yes, if you spend less time thinking about the other,
#
so which is a little bit different than what you're saying, which is othering people,
#
there is an other and there is a self in everything. So if you find that somebody else is
#
very bothersome and their identity is preventing them from seeing you in a certain way, I would
#
not engage with them. I would rather grow my own stuff and force them to engage with me.
#
The lawyer Flavia Agnes did a very interesting thing. I made a film on two of her clients and
#
one of her clients, her husband tried to kill her or some drama happened. Then he had a girlfriend
#
whom he brought into the house and he threw this woman, his wife out of the house. So she went to
#
Flavia saying, I want to divorce. And Flavia was like, do you want to divorce? Or do you need a
#
house to live in? Like, which is the thing you want? So she felt, okay, I've been thrown out of the
#
house. I've been treated badly. I don't want this man. But really what did that do that left
#
everything on the man's terms. He didn't want her either, right? He wins if she gets a divorce. But
#
she needed a house to live in. Like that house was also hers. So Flavia was like, see, if you're back
#
in the house, I can get a stay order. He cannot throw you out of the house. But once you're out
#
of the house, it's difficult for me to get in order to go back into the house. So you must first go
#
back into the house. So she went back into the house, like she whatever had the key and all that.
#
And after that, a stay order. And then the judge was like, okay, you have to separate the house into
#
two sections, her section and his section. And he harassed her like crazy while she was there. But
#
she had to stand strong. So finally he was like, okay, what will it take for you to give me a
#
divorce? And then he was like, okay, now we'll talk, right? So there is a way in which you don't,
#
your bad is not, I'm good. That's what I need. That's what I'm going to do to bring the other
#
person to your terms, I think is a very important political effort. And so yes, I know argument,
#
nicety, all of those things matter to me as well. Empathy is very important to me. But I think that
#
the real heart of politics is about strengthening yourself, strengthening your position, and then
#
getting people to talk to you on your terms, instead of always falling into their terms.
#
What is happening today with the protests is that instead of immediately falling victim to the
#
right wing agenda, and then getting into those meaningless arguments, people are like, ha ha ha
#
joke, ha ha ha poem, something, something. So the terms of the discourse are changing. And that is
#
the really revolutionary thing. And really, the flowering of art is the one silver lining in all
#
of this, because the cartoons, the poetry, I'm not going to show the papers. But art is the place,
#
right? Where change happens, where what is coming and what is going can do so in a much more fluid
#
way, right? And you have made my job easier because this is such a lovely segue into the
#
influence of popular culture on you and on, you know, on your work. Thank you for that happenstance.
#
You're welcome. I was wondering how to cut it. Now, madam can do it so fluidly in so many films,
#
but we are stuck in the podcast. I have done it. I will do everything for men. What to do?
#
Shows your empathy. Thank you for that. So, so yeah, I mean, you've engaged with popular culture
#
at a very serious level. You haven't sat back and said that no, this is misogyny, this is this,
#
this is that. You know, obviously all the cliches about containing multitudes, but you have loved
#
popular culture. You, I mean, the very fact that you wrote flashback presumably with our old friend
#
Imtiyaz Baghdadi, the great researcher is just a sign of that love. And, you know, recently you
#
wrote a column on SRK and, you know, how his evolution mirrors evolution of middle-class
#
India. And you wrote a similar thing about rom-coms, how they also mirror the, so tell me
#
about the influence popular culture has had on you and have you always loved it? Was there a point
#
at which you sat back and started thinking about looking at it with a critical gaze and what did
#
you then find when you did that? So, you know, I think it's interesting that, so I didn't ever
#
think of myself as outside of popular culture, right? Like most young people, the big thing was
#
radio in my youth. And then there would be just like, it was so difficult to get Western music
#
when I was a teenager. And there were like these two programs on radio called Play It Cool and In
#
the Groove. In the Groove came in the evening and Play It Cool came in the morning. So I would listen
#
to them, then you would copy down the lyrics of songs, because you didn't know when that song
#
would come again and when you would get to hear the song, right? So then think of trying to have
#
the song. I think you kids listening to this today should kindly realize how freaking lucky you are.
