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Why do we read books and watch movies?
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Part of the reason is to immerse ourselves in the heads of other people, experience many
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lives instead of just our own.
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But the other great reason is not about discovering others, but about discovering ourselves.
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I sometimes wonder how much of my own self do I truly know.
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When I look back on how I viewed myself in my twenties, I realised that I did not know
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I had a flat, distorted view of who I was.
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There were layers to me that I did not see, and what I did see was a misleading outline.
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And I am sure that despite my best attempts at self-reflection, that is true even today.
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How do we get past this?
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When we read books and watch movies, then through the lives of others, we discover parts
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of ourselves that we did not know existed.
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I am sure you also felt that shock of recognition when something in a book or a film touches
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you deeply, and it touches you deeply for a reason.
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The more we immerse ourselves in books and films, the better we know ourselves.
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Just as art can increase our empathy for others, it can increase our understanding of ourselves.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioural
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Jai Arjun Singh, best known as a writer on film, but who also writes brilliantly
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about books and culture in general.
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I first met Jai in the heady blogging days of around 2004.
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I used to blog at India Uncut.
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His blog was called Jabberwock, and I immediately fell in love with his writing on films and
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The quality that I liked about Jai's work is best expressed by Javed Akhtar's favourite
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I can't think of a precise English translation for it, though I describe it as a kind of
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stillness that allows for reflection, in Jai's case, often self-reflection through the prism
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That quality was something that you could cultivate through the form of blogs.
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Newspapers and magazines did not give you that space of freedom, and left a writer breathless
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because of the need to rush through what they wanted to say.
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Jai went on to write books on the film Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, the director Ishikesh Mukherjee,
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and he also edited an anthology of essays on films called Popcorn Essays.
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I still look forward to everything he writes, and I absolutely loved this conversation.
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We spoke about the loneliness of growing up as a film lover in the 80s and 90s, how taste
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can both shape and be shaped by the circumstances of your life.
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What happens when art is viewed through ideological prisms, as often happens these days.
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And Jai also coaxed me to revisit Hindi films of the 1980s, which he says was not such a
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bad decade after all, Rahul Ravel Zindabad it seems.
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We actually didn't cover many of the subjects we wanted to chat about, three hours is simply
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So we'll do future episodes as well, but for now, sit back and enjoy.
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And before that, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Sometimes when I enter a museum or an art gallery, or just look at pictures of paintings
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by great artists, I don't quite know what to look for, I react to them viscerally, but
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I often wish I had a more nuanced understanding of the form.
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Do you also feel that way?
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If so, I have the perfect resource for you.
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Head on over to the sponsors of this episode, Wondrium, at Wondrium.com, and check out this
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Now, Wondrium used to be known as the Great Courses Plus, who have sponsored many episodes
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Let me spell that out for you, Wondrium, W-O-N-D-R-I-U-M dot com slash Unseen, U-N-S-W-E-N.
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Jai, welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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I was talking about doing this for a while, glad we're finally doing it.
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Yeah, in fact, we last spoke about it when I was, in fact, in Delhi last year, I had
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come in February to do a bunch of episodes.
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I think I recorded some 10 episodes in two weeks in an actual physical studio.
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And I remember you and I met in Saket and we had coffee at this delightful bookshop
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where I browsed around and discovered Future Guests.
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That's the place where I first saw Tripur Duman Singh's book, for example.
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And yeah, and then we went to this restaurant and we discussed that we have to do an episode
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sometime and here we are and just look what the hell happened after that.
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What have these last few months been like for you?
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Well, it's been tough, like it has been for many people, but of course, not as tough as
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it has been for the worst affected.
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Getting along, you know, in keeping with what we're going to be talking about, I've actually
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done a few online sessions and courses about cinema, which is something that I probably
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wouldn't have thought to start if it hadn't been for the pandemic and everything that
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Got into the world of, you know, of online sessions and became comfortable with it.
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And that's it's been at least that part of it has been going fairly well, other things
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Yeah, it's going to be, I mean, I also started my writing course in April last year and it
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was just off a lark where I thought that, you know, would people be interested?
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I put out a tweet asking if people were interested and people said yes, and it's still going
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I mean, the 14th cohort is kind of going on now.
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And it's also interesting, I was thinking about every time we meet and we don't meet
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very often because hey, Bombay, Delhi, though I must tell you that I meet my Bombay friends
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less than I meet you because you just take it for granted that they're in the same city,
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it's you're not fixing up meetings and going and all of that.
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But it struck me that we actually met very few times in the sense that we of course got
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to know of each other when we started blogging and I'll discuss that period in detail with
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But so that's that's when we kind of came to know each other and we found this very
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easy groove to our friendship as it were that every time we meet we're in the same kind
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of place and you know, it's easy and it's comfortable and it's almost like a comfort
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And the reason I kind of bring this up is I've done episodes in the last few months
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with people I've known for about as long as you in the same way as you, friends like
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Deepak Shinoi, Sonia Faleiro, who was in Bombay for a few years, so I did spend much more
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But it was interesting and I was just thinking about how friendships develop and form these
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The easiest way to form a groove of friendship is of course when you're in school or college
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with someone and you're spending a lot of time together and you figure out each other's
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comfort zones and all of that.
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And the interesting thing is that that is shaped almost by happenstance because you
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know, your physical location determines everything.
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You are in school or you are in college where you are, you can't choose anything and also
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So today I have virtually no friends, one or two maybe, whom I'm still in touch with
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from sort of my pre-20 life, but I have plenty of people who are now my friends who I met
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in the mid-autees like you, who you meet them because of a common interest or a common thing
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you do and then you just find a groove and that groove is almost kind of always there.
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And it's said that later in life you have trouble making new friends and both of us
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I do find it hard to kind of make new friends and find these grooves and all of that.
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And that kind of just got me to thinking about the nature of friendship and what it is and
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because at one level it just seems so mysterious.
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You know, sometimes I, in my misanthropic way, I can't figure out why anybody's friends
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Well, yeah, well, you know, you've already said quite a bit about it, so it's, you know,
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17 years, can you believe it has been 17 years since the blogging thing happened?
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I actually remember the first time we met when you had come to Delhi for something after
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we had been in touch with, you know, through the blogosphere.
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And I was listening to parts of your conversation with Ani Zaidi a while back and she was also
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part of the blog meets of 2004-2005 when we were all being introduced to each other as
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known turf and Jabberwock and India Uncut and so on.
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What you were saying, you know, it's interesting, I quite possibly don't want to get into competition
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territory now, but I quite possibly had even fewer friends than you did in my school years.
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In addition to being introverted, I was also very painfully shy and I know there was a
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lot of melancholia, things weren't great on the personal front, there were things going
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on, having to be away from school for periods.
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And it just struck me that one of the things that happened, you know, in the early 90s,
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when I really got into watching, I got into doing the sorts of things that the few friends
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I had were absolutely not interested in at the time, you know, obviously reading voraciously
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is one thing that I had that habit from from an early age, but getting into watching old
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Hollywood films, then watching world cinema, getting into all that as an adolescent.
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And I went through a period of around 6-7 years of crippling loneliness, this is in
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the pre-internet period, where I was convinced, absolutely convinced that I would go my whole
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life without ever having the sorts of friends who shared some of these interests, the specific
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interests and then of course the internet comes along and then within a few years, you
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know, of course, one thing led to another, I got a journalistic job which put me in touch
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with people with similar interests, then suddenly you're blogging and the world opens up and
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then you know, the people like you are out there, there are people outside India as well
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who suddenly find yourself in touch with, who share these interests and suddenly it's
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a very different landscape all around.
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But yeah, I mean, friendship, I don't know, I just feel like it's, you know, one of the
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cliches that we're constantly uttering and you know, it's completely true as cliches
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go is that all of us contain multitudes, right?
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And that we are, maybe we are different things at different points in our life and even at
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the same point, you can be, you know, different in one context with one person and in another
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context with another person.
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I think friendships just intersect in so many ways, but that being said, of course, there
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are some people with whom you have a far more of a kindred thing going on across multiple
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interest areas and those perhaps tend to be the more lasting ones.
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You know, when you speak of the crippling loneliness, I kind of identify with that in
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a sense and you know, there is another kind of crippling loneliness that I think is there
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in today's generation for different kinds of reasons.
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But in our kind, part of it, of course, was that being in India, firstly, you got exposed
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to so little of the outside world, like unlike today, everything wasn't at your fingertips.
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Like you said, you know, you've said elsewhere that once you got into foreign films, you
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would go to embassies and you would take, you know, borrow video cassettes from there
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and it was just an effort to get anything of that kind.
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And therefore, by default, like first, you're in a poor country where, you know, culture
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We are not at that stage of technology where everything is on the internet.
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Secondly, only the very privileged like you and me can, for example, see those kind of
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You and me were probably watching the same kind of films at the same kind of time, but
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we are in different cities.
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So there is that physical barrier and then at a later point in time, that physical barrier
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sort of breaks down, which I totally get.
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So tell me a bit about your childhood years.
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What were you watching?
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How did you kind of get drawn to films and so on?
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There are no easy answers to those questions, but anecdotally, what I was reading and this
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of course is true of, you know, this disconnect between the sort of stuff that you're reading
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and the sort of stuff that you're watching.
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There's something that I think Mukul Kesavan or someone else may have written about this,
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written an essay about this, a certain type of urban anglophone Indian who's sort of
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grown up in a city whose first language more often than not is English or at least, you
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know, you're studying in an English medium school.
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In my case, my parents spoke with me mostly in English.
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So one is reading Ladybirds and Enid Blyton's and things like that to start with and then
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maybe Amar Chitra Katha comics in English and stuff also, but one is almost exclusively
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That's the film culture that you're first exposed to.
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So it's a bit strange really, when you think back on it, that the world of the famous five
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is intersecting with the world of the Amitabh Bachchan Masala film, which was my preferred
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movie when I was growing up, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years old.
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It sounds like the worst cliche on earth, but really, Bachchan was my superhero and
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the sorts of films I was most interested in for the longest time, I think right up to
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the age of 13, 14 were, like I said, the Masala Hindi film, the Dishoom Dishoom films, the
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very macho Bachchan movies or, you know, if the film didn't have Bachchan in it, it had
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to be a multi-star with three or four heroes, you know, the Nagen, Jani Jyot, Dajani Dushman,
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And it's pretty amusing because, you know, a few years ago, as you know, I did a book
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on Rishikesh Mukherjee, who was known for the slightly more subdued, gentler middle
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cinema sort of sorts of movies.
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And when I was working on that book, many people just assumed that when I was growing
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up in the single channel era, in the Doodhashan era, like everybody else of my generation,
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I was besotted by the Rishida movies like Anand, then Chupke Chupke and Golmaal, Babarchi,
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watching them over and over as they appeared on TV.
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And that wasn't the case.
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At that point in my life, when I was when I was a child, I wasn't interested in these
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I only wanted the most action packed Masaledar stuff.
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I didn't even want to see my favourite actors Amitabh and Dharmendra in these Bhadralop
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personas in a film like Chupke Chupke.
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So there was, of course, a change in my tastes and a lot of things coming together in subsequent
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But initially, it was just that.
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One thing I'd like to just point out is, of course, many of us are movie buffs or movie
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nerds at a certain age.
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One of the differences, one of the things that distinguishes someone who goes on to
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become a professional film critic writing about cinema is perhaps that from a very early
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age, I think from when I was six, seven, eight years old, I just developed this habit of
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maintaining a register in which I would write, I would just scribble down the titles and
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the star casts of whatever films I saw because at that age, you're principally interested
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That's what you're interested in and because you've looked at newspaper reviews and star
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ratings, you've been influenced by that sort of thing.
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So I had a register when I was maybe seven, eight years old where I'd just be writing
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down things like the titles of all the films that I saw and giving them these massively
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exaggerated star ratings that would go right up to 16 stars, for instance.
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Out of a five-star system.
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Yeah, instead of the five-star system, you go from the zero-star to the 16-star system
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and there'd be different sorts of adjective combinations that I would use to describe
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what a particular rating meant and I'd use up all the big words I knew.
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So a 10-star film might only be a magnificent classic, but a 16-star film like Cholay or
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whatever might be a stupendously fantabulous masterpiece or something like that.
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So I got into that habit and this, of course, is when I'm very small, seven, eight, nine
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A few years after that, when I was in my adolescence, I also became interested in rating films
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in a perhaps more disciplined and organized way.
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When I got into old Hollywood films for the first time and I bought an enormous movie
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guide called the Leonard Maltin movie guide of 1990-91 and I lugged it around with me
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everywhere to video shops to flip through, to read the entries on individual films that
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were available at the store, at that point, again, I got into the habit of maintaining
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a perhaps more organized register or diary of the films that I was watching.
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But by that point, I was also making little notes, like one or two sentence scrolls about
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the film, just something that struck me about the film, something that I found interesting.
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And I suppose that was really a prelude in many ways to writing more analytically about
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films, which is something that would happen years later.