#
You can listen to any song anytime you want. Yes. I mean, that's another of the things about
#
YouTube that I love that I can listen to any song I want. Recently, somebody asked me what I wanted
#
for my birthday. And I said, I want a CD player. And they were like, who even has a CD player
#
anymore? And I'm like, well, I have 500 CDs, so I need a CD player, right? But the thing is that
#
this idea that culture is just what you like, popular culture is what you like, you do it very
#
effortlessly when you're young. It's only later on that you start getting told that something is
#
high culture, something is low culture, you shouldn't like this. But definitely, I am the
#
generation that grew up being told that Hindi films, people like Hindi films and Hindi film
#
songs are definitely like uncool. So Hindi film music was not cool the way it is now normal for
#
people. But my grandfather was a music director in films. I mean, he was a very famous film composer.
#
What was his name? Anil Biswas. Oh, you are his granddaughter.
#
I am his, he was my nana. I will ask you to sing at the end of the song.
#
And in fact, badli teri nazar, toh nazare badal gaye, it's a line from one of the songs he composed.
#
And my grandmother was an actress and she was a film producer later. So my uncle was also a music
#
director. So I lived in a house which was full of Hindi film songs. We listened to the radio.
#
My father loved music. He was of the generation that gets educated in Urdu, not Hindi. So he
#
couldn't even write his own name in Hindi. But there was all this Urdu poetry also in the house
#
and Begum Akhtar also in the house and Hindi film songs also. Some porno books, The Rise and
#
Fall of the Roman Emperor. Which you were spanked for finding. Why should anyone get spanked for
#
finding? Yeah, as well as they are seven years old and reading porno. I don't know. Like they
#
shouldn't get spanked. I don't agree with that. But yeah. But that changed your whole life.
#
Yes, well agents of wish. But the thing is, so I think that it was just normal to enjoy. Playing
#
antakshari was a big thing you did. So it was funny for me that the thing which you liked to do
#
most of the time, you then pretend to other people that you don't do. This I did find strange. Plus
#
it really was my family thing. I recently interviewed Raveena Tandon for something.
#
And you know, one of the things she said is that, well, I went to like Jamnabai and there everybody
#
like Hindi film. Eww. But that's the world I came from. So they looked down on me. But I was like,
#
what's wrong with it? So I feel like this idea was always strange to me. But I remember when I
#
started working for Anant that one day I was sent to some film studio and there was some recording
#
of some film going on and I asked, what is this? And they said, it's a new film called Ramgarh Ke
#
Sholay. Basically it'll be all these duplicate actors who are going to play Sholay, but as the
#
copies. And it's a parody. So I came back to work super excited. There's going to be this movie called
#
Ramgarh Ke Sholay. And you know, I saw Amrish Puri in the studio today and something. And everybody
#
like, what's with this chick? Like why is she so into all this? What is Sholay? You won't forget
#
Ramgarh Ke Sholay. So they were not into that thing, but obviously the coming of television
#
and like post liberalization cultures brought all this out. And I was in the lucky position when I
#
wrote flashback of being a person who knew Hindi film songs, but who also knew the Western way of
#
thinking about communication, right? Which is what you needed. You needed that particular Indo-Western
#
combo to be able to succeed in media at that time. And I think I did have it. So it was a lucky thing,
#
but most people who were like me were not working in that programming place. You know, they used to
#
work in promos, if you remember. So like the cooler people were still in promos and the slightly
#
uncool people were writing all this Hindi film music based programming, but I was in that uncool
#
place as always. So was I, but after your time, yeah, I was between 95 and 97. But it was a bit cooler
#
than in my time. So I think that, you know, there was this kind of dichotomy. I didn't like it.
#
And of course, because I, in my house, there wasn't a difference made between poetry and Hindi film
#
songs. People liked both, and they seem to be at ease with it. So I may have inherited that.
#
But also I don't, I mean, I do think that there is something different about the fact that I don't
#
just enjoy it. I obviously also look at it critically, but not in the sense of criticizing it.
#
But I see something happening in it. I'm not sure how that started to happen, but I would credit
#
Nandini Ramnath with making me think about it in a more formal way, because she and I would often
#
discuss things and she would be like, I really like what you said about that. That's really
#
interesting or something. Some of it, you know, it came from my irritation with all the left liberals
#
who are older than me who were like saying, this is regressive culture, all of Hindi film music and
#
new stuff. Govinda is aggressive. This one is aggressive. And my feeling was not really, I think
#
you have a class snobbery thing going on here.
#
Govinda is bloody amazing.
#
But, you know, people felt many things. There was misogyny as well, of course, as you're
#
rightly pointing out, but there was also many interesting class settings and it was just the
#
creativity of the writing and the exuberance of popular culture, which I loved. And, you know,
#
every time like somebody like fishes out their guitar and starts singing Bob Dylan's song,
#
I start breaking out in hives. So this thing that, you know, I actually hate boys who like
#
Pink Floyd, for example. I know you like Pink Floyd.
#
I kind of like the later Dylan.
#
Not that I don't like Dylan, but this kind of canon of what is great here, you know.
#
So I think, and I remember talk the Simi Garival show, which everybody loved to hate,
#
but which I loved. And I think my reasons for loving it was solid, really good interviews,
#
people talking about their personal lives. You never caught that anywhere. Like Abhishek Bajan
#
or thinking about being single, Raveena Tandon talking about her adopting these two girls,
#
her heartbreak. Dev Anand talking about his relationship with Suraiya and how he could
#
never really love anybody after. Like you never got this kind of conversation anywhere else.
#
She was smallsy, but she was also all of these things, right? And so I would be talking to
#
Nandini Ramnath about it. And then she started asking me to write pieces, longer pieces about it
#
for Time Out. Really? You think? So I wrote a piece about Himesh Reshamia.
#
Then I wrote a piece about Simi Garival. So these were things people didn't take seriously.
#
What was your take on Himesh? Well, I coined a good term for him,
#
his himness. But you know, I saw his popularity in a structural way. It's not like I was a fan,
#
but I could see that around that time, I wrote a television series about the business of Bollywood
#
for a business channel. And that would help me to see that, okay, he has these hooks and his music
#
allows you to make dance steps that are hooks. So this is the early version of virality. Like
#
it's very quickly quick to catch on. And at the same time, he kind of comes from the legacy of
#
Altaf Raja into a more remixed idea. That's why he's very popular with auto rickshaw drivers.
#
You know, so it's kind of the end of T-series and the coming of something new,
#
a different Indo-Western fusion from what happened immediately post liberalization that he's
#
offering. And this urdufication, I used to call it, like he only had a repertoire of about six
#
or two words, and he would use them liberally in the songs. So you get that old Altaf Raja
#
Pankaj Udaas vibe, but with this Moroccan beats. So it allows many different populations to enter
#
it and participate in it. And it creates this virality of the dance step and the repetitive hook,
#
et cetera. And then there was all the other fantastic thing like the village, which thought
#
that if you sang Jhalak Dikla Aja, you would get possessed by a ghost. That when you said,
#
Ek Baar Aja, Aja, Aja, Aja, Aja, and the ghost used to enter you. So there was a village in
#
Gujarat, which was, you're not allowed to sing image songs. So, I mean, there was all of this,
#
like, you know, this kind of cultural material that floats around and you listen and you think
#
like, what does it tell you about what people are feeling? And what does it tell you about how the
#
world is changing around us? And it was, it was, it's like being in a playground, right? Because
#
you go in there and you're seeing all these things. And I go, this is what it means. Oh,
#
this is what it means. And that's exciting. So I think that's what I felt about it over time.
#
Of course. Yeah. It's all the things. It's trusting what I loved. I loved Shah Rukh Khan always.
#
People always made fun of me for that. You know, he can't act. And I'm like, what a kind of like
#
dumb ass thing to say it is that he can't act. He can't act. That's bullshit. First, I mean,
#
come on. Please. We should take this outside. Outside. Yeah.