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So before we get back to the personal journey, a couple of questions that come to my mind
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And one is that the moment you force yourself to give a rating for a film, I would imagine
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that it forces you to think a little deeper about the film, because then you have to question
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why am I giving it three stars, why am I giving it four stars, what are the parameters?
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And equally, and a question that I'd really save for later, but it seems apt now, is that
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does actually formally writing about film, like at this stage, of course, you're doing
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notes, but later on, you go on to actually write about cinema in a more formal way.
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Does that force you to think deeper about films?
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Because one experience of a film lover can be that you go to watch a film, and you just
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sit down and you just watch it and you enjoy it for what it is.
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You have thoughts about it, but you don't write them down anywhere.
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There's no structure to your thinking, you're not breaking shit down.
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You're not thinking that, you know, you're not necessarily making historical connections
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and going deep in all the many different ways that one can go deep, whether we are talking
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about the craft or the form or the, you know, where it stands in the director's previous
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So does, first, giving these kind of ratings and two, then actually writing about cinema,
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does it force you to engage that much deeper in the sense that you have thoughts you wouldn't
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otherwise have had, and because you have had thoughts that you wouldn't otherwise have
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had, you are a changed person?
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You know, would you say that?
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Yeah, no, no, no, of course it does work that way.
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It still works that way in my 40s, after all these years of doing this, one is constantly
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being surprised by something, you know, and of course it happens and I know this happens
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with other writers as well, that very often I'll sit down to write about a film with only
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a very basic idea about, you know, of what I'm going to be writing and a basic sense
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of what I thought of the film, the two or three points that I'd like to make about it.
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And then in the process of writing about it, when you're sort of really getting into it
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deep at a paragraph-by-paragraph level, you find yourself articulating thoughts in the
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process of writing and making these little connections that you mentioned in the process
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It's not the case that everything is cleanly flowcharted out beforehand.
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Sometimes that can happen also, I suspect that can happen when you're working on a very
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tight deadline and you're writing something for a limited word count, 600, 700 words,
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you know, you can even while travelling by car or something, and you can be making basic
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structural notes on your cell phone and then typing the whole thing out on the computer
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But that is a relatively low investment sort of review that I'm talking about.
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I'm talking about really the fairly long form analytical essay.
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That's something that happens routinely with me that I articulate my thoughts about the
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film and about perhaps my own response to the film and what that says about my mind
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or my personal experiences or whatever, my life experiences, my feelings about different
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I articulate a lot of those things to myself in the process of writing.
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One thing I'd just like to touch on something that you mentioned just now about the sort
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of film nerd, the sort of film buff who engages deeply with the film but doesn't really feel
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the need to write about it or to put one's thoughts down or to put his or her thoughts
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down on paper or to have it published somewhere.
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I have to say, I very often have a deep envy for that sort of movie buff.
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I have many friends who are like that, friends who are quite possibly bigger movie nerds
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than I am, more capable of being articulate about a film in conversation than I would
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be, but who have absolutely no impulse to write about it or to sit down and agonize
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And I think that's such a wonderful thing because I'm always surprising people when
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I don't watch anywhere near as many films as people might think I do.
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And one reason for that is that every time I watch a film that stimulates me in some
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way, it could be a positive way, it could be a negative way, I need to take a lot of
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time out to sit down and write something about it, even if it's being written just for myself,
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even if it's some scattered fragmented notes which I may or may not use months later in
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a column, even if it's not a piece that's being immediately written, I need to sit down
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and write about it then.
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And that actually eats into the time that I might have to watch another film very soon
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So it's very, very rare for me today, for instance, that I watch more than one film
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That almost never happened.
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And I have so many friends who will go to film festivals in the pre-COVID world, going
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to film festivals and watching four or five films over the course of a day.
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And that's something that I've never really done.
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Even at the age of 20, 21, when I was so enthusiastic about festivals or whatever it was, I've never
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really had the mental energy to watch a number of films in a day.
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Because normally just watching one takes up so much of my mental space and I need to sit
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down and think about it, assimilate it, process what I've experienced.
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What is the other question you asked?
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I think I've just gone off on a tangent.
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It was essentially about this, about whether this imperative of having to write about a
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film improves your thinking about the film and therefore does that change you as a person?
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But the drift I seem to be getting from your answer is that you are that kind of person
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anyway who takes time to process things.
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So you would probably...
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Is it a feedback loop where they feed into each other?
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But also to perhaps more directly answer what you just asked, of course it works that way.
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I can think of numerous cases where a lot of films that I've written about over the
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years, not coincidentally I think, have been films that touch on various aspects of the
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parent-child relationship.
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And I feel that there's a lot of writing that I need to do in the future as well, perhaps
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not film related writing, just general personal essay writing about my parents, both of whom
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are now gone and I have very different relationships with each of them.
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I've often found that I sit down to write about a film without thinking that it's going
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to turn into a personal essay at all.
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And then in the process of writing about it, and of course I am writing about the film
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as well and about what's going on in the film, the quality of the acting or the directing
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or the music or whatever it is, all that is there as well.
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But in the process of writing about it, I realize that possibly one reason why this
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film meant so much to me or stimulated me to thought or to the action of writing is
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because there's something in it that ties in with my experience with my parents.
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And then suddenly, if one is writing an essay length piece or writing a commission piece
#
for someone where you have a certain amount of leeway to do personal writing as well,
#
I'll find myself writing four or five paragraphs of personal reminiscence involving my mother
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or my father and tying that in with how this particular film affected me.
#
So that happens a great deal as well and of course then the writing and the film analysis
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also becomes a conduit for perhaps understanding or articulating something about oneself, about
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In one of your books, you mentioned that Pauline Kale was once asked about why she had never
#
written an autobiography and she pointed to her anthologies of reviews and film essays
#
and said, I think I have and that kind of brings me to my next question because it strikes
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me that people think that a review is or must be or should be in some way some kind of objective
#
And you've also spoken at length about how the earlier form of the review where newspapers
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in the nineties and 2000s would give like 600 words, 500 words and what people came
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to expect would be just verdicts delivered on the movie that acting is good, cinematography
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I used to have those Leonard Maltin guides as well.
#
And it is only in retrospect after many years that I've realized that to me that's kind
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of the wrong way to think about films as if there is a hierarchy of merit, so to say,
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when different films can appeal to people for so many different reasons.
#
Now, whether I'm reading about books or cinema or even when I write about those, what I have
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realized is that when I'm reading something, what I value is always something that is in
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the realm of the subjective.
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In fact, what I value is always something that is coming from the author's personal
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life and experience and whatever, because that is the only thing that can make anything
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Anybody can say Starcast was good and cinematography was this and it's so many minutes long and
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this is a plot and spent 300 words giving the plot.
#
What makes an essay on a film or a review or whatever stand out will necessarily in
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a sense be autobiography, not autobiography in the sense that there is a book about parents
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and you relate to that because you're thinking of your parents, not in that kind of direct
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sense, but there is some emotional resonance like in another piece of yours, you mentioned
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this beautiful phrase by Sunita Rappurwala where she talks about the spiritual DNA of
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a film, which I would say could be the essence of a film.
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I think this was you were part of a panel on the translation of books into films and
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you were kind of talking about transferring this essence from one to the other.
#
And this is something that I feel is true, that everything I write about anything and
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this is of course not true perhaps of my political operatives or whatever, but more and more
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whatever I do, including this podcast, which is kind of my journey and the stuff I'm thinking
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about and the stuff I'm interested in, more and more the things I find value in and the
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things I want to do are those things that are imbued with the personal.
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What's your thinking about this?
#
And initially when you start thinking along these lines, is there something holding you
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Is there a sense of guilt that there should be no I in this, that there is something objective
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about everything and you have to get that across?
#
And because especially as a news reporter, that is of course true, that you're just reporting
#
facts and trying to get to the truth, but that's kind of what it is.
#
But you know, is that something that you begin thinking about that you begin resisting that
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should I put so much of myself into this?
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And at what stage do you begin to realize that this is a dope, this is what I want to
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And almost needless to say, I agree with pretty much everything you said there about the importance
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of subjectivity and the interestingness of subjectivity.
#
To answer the last thing you asked just now, I can say with some pride that I've never
#
felt guilty about the possibility of putting an I into my writing.
#
What I have felt early in my career, when I was 20, 21, 22 years old as a journalist,
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obviously subject to a much greater degree to the hegemony of one's bosses and the things
#
that they expected you to do.
#
At that point, of course, you did run into the sort of senior editor who would frown
#
on the use of an I in a review and that's something you still have even today in 2021
#
in some mainstream publications, including a couple that I write for right now, where
#
you get told by the person who's commissioned the piece, listen, so and so this guy at the
#
top, he's a bit conservative in his thinking, you know, it was for first person, so you
#
make those little adjustments if you feel that it's still worth your time and the money
#
is worth it or whatever it is.
#
And here I'm talking about the very short form sort of review that does not involve
#
a lot of personal investment for me.
#
So I'm okay with doing an objective, seeming review, structurally objective seeming, though
#
it is, of course, still completely subjective, and I'm okay with doing that for a certain
#
sort of publication, but generally speaking, throughout my writing life, my professional
#
writing life, including those earliest years, the sort of writing I was most interested
#
in was the navel gazing, you know, I'm saying that in a deliberately self-deprecating sort
#
There's a sort of writing that gets described as navel gazing by a lot of people.
#
I just took it as a given that anything I write with seriousness of purpose and with
#
integrity is going to be as much about me and the way my mind works as it's going to
#
be about the thing that's being written about.
#
I just took that as a given.
#
And I didn't even see that as an arrogant position, somewhat similar to what you said
#
that, you know, to me, it was self evident as a reader as well that I would be most interested
#
in review or the sort of work of criticism or the sort of essay that provided a glimpse
#
into how a particular sort of mind received a particular sort of film or book or whatever
#
That's the sort of film writing that I had been very interested in when I first seriously
#
got into film literature in my adolescence around the time that I started watching old
#
I also started seeking out a lot of film literature by people like Pauline Kyle, one of the obvious
#
suspects, but also a few other writers who had done books on Hitchcock, on Howard Hawks
#
And I always found that writing, that sort of personal writing, very interesting, very
#
Now, when I did that Rishikesh Mukherjee book that I mentioned, I was clear from the start
#
that the book would be, however arrogant this sounds to some people, that the book would
#
be as much about my mind as it would be about Rishikesh Mukherjee's films.
#
And I really did not mean that in an arrogant way at all, I meant that as a compliment to
#
Rishikesh Mukherjee's films for stimulating my mind in a certain way.
#
But of course, what happens then is that when you've written a book like that, and the book
#
has, the publisher has marketed it to make it seem like it might be a little more biographical
#
than it is, a little more anecdote driven than it is, and then of course, people start
#
reading the book, people pick it up on Amazon and then they start writing online reviews
#
I actually have a number of one-star reviews of that book on Amazon, which say things like,
#
this book is not about Rishi, Rishidhar, this book is about J.R.Junsingh, and an objective
#
book about Rishikesh Mukherjee's films would have recognised the brilliance of Anand, but
#
this book hardly says anything about Anand, so that sort of thing, and I took that sort
#
of thing as a big compliment in a way, even though of course it hurts to have one-star
#
reviews on online forums, because really to my mind, and to again coming back to what
#
you touched on earlier, at a time when the internet is full of hundreds, maybe thousands
#
of blog posts about a high-profile film like Anand or Golmaal, a lot of which are basically
#
just saying the same thing over and over again, providing a plot synopsis, and saying something
#
very trite in my view, like Anand is an inspirational film about a man who teaches everybody that
#
death can be conquered, something really obvious like that, and once it's been said a thousand
#
times all over the internet, I feel like if I am doing a book about Rishikesh Mukherjee's
#
films, I want to say something about the Anand that I experienced, and maybe bring something
#
new to the table that has not been said before, and if I can do that honestly, I mean it shouldn't
#
be a contrived thing of course, it should come honestly from my engagement with the
#
film, then that's what I want to do, I don't want to just write something that you can
#
easily find on Wikipedia anyway, so agree with pretty much everything you said there.
#
Yeah, and also it strikes me that number one, that whole expectation that there can even
#
be an objective book about Rishidas films for example, is completely untrue, there is
#
no universal truth to them that is there to capture everybody views it differently, even
#
Rishida would have viewed it differently and not gotten that, and I think that, and I agree
#
with you that though I can tell it hurts, I can tell the one-star reviews hurts over
#
If I can just interrupt for a second, what you said there is absolutely true, because
#
if you were to read Rishikesh Mukherjee's interviews over a period of 30-40 years, he
#
is contradicting himself all the time, even about his own films, one of the things I found
#
fascinating was the sense of a very conflicted man working in a mainstream film industry
#
where a certain degree of compromise was required, you know how mainstream Hindi films tended
#
to be made in the 60s and 70s without bound scripts, often with producers dictating things,
#
the star system dictating things, in the midst of all that if you have a director with a
#
certain sensibility of his own having to make compromises every now and again or do things
#
on the fly, of course there is going to be a lot of self-beratement happening, at the
#
same time there is going to be defensiveness, once in a while if he gets criticised by someone
#
else he will stand up for himself.