#
I feel like that's bringing realism into fantasy, right? Like people don't love Shah Rukh for his
#
acting. They love him for something else he unlocks in us. So I think that making sense of cinema
#
in a literal way, and especially with popular culture, it's a very stupid thing to do. Popular
#
culture is all about sensation and how we feel things. So it allows us to feel things fully.
#
It overtakes us. So what you're saying is the way I am judging Shah Rukh as a bad actor and the way
#
I might look down on some popular cinema is valid from its frame of reference. But that frame of
#
reference is inapplicable because these films are not trying to do that. They're not. Their enterprise
#
is completely different, you know? So you can't really bring that lens to it. But I also feel
#
there's a squeamishness about simple pleasure, right? Bodily pleasure is a problem for people.
#
Later on, it became fashionable to write about popular culture, but it's written about in a
#
fairly loveless fashion. No longer. I think there are new writers. I mean, other writers who are
#
doing really interesting work on Bollywood now, Hindi films, whatever. But yeah, for a long time.
#
And I mean, when you start looking back at it, like when you look at Hindi film songs
#
and the number of things they managed to do in a film, the way they represented queerness,
#
the way they allowed sex to be present, the voice that they gave to women, the voice that they gave
#
to emotion, which is completely lacking in our cinema right now. And I feel that's part of the
#
success of a film like Kabir Singh, that it is so much about emotion, that it's the only place
#
that people are getting to talk about feelings. So whatever its problems might be, they're clinging
#
to that, you know? So I feel by removing songs from films, for example, we have removed the
#
entire poetic component of a film, which gave some expression to our feelings as well. So I think
#
the playback song itself as a thing, that the voice and the person are two different people.
#
It's itself such a queer idea. I know it, but I accept it. It's a fiction. I know the reality,
#
but I accept the fiction as real, you know? I know that that's the voice of Lata Mangeshkar,
#
Nutan Kim. Unless it's Himesh, who's acting. If it's Himesh, then Himesh takes over everything.
#
Yeah, he is the fiction and the non-fiction. So he erases the actor in a certain sense. And that
#
is why he tried to become an actor eventually. But yeah, so I think like there is a lot of
#
complexity in popular culture, which is poetic, which speaks to us, which says something about
#
subterranean parts of ourselves. And I found it a great way to understand life. I'm not saying to
#
understand society as if I'm something outside it. I feel it's a great way to understand life
#
and who we are. So not just watching the film, but also saying that why am I reacting this way
#
instinctively to this aspect of the film? And then that makes you see the world. So, you know,
#
Ulka Anjaria has written this book called Reading India Now. And she's an academic.
#
And for about a year while she was in India on a sabbatical, I would see her at every talk that I
#
gave and every event I was in part of. And I'm like, wow, she's so culturally active. She goes
#
to everything. Or she's stalking me. No, actually, well, she kind of was because a year later. And
#
then, you know, I had drinks with her one day and I asked her, what are you working on? And she says
#
something about contemporary culture and Chetan Bhagat and something and all of that. I'm like,
#
yeah, it sounds good. But I didn't think about it too much afterwards. And about a year later,
#
she sent me a chapter saying that there is a chapter on your work in my book and I wanted you
#
to read it. And I hope I've not misrepresented in any way. And when I read the chapter, I was
#
halfway between like ecstasy and tears because I felt like nobody had understood my, first of all,
#
she's read everything I've written, which is massive amount of reading. And she had seen
#
everything I've made and been to all these events, but she had really, really understood what I was
#
trying to do, which was fantastic. And one of the things that she wrote about was my review of
#
Anarkali of Ara. And she said, it's the idea of the critic as a lover, that you love the thing,
#
but you critique it from a place of love, not from a place of contempt, which is what you were
#
talking about, right? And so for me, like when I saw Anarkali of Ara, I felt relief. And I'm like,
#
why am I feeling so, like this feeling I had at the end of the film, because, you know, throughout
#
the film, I realized I'd been holding my breath, but in the end, no matter what, it's going to be
#
like that fucking film Pink, where the men will uplift the woman. But that's not what the film was.
#
The film was about her just wanting to sing and dance again. It wasn't about her wanting revenge.
#
She didn't even want to, she just wanted to sing and dance and wear blingy clothes again.
#
She didn't want to be only the moment of sexual crime, which people are continuously reducing
#
women to, right? You're the victim of the crime and you're nothing else. So when she ends with
#
that thing and I came out and I was like, what a relief. Like this is a film made for people like
#
me who want to say yes, who's not only about no means no, it's also about yes means yes when I
#
want to, not when you want to, which is something totally missing in our films. So the idea of
#
writing about something because you see it as enabling, important, vibrant. I think that is a
#
critical place that we don't feel enough, right? And the way that I relate to popular culture is
#
really to look at what it enables, not what it disables. So the natural follow-up question to
#
that, which has two parts to that and one is cliched, but the other may be slightly less,
#
is in your time, in the time that you've been writing and working the last 30 something years,
#
one, how has popular culture changed? Or rather, that's the question. There are two parts to it.
#
How has popular culture changed? One, in a general sense of, you know, you think of, for example,
#
the market for entertainment and as society changes, you imagine popular culture will change
#
and how much of that has happened and what does it reflect? And part two of the question is that
#
Bollywood is often like governance, in fact, driven by the elites, that you have a few
#
privileged elites and a few structures and, you know, most new actors who come in are coming in
#
because they're the son or daughter of someone and blah, blah, blah. And you have these big
#
families ruling over the thing. And what I find interesting is that to a certain extent, these
#
elites are driving the change. So when I look at a film like say Kapoor and Sons, which has come out
#
of, I think, the Karan Johar's table, and I'm thinking, okay, I like what I really love about
#
Kapoor and Sons is that it shows gayness as such a natural, normal thing. But is it happening this
#
way because the elites are more, so to say, with it or have, you know, progressed further than the
#
rest of society? I mean, I don't know if I'm being very coherent, but... I don't think the elites have
#
progressed, first of all. I think the elites can often be more conservative than many other parts
#
of society, but that's also not really fair. I mean, look at things like Kapoor and Sons are even
#
Made in Heaven, which, you know, and again Zoya is Bollywood royalty. Yeah. I don't like Made in Heaven,
#
but I like Four More Shots, please. Oh, okay. Because I feel Made in Heaven is very Bhadur Lok
#
and it's like a very nationalist kind of thing. But it's got this very national...
#
You know, but I meant to the aspect of showing gayness in a very natural way and not in a
#
caricature sort of... Yeah, but you know, this gayness in a natural way also has become a kind of
#
liberal calling cliché. Yeah. So I will get tea. You know, but it's still there for its issue,
#
to an extent. And Made in Heaven takes a lot of its power, not from the juicy personal dynamics,
#
as from its very worthy kind of interest in social issues. It's like a 10 episodes of one
#
social topic after the other. Whereas Four More Shots, please, is about four girls who want to
#
have sex, make money and, you know, solve their emotional life. So I'm with that. I'm going to go
#
back and... Well, you may not like it. It's a bit trashy, but I was like with it. How dare you say
#
I don't like trashy things? I am called the Govinda of podcasting for a reason. Right. Control
#
yourself. Podcast is three hours long, maybe the only reason. Just like a Bollywood film.
#
Yeah. If I made it five hours long, they'd call me, I don't know, the Bela Kaur of podcasting.
#
Exactly. It's all about size. So the thing is that I feel that Bollywood first, if we're talking
#
about popular culture, it's not only Bollywood. But Bollywood at first was like full of people
#
who were not elites. There were elites, of course, Deva Karani and all, there were Brahmins,
#
there were upper caste people, but there were a lot of Muslims, there were a lot of Anglo-Indian
#
women, there were a lot of Tawaifs. So there was a kind of melting pot feeling about Bollywood early
#
on. And then, of course, families start coming and studios and systems and privileges form.
#
It was always very driven by those camps. But in its content also, it represented a far more diverse
#
world than today's Bollywood does. Right. Which is to say you had working class people,
#
you had queer people not being gay in that accepted sense, but you had a lot of queer
#
presence. If you look at older Qawalis and you see the kind of men who are seeing those Qawalis,
#
you'll see queer presence in a very much more potent, because it's not been neatly,
#
you know, like politically correctly presented. Now, both things have a different power is what
#
I'm saying. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but it's not necessarily a linear
#
progression of one progressiveness and then it's getting better and better.