#
So if you read his interviews, in one interview he will say one thing about Golmaal, in another
#
interview he will say something that sounds very different about it, so the subjectivity
#
as you said just now comes in even with the creative person.
#
Yeah, and it's appropriate that one should have conflicting views on a film with a title
#
like Golmaal, and this text means that that's not necessarily just true of him, it's true
#
I think of every creator in the sense that you are driven to do certain things, you may
#
not yourself know where those impulses come from and why you are driven to do them, you
#
tell a story to yourself about them, that story can change as your self-image changes
#
or as your desire to project a certain image of yourself to the outside world changes,
#
so it's a sort of constant mishmash of changing narratives inside your own head, and I would
#
still say that you know then a naysayer would say that okay if JR Jun is talking about Rishidas
#
films from his point of view or if Amit is pursuing his intellectual journey in his podcast
#
why should the rest of us be interested right, it's just personal, you enjoy it, let your
#
friends listen, but I think that's just the wrong way around because I think what then
#
someone like you is doing is if you're exploring a certain avenue and you know what those films
#
meant to you, I think a lot of people are trying to figure stuff out, like when I try
#
to figure stuff out through the show, a lot of people are on similar journeys where they're
#
trying to figure stuff out, and your journey is relevant to everybody for that reason,
#
as long as you do it honestly and you do it in an authentic way and you're not just being
#
performative, I think it's of tremendous value for that reason, by the way I gotta tell you
#
that I am one of these people who just derogatory said they watch four or five films a day during
#
film festivals, you know, and for the last few years while Mami was on, that was pretty
#
much my routine during Mami, I read what's on 28, 29 films in the week that it was on
#
and I would also kind of live tweet about it almost like not during the film, but after
#
every film I'd, you know, have a little bit and I found that it helped because putting
#
a tweet about something, compressing it in so many characters would just force me to
#
think a little deeper about why I liked it and why I didn't like it, I think that kind
#
of sharpens your thinking, like going back to what you said earlier, like in my writing
#
course I'll often quote Joan Didion who once said that I don't know what I think until
#
I write it down, so the process of writing is not just a way of oh I'm thinking something
#
I got to put that on paper, the process of writing can shape your thinking and in that
#
sense kind of shape the person you are, let's go back to biography now, as you can see I'm
#
treating you the way you treated Rishida, so let's yeah, just wanted to quickly add
#
to that Joan Didion quote, Roger Ebert had something along those lines, I don't remember
#
the exact thing, but it was something like advice to writers that the muse doesn't come
#
before you start writing, the muse comes while you are writing, when you sit down to write.
#
Which is why discipline and process is so important, like one of my four webinars in
#
my writing course is just about process, which people kind of ignore, people think if you
#
understand the craft, you have an intellectual understanding of what a good sentence is,
#
you are covered, no you are not covered, you still have to get your ass down and actually
#
write the damn thing, now you know one thing I was kind of struck by and I haven't thought
#
about it in these terms before, though you know the thing about people containing multitudes
#
is actually a cliché on my show, so it's a cliché I'm kind of guilty of, it's so true,
#
but the context in which I never thought of it is how you mentioned that people like us,
#
people like you and me, the English speaking elite so to say in 1980s India, would be reading
#
one kind of thing but watching entirely another kind of thing, there also I was a child of
#
privilege because my dad was a director of the FTII from the mid 80s, so I got to watch
#
a lot of world cinema as a matter of course, but in general there is this classic disconnect
#
where it's almost like we are one person when we read an English book, we are another person
#
when we watch a Hindi film and my question to you is about when does that sort of shift
#
happen where initially you are reading everything and you are watching everything and it's entertainment
#
and you are just enjoying it and all of that, but at some sense there is a shift where you
#
know some switch goes off and you are like you know you get it, you get art, you get
#
literature whatever, I mean I know that sounds kind of pompous but you get it, you get that
#
there is something else, there is something deeper, like in my case like I sometimes say
#
it happened when I happened to pick up Dostoevsky's House of the Dead when I was 10 and I thought
#
it will be a thriller, be zombie horror whatever and suddenly you know my mind is blown and
#
then it's my gateway into that kind of thing, similarly in your essay about horror films
#
and the great book you edited Popcorn Essay, you wrote about how for you that might have
#
been psycho where you are watching a whole bunch of horror films before that and you
#
are you know getting into the genre and really loving it but it's psycho which is something
#
else and you are not scared while watching it but other parts of you kind of get activated,
#
is that shift something that you have thought about, is it a gradual thing or is it a one
#
day thing, is there a sort of a exhilaration and a hunger that goes with it that you know
#
you discover this whole new world, tell me a bit about that and tell me a bit about this
#
transition then from someone who is loving films to someone who begins to appreciate
#
You know this is a very difficult question, I can tell you it definitely wasn't a sudden
#
shift, if it was a shift it was a very gradual one and it's still going on in my 40s, I
#
feel like if I were to spend the next 50 years writing and thinking about films, at the end
#
of my life I would still feel like I was just a student in the first grade or something
#
and hadn't engaged with a fraction of everything I could engage with.
#
The psycho thing you know just to provide context for those who don't know, I am actually
#
in the process of writing a lot of these little personal essays that I am currently doing
#
just for myself or putting versions of them up on the blog or on Facebook because this
#
year marks 30 years from the summer of 1991 which is a very major period in my film watching
#
life and probably the period that's closest to the sort of shift that you are talking
#
about even though I am personally reluctant to speak in the language of shifts as if it's
#
some sort of life altering thing because I continue to maintain that my arc as a film
#
watcher has been a very weird one, it's not something as simple as okay I was watching
#
only masala Hindi films up to the late 80s or early 90s and then there's a sudden turn
#
into watching old Hollywood and from there getting into world cinema, a lot of this is
#
also facilitated by the fact that satellite TV came to us in the early 90s, in the mid
#
90s star movies had this thing called 100 years of cinema where they showed all sorts
#
of things for months on end, there were the embassy video libraries etc etc so I had
#
access to a lot of stuff, things changed for me for around 10-12 years I was completely
#
out of the world of Hindi cinema, I think I had just been so sated by that particular
#
sort of filmic language, that over the top hyper dramatic language and because as a personality
#
type I was very reserved, very emotionally undemonstrative, it perhaps also in some small
#
ways became a rebellion against hyper drama, against larger than life things and for several
#
years I got into, I developed a taste that was almost exclusively for the more restrained
#
forms whether it was old Hollywood which was a little more subdued than mainstream Hindi
#
cinema or world cinema by people like Bergman or whoever but having said all that then in
#
my 20s I then returned to the fold of Hindi cinema and found myself appreciating a lot
#
of these larger than life hyper dramatic films through new lenses and finding a lot of emotional
#
resonance in them all over again and today if there is something that I value in myself
#
as a film watcher or as a film writer it would just be this that without any conscious effort
#
on my part or some deliberate attempt to be a viewer who watches many different sorts
#
of things, I just developed a sort of egalitarianism as a film watcher and open mindedness to all
#
sorts of forms, all sorts of genres from the really restrained mode of kitchen sink realism
#
to the larger than life language of film makers like one of your favourites Anjali La Bansali
#
I got to point out to the viewers right here that Jay is being ironic because Bansali is
#
exactly the kind of film cinema I don't like but anybody who has heard your previous podcast
#
already knows that I suspect but yeah so I am almost ready to say that I am resistant
#
in many ways to suggesting that there is a clear cut evolution as a film watcher because
#
also what happens, Amit, I feel that there are two, whether one is talking of cinema
#
or literature, maybe it's just the circles that I move in, the sorts of people that I
#
interact with most these days but I feel like many people just view that evolution in terms
#
of moving from the escapist things you loved as a child to the more sombre things that
#
are befitting for you as an adult viewer, when you become more interested in things
#
like realism or whatever or an understatement or authentic pictures of the world around
#
you and I don't really feel like I have had that journey, I think my journey has been
#
much more back and forth like that, today I can, depending on the mood I am in when
#
I wake up in the morning or the mood I am in in the middle of the day, I can just as
#
easily watch a gritty, understated, completely realistic film as I can watch an over the
#
top, loud, slapsticky or melodramatic film and enjoy it and find some level of stimulation
#
from that but to also come back to the question of shifts, what happened with Psycho really
#
was that it became a turning point for me because I watched it, I found it a bit creepy
#
of course in some ways but again I just found this tremendous sadness in it as a film and
#
I related to it in ways that I perhaps would not have been able to articulate back then
#
as a 13 or 14 year old but which I found myself making sense of subsequently, as a young boy
#
who was living with a single mother, with a recently divorced mother, having escaped
#
a house that had had unpleasantness and violence in it and now dealing with the new challenges
#
that came with living as part of this somewhat unconventional family unit with my mother
#
and her mother, my nani, who did so much for us but was also an extremely boisterous and
#
extroverted person, the sort of person that I was very of as a child, as a very shy introverted
#
child so there are all these conflicts going on for an adolescent, for a 13, 14 year old
#
and I found that watching Psycho with its reflections especially in this beautiful scene
#
in the middle of the film where the Norman Bates character and the Marion Fane character
#
played by Janet Lee, they sit and just talk in the parlour and for those 10 minutes or
#
so the film is like a Bergman film or a chamber drama or something and they are talking about
#
loneliness about things like that and what it means to love someone and to hate that
#
person at the same time or to feel like you are in your own private trap versus being
#
free and I just found a lot of resonance in that, a lot of sadness in that and that was
#
one of the things that led me perhaps to, it came at a time in my viewing life when
#
like I already mentioned, I was starting to get a little tired of the overwrought language
#
of the Hindi films that I was watching, this is also a time when Bachchan is in decline,
#
serious decline, there have been some truly ghastly films like Toofaan and Jadugar in
#
the late 80s and so it just turned into, it just happened to be a good time for someone
#
like me to start exploring new pastures and to get into new idioms of filmmaking and one
#
thing led to another and I became a new type of movie nerd, like I said I was away from
#
the world of Hindi cinema for around 12 years almost, that said there is one little caveat
#
which might confuse this whole narrative all over again, in the middle of that 12 year
#
period, I was taken by friends, by the few friends slash close acquaintances I had at
#
that time in the college years to watch Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge in 1995 when it just
#
came out on the big screen and I really enjoyed it, I enjoyed it thoroughly, I am not sure
#
if I admitted it to myself or I admitted it to my friends but I felt stimulated by it
#
and I was completely immersed when the song sequences came on, when Shah Rukh does that
#
crazy thing on the piano early in the film and I found that fantastic, it reminded me
#
of some of the Shami Kapoor films I had seen, so I still even at that point in my viewing
#
life I obviously had the DNA that enabled me to immerse into the language of mainstream
#
Hindi cinema, it's just that it wasn't important enough to me so after that one DDLJ experience
#
I didn't go back to watching Hindi films on the big screen or anything like that, I
#
went back to the sort of cinema that I had become recently interested in, it took a while
#
to get back to Hindi cinema but yeah that's roughly what the journey was like at that
#
point, it also brought a lot of loneliness with it because the sorts of films I was watching
#
I really did not have any friends or anyone I could talk about them with.
#
All of this is fascinating and especially when you mentioned Bachin's bad films, Jadugar
#
and all the other rubbish that came around at that time, the thought that comes to my
#
mind is that today when people look back on the career arc of a person like him, they
#
can just focus on his good films and almost a selection bias and they know that there
#
are bad films in that arc but it's a historical thing but there are people who kind of live
#
through these periods where I think the 80s was not just a bad time for say Bollywood,
#
it was also a kind of horrendous time for western rock for example, you had all those
#
hair bands and all of that, it almost seems like to grow up in that time I think you and
#
I should get special points for surviving all the bad art that came out during that
#
I have to say I somewhat disagree with that, when you say 80s is a bad time for western
#
rock, wasn't that the time when you had REM and U2 both sort of doing some of their major
#
early work and well a few others.
#
I am kind of thinking more about all the hair bands and the big arena bands and all of that
#
and REM really got into their best phase I would say in the late 80s, early 90s from
#
My favourite REM work is certainly 90s and YouTube of course Joshua Tree was 80s but
#
Akhtung Baby was early 90s if I remember.
#
Also I have to say at risk of again confusing the narrative or sort of getting our boxing
#
gloves on, I have actually, it is one of the many things I have changed my mind about a
#
bit and I do this infuriatingly often to the degree that I go back and look at my blog
#
post written 12-13 years ago and I find myself disagreeing with everything I have written
#
in a particular post but I am not that sure anymore that the 1980s was such a bad time
#
for Hindi cinema and I am not, let me clarify right at the outset, I am not talking about
#
the art movement or the parallel movement, I am talking about a lot of other stuff that
#
was happening which included, no one is going to stress that these films are interesting
#
from beginning to end or really organically well created or anything like that but I still
#
feel like there was some interesting stuff going on in the mainstream done by directors
#
like J P Dutta and Mukul Anand and Rahul Ravel and a couple of others and it is not as bad
#
a time as a lot of us think it was.
#
Also I think with hindsight, I feel like a case can be made that there was a lot more
#
honesty in some of the best of those films, some of the 80s films than there has been
#
in the last two decades where a lot of filmmakers including the really good filmmakers who deserve
#
to be respected seem to just be very aware of their place in a global world and constantly
#
having conversations with other international cinemas to the degree that they are almost
#
operating in that idiom, in the idiom of what a certain sort of homogeneous good film, what
#
most cineast would describe as a good film internationally speaking should look like.
#
A lot of the Hindi-Hindi films of the last 10-15 years I feel have formally modelled
#
themselves on that structure, even with very good results, I am talking about films that
#
I have enjoyed a great deal but I do wonder at times if something has also been lost along
#
the way in terms of moving away from the very special language of Hindi cinema as it once
#
used to be, when it was tonally all over the place, when its masala derivative sort of
#
came from, as we know from the Parsi and Sanskrit theatres and you had a lot of tones mish-mashed
#
together in the same film, I sometimes feel that it is a bit of a loss that we moved away
#
from there as well or at least there seems to be no place at all for that sort of film-making
#
in today's world unless its done ironically, unless its meant to be a nudge-nudge-wink-wink
#
thing or something, I do feel that's a loss.
#
So before we get back to your personal journey narrative, I will kind of double-click on
#
this digression and ask about this itself, I get what you are saying, you are saying
#
that at that time film-makers are, they are what they are and there is no pretentiousness
#
there, they don't have, like today people have different kinds of expectations of themselves
#
and all of that and whatever and we will come to current day cinema a little later but just
#
going back to the 80s, my conception would be that it wasn't that there was like almost
#
a deliberate ideological decision that world cinema be damned, this is what we do, we will
#
continue doing it and that therefore there is a certain kind of purity in that.
#
I don't think there was something like that, I think it was a lot of the films that were
#
being made were being made not out of that sort of conviction but just out of, you know
#
they were just doing what they knew, they were just being reactive to what they thought
#
the audiences wanted at this time, I mean I understand that there are interesting things
#
happening during this time that with Ubinod Chopra made Parinda but again he is influenced
#
by a lot of world cinema already, so leaving those kind of outliers aside, the Rahul Ravels
#
and the J.P. Dutta's and Dacoit and all of that stuff which is kind of happening, does
#
seem to me filmmakers just focusing in a mode of giving the audiences what they want, getting
#
a box office hit so to say and nothing and I am not dissing that, you live within your
#
culture and it's perfectly fine if you want to just do that and do nothing else but any
#
thoughts on that and specifically then what are the films that you look at during that
#
period and say that these are films that we should revisit now, it's not as bad as we
#
used to think it was, like I think Mr. India was 80s and I am sure you would consider that
#
as part of, but apart from that what are the kind of films which you think we should revisit
#
See there are lots of films, the thing is that I will name a few but then again it comes
#
with a necessary caveat that many people, maybe you, maybe many others listening to
#
this will not even agree with me that these are films worth revisiting, so we have to
#
come back to the subjectivity of all this and one more thing that I like to say which
#
perhaps has a bearing on some of what I am talking about is that as I have grown older
#
as a film buff, one of the things that has happened to me is that I have become far more
#
interested not in films that are interesting or well done from beginning to end or you
#
know just sort of look at the totality of the beast and say ok this is a 4 star film
#
or a 5 star film to use the reductive language of star ratings, but films that might even
#
be pretty average in some ways, maybe tacky in some other ways, maybe whatever word you
#
want to use, regressive is the word that gets used a lot when we talk about any sort of
#
world cinema, but also has points of interest, also has some sequences, some things that
#
it does very well, now increasingly I have found myself finding a lot more time for that
#
sort of thing compared to this assessment driven idea of what sort of film is it on
#
the whole and of course I am also speaking with the privilege of being somebody who doesn't
#
do reviews on a very regular basis, in the last few years I have been writing columns,
#
I have been allowed to write these very whimsical personal pieces, so for instance two different
#
columns that I have done for two different publications have actually been about sequences,
#
about moments in a film and of course how those moments tie in with the larger animal,
#
so I have had the luxury of doing that which is perhaps not a luxury that the regular Friday
#
to Friday film reviewer has, but that is how it has worked for me, one of the books that
#
I hope to work on in the future, I don't know if I ever will, will be an anthology of moments,
#
an anthology of important moments from Hindi cinema, which could be and a moment can be
#
defined as a full length 10 minute sequence, or it could be an actor's gesture, just a
#
little gesture or the movement of the head which seems to speak volumes or whatever it
#
is and of course it will be very subjective, so I am saying all this also partly to prepare
#
you and your listeners for the possibility that some of the films that I mentioned may
#
not really be seen by most film buffs as good films, capital G, capital P, may I just interrupt
#
and say that you don't have to be so defensive, I am always defensive, when I asked you the
#
question I did it with the actual sincere intent of actually revisiting some of the
#
stuff you are talking about to educate myself, but anyway continue, well because this is
#
meant to be about my subjectivity as a person, I have to say I am defensive 99% of the time,
#
when I am talking about my taste, so to come back to what I am saying, just look at directors,
#
the interesting works of some directors, I think some of Subhash Khai's films including
#
Meri Jang which has Anil Kapoor and Akshay Shadri in it, is one of the relatively interesting
#
mainstream films of that period, in general I think you mentioned Mr India of course which
#
I think Mr India is actually a fairly respectable film in many ways, I think there are a lot
#
of people who can just see the craft of that film and the honesty of that film as well
#
quite easily, but I think this might be a good time to talk about how many of us have
#
undervalued Anil Kapoor as an actor and he did so much interesting stuff in the 1980s,
#
of course it's amazing that he still managed to be relevant in various ways in the 60s,
#
but back then I remember when I was a kid in the 1980s, even though I was surrounded
#
by the world of Mr India and Tezab and Parinda and this film called Ishwar in which Anil
#
Kapoor had a very interesting role and Avargi, a few films like that, somehow, this is something
#
that I articulated to myself only years later, somehow I thought of all these films in terms
#
of other people in the films, Shri Devi, Madhuri Dixit, Jackie Shroff and Parindana, Nanna
#
Partikar and things like that, Subhash Khai's Karma in which it became so easy to see Anil
#
Kapoor playing this buffoonish character, jumping around all over the place and instead you
#
are supposed to be looking at Dilip Kumar and Newton and all that. It's only later,
#
many years later that I realised that Anil Kapoor was a pretty major part of these films
#
and he was at the very least quite good in most of them and he held his own, he did everything
#
that was required of him and I think certainly his early career including his mainstream
#
career at that time and of course the slightly not so mainstream career which includes lower
#
profile films like Chomeli Ki Shaadi and Sahib, films like that perhaps deserves to be looked
#
at again. There are of course films which primarily have what one might think of as
#
kishy value or cheesy value but which can also be quite stimulating in its own way if
#
you are in a certain type of mood. So, I remember that films like the film in which Jackie Shroff
#
co-starred with a dog, Teri Merwaniya, which was, it's a film that even back then at the
#
age of 7 or 8 when one was watching the songs on Chitrahar, I think even at that point one
#
realised that one was watching something that's a bit silly or whatever word you want to use
#
but again I watched a lot of that film, not the whole thing again but I think maybe 80%
#
of the film on TV when it happened to be coming around maybe 10 years ago or something and
#
I just found myself absorbed in it and just watching it and maybe it has something to
#
do with the fact that my own life had become quite dog centric by that point also. So,
#
one is interested in certain things and what the relationship might be like at its core.
#
If you look at it, if you take away the really melodramatic trappings and just look at the
#
emotional core of it that there might be something to it. I found that interesting as well that
#
there are JP Dutta's films definitely deserve to be revisited. Unfortunately, to the best
#
of my knowledge, there are major films like Ghulami for instance do not seem to be available
#
in their complete prints anymore. I think it was a more than 3 hour long film and I
#
think it's on YouTube or something in 2 hours, 20 minutes or something funny like that and
#
I don't know how these things even work at times. And Hathiyar which was another JP Dutta
#
film which I was a big fan of when it first came out and when I watched it many years
#
later. These are all films that broadly use the language of the mainstream Hindi film
#
of the 1980s. Overwrought, sometimes embarrassingly dramatic, loud music used to underline everything.
#
I know you have a major problem with that emotional cue providing use of music. I don't
#
as a rule. I actually find it very stimulating in many contexts. But I would admit that a
#
lot of the 80s films perhaps went over the top with it or it's a bit difficult to watch
#
some scenes in those films because of how we've now been conditioned by the slightly
#
more realistic cinema. This is also true of course of old Hollywood. A lot of the 30s,
#
last year when I was hosting these film discussion sessions and looking at genres like film noir
#
and the screwball comedy and looking at 1940s Hollywood films, I found myself cringing just
#
a little bit when even in a really good Billy Wilder film that I loved, the music would
#
be a little more insistent than felt strictly necessary. But on the whole, I don't really
#
have a problem with that. I find it quite stimulating at times. But yeah, so J.P. Dutta,
#
a few Mukul Anand's films are quite interesting. Rahul Ravel, you mentioned a film like Arjun
#
for instance, which is an interesting mid-80s take on the angry young man for the unemployment
#
era, that sort of thing. There are quite a few others. I'll keep bringing them up over
#
the course of these conversations.
#
Yeah, no, you mentioned my sort of distaste for spoon feeding in the sense background
#
music that tells you how to feel and all of that. And I've actually been thinking about
#
that in recent times. And what I've realized is that at one level, obviously, I prefer
#
a certain kind of understatement where I am being manipulated as little as possible and
#
you know what's happening is happening. But then the point is that manipulation is inevitable
#
because every choice that a director makes within a film has a certain effect on the
#
Every second of a film, even in a documentary. So even when Ozu keeps a still camera in Tokyo
#
Story and people are doing what they're doing, he has still chosen to keep it still. He's
#
chosen to keep it in a particular place. He's chosen to keep it for that bit of dialogue
#
and not some other. All these are choices affecting you. So you're being manipulated
#
anyway. People may manipulate you in understated ways or they may manipulate you in, you know,
#
more flamboyant and obvious ways. But what is happening is what is happening. So even
#
if you look at, say, the, you know, Lars von Trier's Dogme kind of school that we won't
#
have background music and we won't have this and we won't have that. But the bottom line
#
is even those are choices. There's no way to kind of get away from the artifice of,
#
you know, the act of creation, whether you're telling a story through a book or a film or
#
But you know, sorry to interrupt you. That's a very good point. There's also another thing
#
to be said, which maybe we can touch on a bit later, about the personality divide. What
#
you said just now actually chimes with something that I've had to think about a lot in recent
#
years. As I mentioned, one possible reason why I needed to get away from the language
#
of the typical mainstream Hindi film as an adolescent was because it was just sort of,
#
it seemed too connected. And then there's something I wrote about in an essay a couple
#
of years back also. And I ended up articulating it in the process of writing it. It felt too
#
close to certain other things that I was feeling stifled by as a very introverted, very undemonstrative
#
kid. You know, the boisterousness of my nani, my grandmother, a woman who loved me a great
#
deal, but also was too loud and extroverted for my liking and moving away in some ways
#
from her world. And when it became possible for me to have a video cassette player in
#
my room and to keep my door shut and to sit down and watch Hitchcock and John Ford instead
#
of watching the latest Salman Khan film of 1991. So all that is there. But I've also
#
had to think about this a great deal. There are, coming back to the multitudes that all
#
of us contain. One thing that I've always been a little puzzled about in my own personality
#
when it comes to how I watch films or how I respond to films, is how very often I find
#
myself identifying with a character or really feeling drawn to a character who on the face
#
of it is completely different from me. There's no connect at all. And the earliest example
#
I can think of actually goes back all the way back to my childhood. You're watching
#
Sholay for the first time. I think it was probably when I was five or six or seven years
#
old and Amitabh Bachchan was everything to me. And in this film, Amitabh Bachchan is
#
playing a character who has my name and is playing this very taciturn, slightly sarcastic
#
character and that was pretty close to my self-perception as well. And you just think
#
that that is the character I'd be most interested in in the film. And I can say this hand on
#
heart, I can say this from the earliest that I can remember watching Sholay and it continues
#
to this day, I've always found Dharmendra's Veeru far more interesting, far more stimulating.
#
When the two of them are on screen together, I'm always looking at Dharmendra to see what
#
he's doing, to see his exaggerated gestures and his grimaces and other things he does
#
with those huge hands of his. And that's something that it took me a very long time to even make
#
sense of this because it's completely counter-intuitive. It makes no sense at all. If you think of
#
art or creative works as being things that help you tap into aspects of yourself, then
#
I think a case can be made that maybe there's closet extrovert in me, some hidden boisterous
#
Veeru who got that sort of catharsis from watching Dharmendra in that film. And there
#
are many other examples of that sort I can think of.
#
I mean, the example that comes to mind is all the colourful t-shirts and sweaters that
#
you wear. So maybe those are also your hidden extrovert.