#
But I think what's happened, the significant change in popular culture is, in fact,
#
I don't think Bollywood is any longer the popular culture of India. It has been excessively
#
corporatized. It works excessively by corporate logics, which means it works by playing the
#
numbers, not really by the slightly maverick quality of creativity. Yeah. So it's not potent.
#
It's not risk taking. You know, it's a fairly risk averse kind of space creatively. From time
#
to time, you'll see something, but not really. And people don't back the risky thing very easily.
#
And you see that it plays out in the OTTs. It plays out in all the worlds that we have.
#
But digital, I mean, TikTok. I was just going to come to TikTok because I have this feeling
#
that this is one thing you and I could bond over. We could sit and watch TikTok together.
#
But the thing is that why I don't watch a lot of TikTok, but the power of TikTok is it has
#
overturned the logic of celebrity. Actually, I no longer need Ranveer Singh because I am Ranveer
#
Singh, right? It's like that. You can get on TikTok and have a million followers like that.
#
You don't need English. You don't need literacy even. You just need to know how to make a great
#
20 second clip, right? So what is it doing? It is actually making popular culture, folk culture
#
again. This division of culture into folk and not folk is a colonial division. But actually,
#
folk culture was culture. And Bollywood is a kind of urban folk. That's all it was, right?
#
You have all these great Shaheers and you have so much other types of folk culture happening in
#
Mumbai before, which many people, Lavni. I mean, one of the reasons I used a Lavni to make a film
#
about consent for Agents of Ishq was because I looked at Laffey and I was like, oh my God,
#
this is so sexy. And it's so clever a form. And it will allow me to say something fairly didactic
#
without being didactic because it is totally rooted in lived experience, right? It's an
#
experiential form actually. So you've always had multiple folk and pop cultures. I won't say folk,
#
multiple popular cultures have existed, but the corporatization of Bollywood made it seem like
#
the only one. When you go to Punjab, Bollywood is not a big factor there because pop music is
#
the main popular culture. And South people listening to this will be so pissed off at me
#
because they're like, what Bollywood is not? Yeah. What are you talking about? So, but I'm
#
saying even the big, big film producing states or regions, right? So yes, maybe Tamil movies are very
#
big, but nevertheless movie production is very corporatized. Although there is much more
#
inventiveness in movies in the South, right? So for example, Malayalam films, because they're not so
#
corporatized and it's not such a big film producing culture, you have a lot more inventiveness. You
#
have a lot more relationship with the audience. What corporatization does is it severs the
#
relationship between audience and creator. And not just that, what you know, the fact also remains
#
is that because of technology and the internet today, anyone in the country can see Malayalam
#
films and get inspired by them, which would not have been the case 20 years ago. You're reaching
#
the long tail. But I think that, you know, if you think like earlier popular cultures, it's like,
#
okay, when somebody is married, you call in the singers. When somebody is born, you incorporate
#
it into the everyday practice of life. Now we have done it again. There are moments, you know,
#
I also know that facetiously when we were doing Diwali puja, since we are a most untraditional
#
family, we would sing some filmy kind of prayer song, like kuch to karna hai type of thing. So
#
the way in which popular culture and the fact that many people sing bhajans, which are based
#
on filmy tunes. So we've always had that mixture of everyday life and popular culture, right?