#
No, I mean, that is a very contrived and deliberate way of making up for my dryness and the boringness
#
It's interesting you say that because, you know, I remember advice that was often given
#
in my poker playing days that if you're at a table and you're very tight and you're folding
#
all the hands, you know, people might notice and exploit that tightness. So what you got
#
to do is you got to talk a lot. So people feel you're involved, you know, and they won't
#
realise that you're actually folding everything. But anyway, that's a boring piece of advice
#
and not relevant beyond a certain stage of play.
#
Coming back to, you know, what you said about, I mean, I have like 30 questions I have to
#
ask from what you have spoken about over the last 10 minutes. But I'll go back to your
#
personal journey. And I'm sort of struck by this beautiful quote I found in one of your
#
essays. And I'll read it out. A quote, much of the world cinema I now encountered felt
#
like exercises and coolness and restraint. Being emotionally undemonstrative myself,
#
I was struck by how there wasn't a need to talk all the time, how silences in cinema
#
could be meaningful. Stop quote. And you're talking about the time you discovered world
#
cinema as well where this almost seems to mirror that phase in your personal life where
#
your nanny is very boisterous and you are quiet and introverted and Bollywood is very
#
boisterous. And then you discover a kind of cinema that indulges in these silences that
#
has the same kind of skeptical attitude towards religion as it were as you have while your
#
nanny is a believer and Hindi cinema is a believer. And this got me to thinking about
#
how much are our tastes mirrored by or shaped by our personalities because my default assumption
#
has been that our tastes are like hardwired. We are what we are, you know, for example,
#
talking for myself, I like a certain kind of minimalistic understated cinema, though
#
I can appreciate why people would like more maximalist cinema. I can appreciate them at
#
an intellectual level, but what really appeals to me is more understated. But like certainly
#
in your arc, and it's obviously not a clear cut arc and all of that, but whatever little
#
I can make out through your writings, it seems that there is this initial distance that you
#
feel between yourselves and say, a family or nanny or whatever, and you turn away from
#
Bollywood and at a later stage in life, you come back in both senses where, of course,
#
you start watching Bollywood again and appreciating it for what it is. But at the same time you've
#
written movingly about how when your nanny passed away, you you sort of regretted not
#
talking to her more, not being with her more, all of those kind of things. And this is also
#
I think like at a personal level, and it must be true for so many of my listeners, that
#
when you're young, you want to express your personality, you want to break away, you want
#
to feel that autonomy. And therefore that often means you are kind of going away from
#
your family. You look at them in harsh ways, perhaps often because one doesn't have the
#
maturity to see the full picture, to see the multitudes. And then later on in life, as
#
you become an adult yourself, sometimes you go, you know, you go back, sometimes you don't,
#
sometimes your vision sort of deepens. So, you know, does this make any sense on this
#
connection of the personal and how one relates to the art and entertainment one one sees?
#
And do you think that and again, I'm thinking about my assumption was your taste is what
#
it is. But and my taste has changed in different ways over the years, but I would have thought
#
it's changed on its own. But do you think there is also a way just by thinking about
#
it, by consciously thinking about why we like the stuff we like and why we don't like the
#
stuff we like, that we can shape our taste as well, that we can make ourselves more appreciative
#
of things we might not otherwise have liked. Like talking to you, for example, I'm definitely
#
going to go back and revisit some of these films you talk about, at the very least, look
#
at your essays on these moments and kind of try to see through them. And who knows, you
#
know, that might kind of make me look at them in a different way. Do you think there is
#
just that possibility or should one tell oneself that don't get ossified? You know, keep searching.
#
Well, as a critic, as somebody who's writing about cinema and who's so nerdish that he's
#
given over a great deal of his life to doing almost nothing but watching films and thinking
#
about them and trying to articulate thoughts about them. I would say and this is advice
#
that I give to anybody in classes, anyone who's trying to be a critic or a reviewer,
#
the first thing I say is read, read, please read as much as you possibly can. Watch as
#
many different types of films as you possibly can without getting into the ideas of what
#
is a good film, what is a bad film. Don't get into ideas about categories being bad.
#
Once you start dealing with individual films, of course, your job is going to be to say
#
that that something worked for you, something didn't work for you and then to articulate
#
why it didn't. But don't go into categories thinking that this is innately bad, this sort
#
of genre or this sort of tone or this sort of mode or whatever, this style of filmmaking
#
is bad. That's one piece of advice I give them. Now, of course, even while I'm giving
#
it, I know that this is not something you can force your brain to do, right? And that's
#
what you're saying. I mean, I'm sure there's something to what you're saying about a lot
#
of our tastes being hardwired in some contexts. I find if you're asking me personally, and
#
you're asking me about cinema and maybe about literature as well, my experience has been
#
that my tastes have not been hardwired. They've shifted a lot over time. And it's something
#
like I implied earlier, it's something that I'm quietly proud of. The fact that I seem
#
to have the capacity, I don't know where it comes from. It's not come out of some deliberate
#
effort, as far as I know. But I seem to have this capacity to appreciate many different
#
types of things, which is pretty useful. It's a useful quality to have if you're writing
#
about books and films. That said, of course, I completely get that it might not come naturally
#
to everybody. And that therefore, maybe a case can be made that you make some sort of
#
effort. You put yourself in this place where if you're watching films and you have this
#
innate resistance to a certain type of film, you don't like the idea of romantic films,
#
mushy romantic films, or you don't like action films or whatever, then if you're trying
#
seriously to be a film critic or a film writer, you do have to make a minimum effort, I feel,
#
to try and get into that world, to try and appreciate the terms of that world. Even this
#
can be very difficult for one very simple reason that there are certain genres that
#
people can just have a visceral problem with, a bodily problem with. Horror. Horror is a
#
classic example, especially the jumpscare sort of horror. I know so many people, so
#
many friends who don't have any snobbery or condescension towards horror at all, but
#
who simply cannot watch a horror film because it's too much for their nerves. They can't
#
deal with it. Now, if somebody like that wants to become a film critic and is then told to
#
go and watch a horror film, obviously it's a less than ideal situation. I sometimes have
#
a problem with very loud action films, especially if I'm watching them in a theatre with Dolby
#
sound or whatever and my ears are being assailed, I get headaches easily, so there's a bodily
#
response to that, which can affect the objectivity, quote unquote, with which you receive this
#
film or write about it. This has been a very long and rambling way of approaching what
#
you asked, but yeah, I do feel like we probably are hardwired in many contexts. In some contexts,
#
maybe including things that we feel very personally engaged with from an early age, as I did with
#
cinema and with literature, perhaps one just has sufficient time to explore many different
#
types of books, films and to start appreciating them. Maybe it just works that way and that's
#
what we call taste changing over time or becoming more inclusive. I don't know. I don't know
#
if that makes any sense.
#
No, no, it makes a lot of sense. And before we go into a break, let's talk a bit about
#
horror, because you've got a beautiful chapter in your book, Popcorn Essays, about your love
#
for horror cinema. And I was especially struck by this lovely line again, I'll quote you
#
quote, superficial details of time and place scarcely matter anyway, as in so many great
#
horror films, the setting is really the human soul. And it's always nighttime, stop quote.
#
And it strikes me that people who are into high art and high literature and so on, often
#
tend to sort of condescend to the genres like horror and science fiction. But I think that
#
many of the finest explorations of what it is to be human actually come from within the
#
genres. Like there's a 1980 film I recommend everybody watches, which I'd written a column
#
about, I'll post it from the show notes called Cannibal Holocaust. And it was directed by
#
this guy called Ruggiero Degadato. And Cannibal Holocaust is, it's really one of those found
#
film things where these people discover these videotapes, which were shot by these filmmakers
#
who had gone to some remote jungles where they were filming cannibals. And it almost,
#
it served as an allegory of something that didn't exist yet, which is this sort of Instagram
#
age where you're documenting everything, everything is a selfie, which, you know, I won't say
#
not exist yet because that innate urge for self-documentation and the performative urge,
#
I guess, was always there and all of us technologies enabled it in new ways. And basically they
#
keep filming each other, one of them dies, one of them, you know, has his vital organs
#
chopped off and burnt and all kinds of nonsense is happening and they're filming everything
#
and eventually they end up filming their own sort of deaths. And at one level, it's just
#
a gory horror film. At another level, I just found it incredibly profound in all these
#
human instincts that it is kind of looking at. And the interesting thing is a guy who
#
directed that film, Ruggiero Diodato, and this was a 1980 film. He went on to act in
#
Hostel 2 by Eli Roth, where in a lovely scene, he plays this sort of cannibal client who
#
is, you know, out of a live person. He's carving out a stake, as it were, while, you know,
#
Bidet is playing in the background. A very elegant scene. And the Hostel films also are
#
sort of fascinating looks at addiction and consumerism and all of these things. Tell
#
me a little bit about your journey through horror. And I mean, I have, of course, watched
#
way, way less than you. And, you know, these are just kind of selective impressions, but
#
you've probably, you know, watched everything there is in horror.
#
No, no, I haven't. I haven't come close to watching everything there is in horror. I
#
haven't watched so much of the more contemporary stuff or the stuff of the last 20, 25 years.
#
Where does one begin? One thing I can say is that I'm glad that you mentioned the Hostel
#
films, which again, I haven't seen. But from what I know about them, those are fairly mainstream
#
horror films, right? Those aren't respectable horror films, which is a new category of film
#
that I've become very nervous about. Having said that one should not judge categories,
#
I will now say that the respectable horror film is this category that I'm very nervous
#
about because what it leads to in my experience is a lot of young work critics talking about
#
how so-and-so film made by Jordan Peele or whoever isn't just a horror film. It isn't
#
a mere horror film. It is something more. And speaking as someone who loves mere horror
#
films and who has been endlessly stimulated by them, I start getting very suspicious
#
when a film is described as something more than a horror film. As if horror is something
#
that is innately disrespectful and you have these... Once a very overt layer of social
#
commentary comes into it, it's like, oh, this isn't a horror film. This is something
#
that happened recently in the Indian context with the latest of these often tedious anthologies
#
that come out on Netflix where Debaker and Anurag and Zoya and Karan Johar are making
#
short films. So there was the Ghost Stories one where everybody was raving about Debaker's
#
film and I saw it and I liked it moderately and then I started reading some of the reviews
#
and all the reviews were just going on and on about how this is a film that just takes
#
horror to a new level because it's got this very... What to my eyes was fairly clearly
#
and explicitly spelt out social commentary about the current state of affairs or whatever,
#
the world that we're currently living in and it used a broad horror framework to do that
#
but it just became one of those things that everybody was raving about and I was thinking,
#
listen, horror has always had subtexts. Horror is a subtext to begin with. You go back and
#
read about the history of cinema. The earliest films, when pictures first started moving
#
on walls and the first generation of film viewers had to deal with this horrific thing
#
happening in front of them, pictures moving in front of them and then this horrible ghastly
#
thing called the cut came along where there's a cut from one scene to a completely unrelated
#
scene and the shock that would have provided to the nervous systems of the first generations
#
of viewers. Horror is built into cinema's DNA to start with. It taps into some of our
#
deepest fears about technology, about where we can go with it. So the subtext is there
#
to begin with even before you start exploring what the theme of a particular film is, even
#
before you start talking about whether Dracula or Frankenstein has this deep rooted theme
#
about man playing God or whatever it is. In the context of cinema, horror is just a synonym
#
for cinema. It's just another word for cinema. And I find it a bit pretentious when people
#
are constantly looking for horror films having these very explicit layers of social commentary
#
in them. This is not to say that a Jordan Peele film is not a good film in its own right
#
for what it is. It's just that I feel like I've got a bit of a mental block against that
#
sort of reaction to horror cinema. Which is also why to come back to what I was saying
#
earlier, I'm glad to hear you talk about the more lowbrow quote unquote films like Hostel
#
or Cannibal Holocaust or whatever. Again, there's been lots of personal resonance for me. Coming
#
back to the parent-child theme that I've always found interesting and a lot of the art that
#
I've consumed. Psycho is one thing. There's this wonderful French film called Eyes Without
#
a Face, which is the English title by Georges Franju, which is also a 1960 or 61, which is
#
pretty gruesome in some ways, though of course it's undercut by the fact that it's a black and white
#
film about a young woman whose face has been disfigured and her mad scientist father who's
#
trying to set her right by finding other young women whose faces can be used for the purpose.
#
Quite grisly in terms of its subject matter, but again, a very moving film in many ways.
#
And if you just look at it in terms of the father-daughter scenes in it and the desperation of
#
this man, who is a horror movie monster, but is also a tormented father. Things like that have
#
always hit me in some plays that I can't fully articulate.
#
Lots to explore there, which we'll do as the show goes along, how your political lens can influence
#
the way you look at art, how young people today perhaps consume art and discover art and
#
how they view it. All fascinating, but before we go in for a break, you were talking about
#
the spectacle of the early movie watcher, the phenomenon of the cut and all that, so I just
#
want to read out this lovely quote by you about the magical quality of films, where you write,
#
There's a popular story from the earliest days of moving pictures about the unprepared viewers of a Lumière Brothers short film who ran out of a paris theater when confronted with the image of a train seemingly coming towards them.
#
This is probably apocryphal, but there are other similar, less dramatic stories from that period, and even common sense tells us that the first movie viewers must have experienced quite a few shocks to the system.
#
Today, even the most casual viewers unconsciously process such aspects of film grammar as cross-cutting between unrelated scenes, but in the earlier days, even basic cutting from one image to another, let alone rapid fire splicing, must have felt otherworldly.
#
To some, it must have been frightening, even demonic. Was that puffing train the first movie monster?
#
And by the way, this also, we take cinema for granted, we are not struck by any of it as such, but this was something that was, that even perhaps this view of cinema as something that influences people more profoundly than say books or art do, was something that led to our censorship laws.
#
Because, you know, back in the 50s or 60s or whenever the censor board was founded, one of the reasons for having much harsher restrictions on cinema as opposed to say books was that, you know, cinema influences
#
naive people and all these deep bays and therefore we must, you know, protect them, that whole paternalism came from there and thankfully that, you know, books were not subject to the same thing.
#
But let's take a quick commercial break, there is so much to talk about that we'll, I feel like we'll need another three hours.
#
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Welcome back to The Scene on the Unseen. I'm chatting with Jayarjun Singh about films, books, writing, all of those things. Let's talk about something that we've in fact discussed in the past.
#
Because, you know, one of the realizations I came to early on and in a sense, I went through a similar journey to yours where as a kid, I used to look down a little bit on Bollywood.
#
Partly because, you know, my father was director of the FDII between 86 and 91. So I grew up at home just watching world cinema all the time. I didn't even know that these were like kind of two separate things.
#
I just didn't think of it that way. So it was a question of taste that I liked a certain kind of cinema much more than the other. And as a young kid, I looked down on one of them as well.
#
Now, as one grows older, obviously, I wouldn't say that I'm a full-fledged mainstream Hindi film lover that I am not. But I do recognize that it is a category error in my view.
#
And we'll discuss this and we've spoken about this, that I sort of came to the recognition at one point in time that it's a category error to judge a Hindi film as it were by the same parameters by which I look at a Western film because they're so completely different.
#
They're trying to do completely different things. They're almost different art forms. So one has to sort of just shift one's frame of reference to enjoy one over the other.
#
Now, there's an interesting quote by you, which again I'll read out, where you indicate that this is a bit of a false dichotomy. And here's what you say, quote,
#
I don't want to make a facile comparison that goes Hindi cinema is equal to loud melodrama, European cinema is equal to understated realism. It's much more complex than that. Each of these forms has many modes of expression and cultures and behaviors around the world are far from homogeneous.
#
An Indian film that depicted the melodramatic behavior of someone like my grandmother or many other similar people I knew could be realistic and truthful.
#
Many viewers, even Indian viewers who know this culture well, might instinctively denounce it as over the top. And much of European cinema, some Italian genres, for example, is loud, goofy or hyper dramatic in ways that are comparable to the mainstream Hindi film.
#
Stop quote. And this point about Italian films is great because one of my favorite directors growing up was Fellini. And one of the Fellini films that I really loved, which critics don't talk about in the canon, but I really loved it, is a film called Amarcod,
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you know, which has all these sort of Italian families behaving in really boisterous, dramatic ways. And Italians in many ways are like, Italians seem to me to be the European Bengalis in some of the melodrama and extreme emotion.
#
And of course, one of my favorite films of childhood was Fellini's brilliant Eva Theloni, a fantastic coming of age film that spoke so much to me, but to kind of get back to the subject at hand.
#
One, there is, of course, a difference. But what you're also pointing out is that there's no strict boundary between the two.
#
How has your thinking on this evolved over these many years? Like, I presume that you shared some of that initial sort of snobbishness and got over it and realized not to make value judgments at all.
#
But how does one look at it? Do you have to sort of code shift, so to say, when you view one kind of cinema over the other? How does it all work for you?
#
Not at a conscious level. I mean, I'm sure there must be some sort of mental shift that happens. But as of now, I don't think it's conscious at all.
#
I find it quite easy at most times to watch a particular sort of film on one day and watch a very different sort of film the next day without really thinking in terms of...
#
And I suppose most people don't really do that. I mean, how do you consciously make that shift anyway?
#
It's not like I start the film saying, okay, deep breath, count to ten, this is going to be this sort of film. It's nothing like that.
#
I think it's just a question of receiving whatever film it is and then seeing if that individual film works for you or not.
#
And then, of course, if you're doing this professionally and you have to write a piece about it, then the big thing you have to do is to articulate as well as possible why it worked for you or why it didn't work for you.
#
And in the process of that articulation also, I don't usually feel the need to put down things like...
#
As you mentioned, I do tend to be defensive in many ways and some of that defensiveness does occasionally come into my writing when I'm writing about a really mainstream Hindi film, which I know tends to be the subject of snobbery from a lot of people around me.
#
That does come in sometimes. But generally speaking, even in my writing, I'm not really trying to describe the assumptions that you have to make while watching this particular type of film or anything like that.
#
I just take it as a given that there are many different modes of expression and that there are so many ways of expressing emotion truthfully and that truthfulness doesn't have to be synonymous with understatement, for instance, to take a really obvious example.
#
You asked something else before this, right? I've gone off on a tangent again, as I do.
#
No, it was sort of about your thinking about this dichotomy. And just to kind of double-click again, as a film critic, like you said, when you're writing about it, it seems to me that there is a certain dissonance, and I'm just thinking aloud,
#
a certain dissonance in this, in writing about a particular kind of film and another kind of film, where the reader would probably expect you to have a similar sense of, use a similar bunch of parameters or metrics to talk about these films.
#
And actually, you cannot do that. Like when you talk about a film like Moonlight, for example, which I loved so much, I thought it's the best film to win a Best Film Oscar when it did just such a great moving film and very understated as well.
#
Right? Now, if within Moonlight, there was any moment where that understatement breaks and when a character says what he is feeling, it would be a tremendous false note.
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It would just mar the sort of the unity of the film and what held it together. But so, you know, that would become a parameter for that film.
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But at the same time, if you're watching a Hindi film, that kind of expression, almost a spoon feeding of the audience, as it were, would almost be routine and not thought of as something that is a problem.
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And at some level, of course, it is how unified is a voice of the film, that that film has chosen one particular voice and this film might have chosen another particular voice.
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But at the same time, it is almost as if we look at these two different kinds of cinema through a different set of values.
#
Like I love David Dhawan films, OK, you can judge me for it in these times as well. So I love David Dhawan films, but I also love Kieslowski.
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But the point is a set of values through which I look at those films and the expectations I have are completely different.
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And of course, multitudes and all of that. But I guess you could say that the reader also takes that for granted.
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So you can't need to spell any of it out or adjust for it.
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No, what I'm really saying is, I suppose, is that there isn't a particular way in which I experienced that shift while moving from one type of film to another.
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I don't know what that means. I don't know what that says about me or my brain or whatever it is.
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And also, since you bring up Moonlight, there's one little point which I think might also be a reminder that there are so many different ways of loving the same film.
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Now, I know you love Moonlight. I loved it as well. I saw it in the hall.
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But some of the scenes that worked best for me in that film, I actually thought that the background music was very lush almost.
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I don't know, you probably didn't feel that way. I felt it was insistent in a very good way.
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It served as a sort of, I wouldn't use the term like spoon feeding, but it served as some sort of an emotional cue for me, especially in some of the dialogue scenes like the one where the protagonist is in the swimming pool, for instance, scenes like that.
#
I felt like my experience of the film was actually enhanced by the use of music, which I didn't think of as particularly subtle music.
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I thought of it as you providing in a way. Now, I'm going to assume that you didn't feel the same way at all, even though you love the film as well.
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So, I have to say that I didn't notice it at all. So, number one, the fact that I didn't notice it is a good thing.
#
It means that it didn't draw attention to itself and all of that.
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And secondly, I think like I told you, I think some of my views on this have changed slightly in the sense that I now realize that all of cinema, every choice you make is, in a sense, manipulating the viewer,
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whether it is to have a particular kind of music or to not have that music.
#
So, I am a little more open to these sort of things than I used to be once, where once I was like, no, I don't want to be manipulated.
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If there is a sad scene, do not play sad violin music.
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You know, do not play Chennai at this time. And, you know, in an action scene, you don't need to play action music.
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Just let shit happen. Now, I'm a little more relaxed. I understand that in any case, it's a curated experience.
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So, you know, unless something is jarring and is detracting from that experience,
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let me just sit back and enjoy the experience without sort of deconstructing it too much.
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But I'm sorry, continue.
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No, that's pretty much all I had to say. It was just, you know, that just a reminder.
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And it's something that, you know, when you're thinking in this nerdish way about not just about films, but also about the nuts and bolts of film appreciation, film criticism,
#
you do think about these things about how, you know, you and I can go together in a post-COVID world. We can go into a hall together and watch a film together,
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come out gushing about it saying, dude, that was great. It was such a great film.
#
And then we go and sit down and have coffee somewhere and start talking about the film.
#
And then we realized that we liked completely different things in the film.
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And that maybe we disagreed about something very important, you know, the quality of a particular performance.
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Maybe I thought the performance was the best thing in the film and made the film for me.
#
You had reservations about the performance, but it wasn't anything like a deal breaker for you.
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So everything else in the film more than made up for it.
#
So at the end of that coffee, we've actually discovered that we've had very different experiences of the film.
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But for each of us, it is a five-star film.
#
So just a little thing that these are some of the conversations that come up the few occasions that I talk about these things with other movie lovers or with other professional film critics.
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That there are so many ways, it's very reductive to think that person A and person B both love the same film, so their tastes match.
#
It's not necessarily the case.
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There are so many different ways of liking or not liking or being indifferent to a film or a book or whatever.
#
No, and this leads me to a further thought about the discourse that if this was to happen, let's say post covid times, you can go watch a movie together.
#
What would be that conversation we would have about the film would further enrich the experience of the film if we are receptive and listening to each other?
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Because then you can see the film from my eyes later and I can go back and I'll probably whenever I watch Moonlight again, I'll, you know, I'll be more sort of mindful of these things that you speak about.
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And it strikes me that in much of our discourse, we don't have that receptiveness anymore.
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Much of our discourses where you take a hardened position that this is what I feel and everyone else who disagrees with me has a character flaw that they are stupid or they are evil or they are whatever.
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And so much of our discourse has become like that a little less on cinema.
#
But even on cinema, as you've pointed out, you've written in the past about, you know, when you would write a bad review of something, somebody else would say, how could you not like that?
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You know, you weren't being objective, whereas you pointed out objective means, you know, you should agree with me.
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So just a kind of a point about the discourse.
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One of the ways in which you see these two words colliding, these two almost these different philosophies, and I'll still speak of it in dichotomous terms.
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So I buy your point that there's an intermingling.
#
You say in a film like Piku, now you've mentioned Piku in the past in the context of acting where some people, you know, appreciated Deepika's quote unquote understated performance there.
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And you pointed out that, no, she's been good in so many other films, but it is only, you know, why are we applying this particular lens or this particular value and saying she's good in this?
#
But I also thought of Piku as showcasing these two forms coming together in terms of the way Amitabh and Irfan acted, where I thought Irfan was sadly just an incredibly great actor by any standard.
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And, you know, while Amitabh, like in that film, I thought Irfan's acting was superb and Amitabh was just hamming it up.
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And it was classic Bollywood. And you have made these categories of actor and star actor.
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And he's basically just been a star actor all the way through, and he's been extremely good.
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So no value judgment there per se.
#
But you sort of see these two different schools of acting come together where Irfan is just living, breathing the character and Amitabh is just hamming.
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It's just not good acting in my book. But that is, of course, through my sort of biased lens.
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Amitabh, in his own context, is a great, great actor that hardly needs to be elaborated upon.
#
Can I interrupt for a second?
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Probably make a habit of just riffing on what the other is saying.
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I actually wrote another piece once, which you probably haven't read, explaining why I was very moved by Bachchan's performance in Piku.
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And in fact, I've spoken about this also recently in a class because most of the people I know,
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which of course say something about the circles again that I tend to associate with,
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share your view of the Bachchan performance as being an exercise in hamming.
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And of course, a lot of these people, a lot of the people who hold this view also happen to be Bengalis,
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who think that this is a stereotypical depiction of the Bengali.
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Now, of course, I, at risk of being very politically incorrect here,
#
I have to say that speaking as a North Indian who has experienced a lot of real-world Bengalis as stereotypes,
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I had no trouble at all buying into Bachchan's performance.
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And I think perhaps a lot of defensive Bengalis are perhaps not the best people to be making that judgement.
#
But that's a separate...
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Look, you know, I'm half-bong, but that is not my criticism at all. I don't care about that.
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I'm not saying it is, but there are many others who, most people I know in fact,
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in the film writers' world, the writers' world,
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even if they weren't bold enough to say it in their reviews,
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thought Bachchan was not very good in the film, hamming, etc.