#
But the corporatization has made it like not to do with day to day life. It has everything is unreal,
#
but actually being the only spokesperson, the binary, creating a binary of culture in a sense,
#
it has lived its day. And that is why, you know, today when people say why aren't Bollywood stars
#
saying something about politics, I'm like, who cares? Like have some pity on them, you know,
#
because they can't in a way. And one of the really popular hashtags on TikTok, if you remember,
#
was the onions. There were thousands of videos and satire about onion prices. So that's your
#
descent happening right there. I would say a lot of popular TikTok is extremely misogynist as well,
#
which our society is. But you're also seeing all these like grannies and so many people doing like,
#
you know, cartwheels, granny doing cartwheels. And so many women with channels of their own
#
and millions of followers. And also, you know, like I met this woman, I keep forgetting her name,
#
but she's very well known on TikTok. She used to do motivational talks about disability,
#
but she got on TikTok because she used to make funny videos with a granny that didn't get much
#
traction. Then she started putting her motivational talks online. She got a lot of followers. And then
#
people are like, your English is so good. Can't you teach us English on TikTok? So she started
#
doing conversation English videos on TikTok, and she has a huge following. So I also think this
#
response. Apparently in a couple of weeks, she had some millions of followers. Yeah, but the
#
relationship between audience and creator is what digital has enabled. And you will see that
#
everybody who goes the corporatized way eventually starts to struggle online, right? So your AIBs
#
and your TVS, of course, they've made money, etc. But they're excessively dependent on corporates.
#
So eventually, I mean, TVS will manage to keep a certain amount of relevance to its audience going,
#
but its newness is decreasing. And TikTok is overturning that it's bringing new populations
#
into control. Yes. So I think it's an exciting moment for popular culture. And I would say even
#
for myself, something that I could do with Unlimited Girls because of the coming of digital
#
culture, make a film that didn't look like any film before, because I had the luxury of it cost
#
less. It was in my hands. I could buy my own camera. Paramita, this is a moment for you to
#
announce your TikTok channel. I am going to start one soon right after this podcast. Done. Oh my
#
God. Amazing. So yeah, if that happens, I will obviously... It'll be called love, sex and TikTok.
#
Now there'll be 50 channels with that title to take advantage of what you just said. I'll think of
#
something new. But I think even making Agents of Ishq wouldn't have been possible without digital,
#
right? Like it's right to the audience. The audience is reshaping it. So I would say that,
#
you know, we don't have to worry too much about Bollywood's badness because it's not that important
#
anymore. So we have now, this episode has reached that stage of self-loathing where I'm hating on
#
myself for having an amazing guest, but not enough time to do justice to our amazing work.
#
So all the things that I wanted to talk to you about, like consent and the changing nature of
#
relationships and so on is something we'll perhaps leave for a future episode. What I'd like you to
#
do right now is something that perhaps I'm guilty of not having spoken of enough through the course
#
of the episode. Tell me a bit more about your projects. What is Agent of Ishq? What is Love,
#
Latika? Tell my listeners something. I mean, I'm sure many of them, I hope not, but many of them
#
might be discovering you for the first time. For example, tell us what are you working on?
#
So right now, for the last four years, I've been running this project called Agents of Ishq and
#
it's a digital project about desire, sex, love for Indians. It was created because I hated all
#
the content online, which was about sexual harassment and this creep kawali and all of that,
#
which I just felt like was actually misogynistic and what I call this very bro-ish kind of content,
#
which actually was making sexual violence worse because it wasn't creating an empathetic
#
conversation across the genders and it wasn't grounding us in our own experience. Like it was
#
setting up what's right and the wrong way to be. So Agents of Ishq was created in order partly to
#
fulfill some sex education desires, which I feel people don't get, but to make stuff that would be
#
about lived Indian sexual lives. As soon as we started, however, it became like it kind of blew
#
up for us because people started writing saying, I also want to write a story and I have an
#
experience I want to share and I also want to be an agent of Ishq. And so now it has become actually
#
a very co-created kind of space where we make some things, but a lot of user-generated materials on
#
the site where people send in their narratives. We work with a huge number of really talented
#
illustrators and more and more keep getting added because people just write to us saying,
#
I love your stuff and I also want to draw for you. So I think now Agents of Ishq has become that
#
kind of a community space where people are talking about sex and love in a very open,
#
honest and thoughtful way. If you haven't seen it, please check it out folks who are listening.
#
Agentsofishq.com, the link of course will be on the show notes.