#
But this actually leads me to a talking point that might be relevant to something that we were discussing earlier as well
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about how our personal experiences often illuminate or help us make sense of certain things
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or in fact, how we receive films or performances.
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The reason why Bachchan's performance really worked for me,
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and in fact just sort of moved me in a way that I just again had a hard time articulating,
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was because there were these little moments in the performance.
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I'm not even talking about the performance in its entirety, but there were these little moments in the performance
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that speaking as someone who has spent a lot of time either caregiving himself in the last few years
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or witnessing caregiving in the context of my nani's final battle with cancer
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and my mother looking after her, and my mother who is also a very introverted person
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just putting her life on hold and having to deal with this parent who was a completely different personality type
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who wanted to bully her daughter but was also very scared about her condition
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and knew that she was dependent on her daughter.
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So you have that combination of wanting to exercise hegemony as this very extroverted, boisterous person
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but also being very scared and nervous that I shouldn't say something that will get Mala upset.
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And I saw this look in my nani's eyes so often in 2007, 2008, 2009 when the cancer period was going on.
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And I saw exactly that same look in some scenes in Piku where Deepika just sort of loses it
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where the Bachchan character is being difficult and the daughter loses it and she starts shouting at him
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or just sort of says something and then you either see him in a direct shot or as part of a larger scene.
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The way he is looking at her, it just felt so truthful to me.
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It just reminded me exactly of that look in my nani's eyes looking at my mother.
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And I just felt like this guy has captured something about this personality type being in this situation
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being looked after by a child and becoming the child who is being looked after by his child.
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So it worked for me purely at that level.
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I am absolutely fine with people saying that the performance felt hammy or whatever.
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And of course there are so many different ways of judging these things.
#
Your feelings about a performance will also be, again I am not talking about you
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but some other people's feelings about the performance might be affected by the fact that he won a national award for it.
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He was given a national award for it.
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So then people will look at the film with that level of expectation
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and then they will say, listen Irfan is so much better and you barely register that he is acting
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and here is this old man who is just hamming it up in every scene and he got a national award for hamming.
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So people will also look at it from that point of view.
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But I had a very personal response to the performance and I enjoyed it for that reason.
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This is kind of fascinating. If I ever come across Piku running anywhere on TV
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because I don't think I will go out of my way to watch it
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but if I come across it running anywhere I will watch out for this.
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No seriously with an open mind.
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There is this delightful quote in one of your pieces in fact which I will link from the show notes
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where you quote Subhash Ghai when he is asked about Meryl Streep and Susan Sarandon.
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Do we have actresses like that in India?
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And he said quote, can they dance as convincingly as Madhuri Dixit does?
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Which is of course a lovely way of looking at it.
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Let's kind of now go back to talking about the personal journey and let's sort of come to blogging.
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Like one of the reasons blogging was significant for me as a writer, it was significant in various ways
#
but like you I had a conventional journalism job where I wrote conventional pieces in conventional formats
#
and blogging was different because of all the standard reasons you and I know that
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number one you are not restricted by format, you can do 80 words or 8000 words, you don't have to do 800.
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You are not restricted by say the news cycle, you don't have to write about what is topical, you can write about anything.
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You are not constrained by house style and in a certain sense you aren't constrained by anxiety as well
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because you know one of the things that often stops writers or gets in the way is their anxiety
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or what other people think of them.
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My approach initially as a blogger was I am just blogging, who is going to read it you know
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and you get into that groove where that self-consciousness kind of goes
#
and all of these together came to being something liberating
#
and in my newsletter I had an essay about this, about form and content
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and also in the context of the podcast where my postulation is that
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doing a 3 hour podcast as opposed to a 10 minute podcast means I am having a completely different kind of conversation.
#
I have to delve that much deeper, I have to do that much more research,
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I have to respect the guest that much more, I have to be that much more patient,
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I have to listen, genuinely listen that much more
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and all of this affects who I am as a person and changes me in subtle ways
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especially if I am doing it for a period of years.
#
Similarly in blogging I think it shaped my writing because throwing away all these restrictions
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and not having to write to the expectations of an editor or an audience
#
just allowed me to branch out in all kinds of different directions and all of that
#
and I think that at the end of that period when I wrote 8000 posts over 5 years
#
I would do 5 posts a day on average, I think my record was 18 posts in a day
#
so it was a great writing gym for me getting a lot of writing done without realizing it or thinking of it that way.
#
But I do feel that it changed the work I did, therefore it changed the way I thought
#
because the imperatives were different and it changed the person I am.
#
I genuinely think that if anything, and this is of course in a relative sense
#
but the podcast has made me a better person because I listen more and I am more open
#
and I am more set or whatever.
#
So what did blogging mean to you in that sense and obviously this is only in hindsight
#
at the time one never knows.
#
But how did it shape you, how did it shape your writing, how did it shape the way you looked at cinema
#
because before this cinema in our newspapers was 600 word review, you have to talk about plot
#
you have to give a verdict, you have to give a star rating and that's it.
#
But now suddenly you are writing personal essays, you are writing stray observations.
#
Well, first of all you are being very kind when you say 600 words in mainstream publications
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it was closer to 300 or 400.
#
I had worked for an India Today tabloid in my first job in journalism
#
and of course that was a very small 16 page publication
#
but the reviews I would do, book reviews or film reviews were never more than 350-400 words.
#
It was far from the ideal way of doing it but when you are that young
#
you will have a boss coming up to you in the middle of many other things you have to do in a day
#
and just sort of tossing a book at you and saying it's a 400 page book
#
and saying give the review by tomorrow.
#
And that of course just tells you, the first message that gives you as a young journalist is that
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reviewing is not taken seriously, it's not something to be taken seriously
#
it's not considered a form in its own right
#
it's not considered something that can be good writing or good thinking in its own right
#
it's just something that you just do, anybody can do it.
#
What's important anyway is the star rating that you go with your piece
#
because that's what the vast majority of readers including my mother by the way would look at
#
even after I started doing film pieces myself
#
my mother would still be looking at the Times of India piece to see what the star rating was.
#
So of course working purely for mainstream publications as a journalist at that time
#
and possibly even at the current time
#
just meant that you don't have the tools to take yourself very seriously as a reviewer
#
or as a critic or to think of it as something that requires rigour
#
or think of a review as something that can be well written, well articulated
#
that can be a personal thing.
#
And of course pretty much everything you said about blogging applies to me too
#
except that I might, I don't know if it would be completely truthful to say that
#
I didn't feel any peer pressure at all or any burden of expectations
#
because I think a time probably did arrive
#
I can't really think of any specific cases just now
#
but a point did arrive when after the blog became widely read
#
during that heady period of 2004, 2005, 2006
#
before social media had come along, before there was all this clutter on the internet
#
and blogs were still being read quite widely
#
and as you might know one of the reasons why it became possible for me to become a freelance writer
#
an independent writer working from home, working for multiple publications
#
was because I was getting job offers from other publications based purely on the blog writing
#
not on my writing in business standard where I was working at the time.
#
So it was a very heady time and once you became aware that senior editors in different publications
#
know Jabberwock, know your blog Jabberwock and obviously somewhere you start becoming a little self-conscious
#
I think that did happen to me somewhere, I became a little nervous as well
#
but I don't think it happened to a great degree
#
I don't think it happened to a crippling degree where the writing became a chore
#
or became more difficult to pull off
#
and ultimately of course what happened was that to more directly answer your question
#
what it did for me in addition to what you said yourself about just giving you a space where you could
#
write an 80,000 word piece if you wanted to hypothetically
#
or definitely a 1500 word, 2000 word piece on a particular aspect of a book or a film
#
rather than a holistic review, a holistic structured review of the book or the film
#
which is something whimsical but detailed at the same time
#
obviously the blogging format did that for me but also what it did was
#
because at the time like I said I was working for business standard newspaper
#
I had started doing a few book reviews for them for the edit page
#
but mostly what I was doing at that time was still this very corporate writing
#
I was doing these corporate stories on the watch industry, on the jewellery industry whatever
#
stuff that I wasn't genuinely interested in
#
and because prior to that the only film reviews or the only book reviews I had written
#
were for that tabloid that I mentioned
#
300 word spaces, 400 word spaces
#
I perhaps lacked the confidence that I could do this
#
in a proper consolidated way in the long format
#
and what the blog did for me was especially when the blog post started getting a good response
#
was that it told me that yes I could write a 1500 word piece about a film or a film essay
#
that was appreciated by other people
#
and that therefore my sensibility struck a chord for other people
#
it told me that and that gave me the confidence that I needed to ultimately go on and
#
write longer pieces for official publication
#
you if you remember a little more than 10 years ago you gave me a column space for Yahoo
#
which again was the sort of space where I could write longish pieces
#
now again without the blog having happened a few years before that
#
I might not have had the confidence to write officially published pieces for payment
#
for writers like Amit Verma and Prem Panekar who I admired
#
I might not have had that confidence without the validation provided by the blog
#
so that's really it I think you know finding one's voice feeling like
#
it was sustainable to write longish pieces about cinema or literature or whatever
#
and that it would make some sense to someone
#
that's what it was about
#
yeah for my listeners I used to be a consulting editor at Yahoo briefly
#
I basically put together and ran a column section for them which included
#
columns by among other people Jai Arjun Singh
#
and I think you used to alternate with Sanjay Sipai Malani on books
#
another sort of fantastic writer the two of you were my sort of art and culture people
#
and we had others for politics and society and this and that
#
no and going back to you know the similar process that happened to you
#
where you said that people started taking your film writing seriously because of the blog
#
and a similar process happened with me in the sense that look I used to work at cricket
#
I used to write in cricket but because of the blog where I wrote about everything
#
I got that column in Mint for which I won the Bastia Prize
#
I used to write regularly for the Wall Street Journal back in the day
#
so everything kind of came from there though none of that was intended
#
and the happiest writing I did was actually for the blog itself
#
because absolutely no limitations
#
and the other way in which it helped me and which is why I advise people today
#
to start a blog or a newsletter because blogs are kind of dead
#
but something is that you're writing regularly that iteration matters
#
you're writing repeatedly hopefully without self-consciousness
#
and that iteration just matters not just in making you a better writer
#
and polishing the craft but also it kind of makes you a better thinker
#
now my next question is that at this time you're writing about films
#
and one aspect of writing about films that we discussed is that it makes you look deeper at films
#
that you no longer have that intuitive or that initial or that visceral reaction to a film
#
you actually have to think about it, figure out what you want to write about it
#
go deeper into that aspect of yourself and all of that
#
but it strikes me that there's another danger
#
and that danger is taking this too far
#
of looking for significance where there is none
#
because you have to have something to write about
#
almost a risk of over analysis as it were
#
and in your self-deprecatory way you've pointed out one example of this in the past
#
I think in a TEDx talk you gave
#
where you spoke about this scene from Jaane Vido Yaro
#
where everybody is sort of silhouetted
#
they go up this building and they're silhouetted in the sky
#
and these guys are just silhouettes
#
and you spoke about how this sort of seemed to be symbolic of their Kale Karnameh
#
but when you mentioned it to Kundan Shah the director
#
he said, oh Jai, you're being a critic again, asa kuch nahi hai
#
and I'm reminded about this and I try to watch out for it in myself
#
when I write about books or films
#
because critics do tend to do this
#
like I remember one of my favourite films as a kid growing up
#
because I saw it at that age when it is likely to appeal to people of that age
#
was the Peter Weir film Dead Poet Society
#
and a couple of years later my dad got one of these foreign film magazines
#
where I read someone talking about Dead Poet Society
#
about having all these homoerotic overtones and all of that
#
which I was completely sure is just way overinterpreting what it actually was
#
you know, reading far more into a story than you need to
#
so is this something that you felt that you had to watch out for?
#
do you think you ever cross the line?
#
you know, would you know when you cross the line?
#
because at some level obviously everything is subjective
#
and you can only speak about how the film affects you and what it means to you
#
but at the same time there is a risk of kind of going too far
#
reading into the film things that the director never intended
#
or just weren't there just because you know, that's a fascinating narrative for you
#
so is this something you've thought about?