#
And also I think one of the things we've done is like a lot of cutting edge work on consent,
#
like cutting edge in the world because we made this laveny about consent, which is first of all,
#
very entertaining and awesome. But also because it said that consent is not just about the binary
#
of yes and no, but it's about yes, no and maybe. And I do think that the maybe space is very
#
important generally as a feminist because the idea that somebody will take time to decide is the most
#
fearful thing for us all. In fact, one very evocative phrase I learned from you was a garden
#
of consent. Yes, the garden of consent. Which is a space where everything is fluid. It's not
#
necessarily a yes or a no. And you've even in a separate place spoken about relationships and
#
dating, for example, as more of an exploration. So it's not a goal oriented thinking by end of
#
first date, I must get to this base or that base. But you have to think of it as an open ended
#
exploration, which and there are so many modern anxieties. I mean, there'll be many people who
#
will have the experience on Tinder of somebody not wanting to meet them unless sex is guaranteed.
#
And I have often said to such people that, you know, you may be worried whether I will sleep
#
with you or not. But how do you know you will want to sleep with me when you meet me? I mean,
#
it's a question not only about what you're getting from the other person, but thinking about what you
#
really want, which I think people don't do because they're so anxious about achieving that goal. And
#
there's a fantastic piece on agents of age written by an Indian woman of Caribbean origin called
#
flirting without agendas. And it's about appreciating each other, not about flirting in order to get
#
something, which is what you're seeing the goal. So I think like there are all of these very
#
beautiful ideas that conform more to the way that we actually wish to live life, if we may or may
#
not always be living it that way, that I think makes it also it's an important project, I think,
#
because it dares to say many things that people feel, but are scared to say out loud. And it could
#
not have been done without the very strong feminist grounding that it has, right? So it centers the
#
experience of women and queer people first, men are not the center of the conversation,
#
their experiences are not what drives the idea of what is liberation. Liberation is different for
#
each person is what we believe. And everybody's ability and possibility to define their own sexual
#
journeys is what qualifies as liberation. If you really, really feel you are monogamous, then you
#
are liberated if you live that life. And if you're really and truly polyamorous, you're liberated if
#
you can live that life, right? So there's no one liberation. I love Ladika is a project that I did
#
purely for pleasure and joy for myself. It's a digital interactive project, where there is
#
vine with many, many different kinds of flowers and fruits. Many are not realistic. And when you
#
click on it on any fruit, it opens either becomes a flower or it starts like oozing pulp and many
#
erotic things like that. And it plays a poem, an audio clip of a poem, which is an erotic poem
#
from an old one, a new one from different places in the world. So it's actually just that it's like
#
a little room surrounded by a diaphanous curtain that you go into. And you just look at all these
#
like gorgeous and surreal flora and fauna and listen to erotic poems. And while watching people
#
play with the love Ladika, I felt very much that people love poetry. They don't know they love it
#
sometimes, but they need to be like poetry should be read out and spoken so that people can develop
#
a personal relationship with it. It shouldn't only be in books. So it also should be in books.
#
And also that actually people when reconnected with their erotic selves become at home with
#
themselves. I really felt what you said at the beginning of our conversation that people are
#
always thinking about other people looking at them. So you never see anybody in a state of
#
repose. Where they're comfortable in their own skin. At home with themselves, right? It's very
#
rare. Everybody's very conscious of being looked at today, even if it's only because they're taking
#
selfies all the time. But suddenly I saw people just immersed in themselves and it was beautiful.
#
And some people said I felt very vulnerable while being there. So that was all very delightful.
#
This is a moment Parvita when I am going to acknowledge my privilege because it's a great
#
privilege talking to you. I've got so many insights and so much wisdom and so much to
#
think about from this conversation. Thank you for having me here and thank you for
#
making this wonderful show. If you enjoyed listening to this conversation, just follow
#
all the links to Parvita's work on in the show notes. You can follow her on Twitter
#
at Paro Devi. If you like any of her work and I'm sure you love a lot of it, please amplify it.
#
It deserves to have a much wider audience as you'll realize when say you watch unlimited
#
girls or visit agents of fish. You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Varma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in and thinkpragati.com.
#
The Scene and the Unseen is supported by the Takshashila Institution. You can find out more
#
about their public policy courses at takshashila.org.in. Thank you for listening
#
and don't be good tonight. Do something naughty.