#
do you look back on some of the earlier stuff you've done
#
and say that, hey, no, no, that was wrong or you know, I overthought that
#
you know, the short answer to that would be no, I don't
#
and I have to say this, what the director consciously intended
#
what a novelist consciously intended
#
should be completely irrelevant to a good critic anyway
#
it's not something that, I am firmly with again
#
to come to another cliché
#
but I firmly believe in D.H. Lawrence's dictum
#
about trusting the artist, trusting the tale
#
and now the thing is, that example you provided
#
I remember that, by the way
#
there was actually a follow-up to it
#
which I think maybe you don't know about
#
maybe I don't remember if I put it
#
it may not have been in the book
#
but I think I may have written it elsewhere
#
when I spoke with Dinod Pradhan
#
later, may even have been after I did the book
#
I can't remember the exact sequence of events
#
he actually told me that, you know, though of course the
#
the fact that the scene was shot in that particular way
#
where the four villains, the four conspirators are
#
you see them in the shadowy sort of way
#
the fact that it was done was first and foremost
#
because they had run out of time
#
and they only had that, had the top of that building
#
for a certain amount of time
#
but Dinod Pradhan also said that
#
when we found ourselves with this constraint
#
I went up to Kundan and said, listen
#
but this would actually make for
#
for quite a nice atmospheric shot
#
given the black deeds that are being
#
being discussed out here
#
Dinod said this independently of my having brought up anything
#
in terms of interpretation
#
having said that, even if he hadn't said it
#
even if Dinod Pradhan hadn't
#
provided this counter narrative to what Kundan provided
#
and I should also specify that
#
Kundan himself, though he was very snarky with me at various times
#
in a way that a creative person often is
#
with an impudent young critic who is
#
who is trying to read a lot of things and do his work
#
because creative people do tend to feel
#
be very proprietary about what they have done
#
they need to have full control over it
#
and that therefore other interpretations
#
that they did not consciously intend
#
everything should just be there
#
many creative people are like that
#
even Kundan in a more relaxed frame of mind
#
did subsequently say to me, yeah
#
but listen, as a critic it is your job
#
to find your interpretations
#
and to look at what is there in the frame
#
Kundan had after all been at FTII himself as a student
#
and he would have picked up on that
#
watching hundreds and hundreds of films
#
and being taught to think about them in personal ways
#
so yeah, my basic position is
#
is that there is no such thing as over analysis
#
subtextual analysis is great
#
of course it's not that simple
#
because of course when we are talking about
#
are still talking about
#
in the frame of the film
#
if you are talking about a particular scene or whatever
#
you look at what is in the frame
#
or in the case of a novel you look at what is on the page
#
the words that have been used
#
hypothetically I were to
#
a villain played by Ajit
#
opulent villain's lairs
#
with a shark swimming in it
#
waiting to chew up heroes
#
write about that scene and say
#
what is happening here is Ajit isn't a bad guy
#
but there is an invisible pink unicorn
#
sitting on that pink sofa
#
wired into Ajit and he is making Ajit
#
do all these bad things
#
and of course you can't see, most people can't see the unicorn
#
because he is invisible and also because he is
#
a little less pink than that
#
but that is it, the real thing that is happening
#
here is that the unicorn is making Ajit
#
do all these bad things
#
now if I were to say that
#
it might still be a fairly entertaining
#
take on the film, it might even
#
but it probably wouldn't be good criticism
#
I think it's safe to say that
#
it wouldn't be valid criticism because
#
you are dealing with something that is not
#
but once you are dealing with things
#
that are actually there
#
at whatever level, because the film is made up
#
of so many different choices
#
some of which could be unconscious
#
choices or subconscious choices or the result
#
of different departments working together
#
collaborating, you can have a scene
#
where an actor is doing a particular thing
#
there is a line of dialogue
#
there is something happening at the level of the
#
costume design, something happening at the level
#
of the set design, camera movement
#
shot composition whatever
#
when you are looking at all of that in its entirety
#
of course it's fair game for a critic
#
to something else that has happened in the same
#
film or something else that has happened
#
in a different work made by the same director
#
it's completely fair game
#
whatever you have interpreted
#
what is actually there in the scene
#
it's not particularly interesting or relevant
#
himself was consciously trying to do
#
I don't think that is something that the critic
#
needs to be concerned with at all
#
I both agree and disagree
#
I agree with your basic point but I can see
#
that sometimes over thinking it can become a bad
#
thing for example let's take the pink sofa
#
now I think the pink unicorn is a bit much because
#
you are adding a plot element and all of that
#
but one way that scene could be interpreted is
#
that a young critic today could interpret it
#
and say that look what Ajit is actually
#
doing is that with the pinkness
#
of the sofa by choosing a pink sofa
#
repressed feminine side it's actually
#
a little bit metrosexual that he's got a pink sofa
#
and all these heroes who are coming
#
to rescue the heroine by the act
#
of trying to rescue a woman they
#
are expressing a paternalism
#
and a patriarchal bent of mind and he's
#
feeding that toxic masculinity to the sharks
#
all of this is coherent but
#
you have a career as an academic critic
#
the thing is here is where the directors
#
intent does matter because none of this is intended
#
all of this is coherent
#
that's a point very well made
#
I think the safe thing to do is
#
to say that we are all going to be making our
#
own value judgements about
#
where you perhaps go overboard
#
with analysis and interpretation
#
that's a very good example
#
that you just came up with on the fly like that
#
I have read particularly in the
#
what I would consider good academia
#
which is a very tiny minority of
#
the academia I have read because
#
much of what I have read especially when it comes
#
to academia around Hindi cinema just seems
#
academic writing I have actually
#
exaggerated example that you provided
#
and I have been able to
#
sort of go along with it to some degree
#
no no I don't mean to diss all analysis
#
I am just saying that there is a danger of overthinking
#
and does one watch out for it
#
and you know this reminded me of
#
a story about myself and it's fairly
#
self-deprecatory because I end up looking very stupid
#
in it so why not share it
#
which is that when I was in college in my teens
#
so this would probably be 91-92
#
for example for all we know
#
so I was in Ferguson college in Pune and in our neighbouring college
#
there was an art exhibition
#
and Hussain's works were among
#
those that were put up and
#
I don't remember the occasion at all or why Hussain's
#
works would be put up in a college exhibition
#
but there was something by Hussain there and Hussain
#
himself was around gracing the occasion
#
so I went there with an
#
acquaintance of my neighbour in
#
the hostel and we were looking at a Hussain
#
painting and there was some candle in it
#
so my neighbour looked at me and said you know what
#
that candle is I think that represents a hope
#
of humanity so I was like
#
no yaar a great artist like Hussain
#
would never do such cheap symbolism
#
so anyway then Hussain comes near the painting
#
and somebody you know thrusts a mic in his face
#
and says sir can you tell us about
#
this painting what is that candle doing there
#
and Hussain says that's meant to
#
represent the hope of humanity
#
almost identical words and
#
I just wanted to sink into the ground ki yeh
#
kya ho gaya but anyway to
#
I'll pick up on one of the
#
things you said where and I
#
agree with you in this particular
#
thing that you said where you said that you
#
have to look at a piece of art on its own
#
and divorce it of everything else just
#
look at it by itself forget what the director
#
intended forget all the things around it
#
now this brings me to that
#
political question almost these days
#
of can you separate art from
#
depending on the artist's character you
#
should just totally ignore their art
#
suddenly your value judgements about their art have
#
to be influenced by things
#
that you find out about their personal life
#
so people will use this to for example
#
you know not watch Polanski or Woody
#
Allen's films and all of that
#
so I'm curious about what you think about this because my
#
stand to be very clear is
#
that my judgement of the art
#
and my judgement of the character of the
#
artist are two completely separate things I can
#
love a work of art and I can absolutely
#
condemn things that the artist
#
might have done that they stand
#
even though at an emotional level for example
#
I would never read something by say Neruda
#
once one knows about that
#
early rape he committed and all of that
#
you know and so on and so forth but there are many
#
other cases which are not so
#
clear cut in my mind like in any case I didn't
#
like Neruda's poetry and all of that
#
but there are cases which are not
#
so clear cut in my mind and my point
#
there is that these judgements
#
judgement of the art always has to be independent
#
for example if I was to give you a book right now
#
anonymous author say a new say even by
#
Elena Ferrante are you going to suspend
#
judgement on that work of art till you know
#
everything about the character of the artist
#
that is not even possible
#
so what is your sort of
#
a little terrified that you asked this question
#
because it's one of those things
#
one will be able to articulate
#
all of one's feelings about it
#
first of all let me just say
#
before I say something slightly controversial sounding
#
understand and empathise with
#
on the things on the subjects that resonate
#
most for them or the things that
#
they feel most strongly about
#
by what Polanski probably did
#
or what Woody Allen probably did or what
#
Snipe or whoever probably did
#
that they just cannot bring themselves
#
this person's films anymore
#
that is a personal decision
#
it's something that's completely valid
#
I might not be triggered by those things
#
I might be triggered as
#
involved with dogs than with
#
most humans, homo sapien issues
#
I might get triggered by
#
or a novelist, someone who I discovered
#
engaged in severe cruelty to
#
if I hear of a favourite
#
filmmaker or a favourite novelist
#
cruelty to an animal, to a dog
#
and that might completely put me off
#
this person's books or films or whatever
#
so all of us have different triggers
#
response even though many people
#
I know just make fun of
#
the idea that you can be triggered enough
#
by what someone has done
#
to just reject the whole
#
body of work or to stop watching something
#
especially when it comes to
#
film, as you implied as well
#
in what you were saying
#
no one is ever going to have full knowledge
#
about these things anyway
#
a film is a collaborative process
#
apart from the director or the scriptwriter
#
you might have 20 other people
#
who have played a very prominent role in the making
#
of this film or the making of
#
specific scenes within this film
#
and there is a pretty good chance that one or more
#
of those 20 people has done something
#
ghastly at some point in their lives
#
and got away with it or whatever
#
information keeps coming in, how do you
#
cancel things with hindsight
#
unappreciate something that you already
#
appreciate? It requires a certain
#
sort of double think which I
#
find very strange but when it comes
#
to the broad question of the art and
#
the artist, one thought
#
that I have which I don't really
#
I feel like I haven't really seen it expressed
#
most of the discourse that I have
#
many of the conversations that
#
begin with can you separate
#
the art from the artist or from the person
#
we just have one of two alternatives
#
know that the artist has done reprehensible
#
things, you reject the art as unsavoury
#
the other option is, yes you can
#
separate the two things, accept the art
#
as something that exists on its own
#
terms and might have its own merits
#
continue to denounce the artist
#
as an essentially bad person
#
but the art as something that
#
has a life of its own almost independently
#
for me these positions seem
#
when an artist who has done terrible things
#
film or a song or whatever
#
that is morally uplifting or empathetic
#
human values, then it means that
#
this artist was being hypocritical
#
concealing his real self
#
from his audience and I find
#
that view quite problematic because
#
if you were to ask, if you were to assume
#
that the allegations about Polanski
#
for instance are completely true
#
and then with that knowledge
#
you then say okay can you separate Polanski
#
the person from his films, my answer
#
to that first of all would be no you cannot separate
#
him from his films because his films are deeply
#
everything, even when he is adapting a work
#
like Macbeth, he is putting so much
#
of his own life experience into it
#
there are scenes in that which hark back to the
#
Sharon Tate murder and there is
#
life and his personality in almost
#
all his work, it's all there
#
how do you separate the two things
#
now does that necessarily mean
#
that we then just cancel all the films
#
and my answer to that would be
#
years or whatever, again coming back
#
to the we all contain multitudes thing, this is something
#
that I know a lot of people will find this idea
#
if you have one side of your personality
#
that has allowed you to do this really terrible thing
#
other sides of your personality that
#
have allowed you to honestly create
#
these sensitive things going on in it
#
and why can't you just accept
#
that maybe these two things
#
represent different sides of
#
the person's personality and then
#
make your call, if you decide
#
that the bad things he's done
#
are deal breakers for you
#
then of course you must
#
never watch a Polanski film again
#
I think the question of can you
#
separate the art from the artist
#
is inherently a reductive one
#
in some ways because I don't think
#
that question, whether you answer
#
I think there is a third
#
there is an in between possibility
#
I think that question needs no answer itself
#
because just thinking aloud I think
#
what we are talking about here is not a separation
#
of the art from the artist but a separation
#
of the judgement of the art from a judgement of the
#
artist where one can hold
#
that your judgement of an artist can include
#
that behaviour which is just
#
horrendous and you can think of him as a moral
#
monster but at the same time your judgement
#
of a particular work in which he may have
#
put different aspects of his
#
personality or his art or his craft or whatever
#
you can still look at that work
#
and say that it's worth it
#
and I agree with you that
#
this is often personally depends on
#
what your triggers are, for example like I said
#
I can't read Neruda again
#
I would not read anything by say Tarun Tejpal
#
though they are both writers of horrendous
#
purple prose anyway, I don't know if there is
#
a connection between purple prose and bad
#
character, it is quite possible
#
but for example one person
#
I do feel conflicted about is someone like Louis C.K
#
like before the Me Too allegations
#
against him surfaced, he was
#
essentially perhaps my favourite modern artist
#
like the TV series he did Louis
#
not Lucky Louis which was an earlier one and not
#
so good but a series he did called Louis
#
I think is an absolute masterpiece
#
which just gets better and better as it
#
goes along through the seasons
#
and part of what makes his art great
#
is the self-reflectiveness
#
reflecting on his earlier self all the time
#
it is like a person has just changed
#
and changed and changed and he recognises
#
that he was once an asshole
#
and his whole art is about
#
crux of the human experience through just
#
looking at all the mistakes that he has made
#
and of course what he was accused of
#
and really bad behaviour but something that happened
#
so you don't know how much he had changed
#
the allegations at one level
#
while they contained assholery
#
weren't really abrogating consent
#
he just misused his position of power
#
asked some women whether he could strip
#
in front of them, they said no he didn't
#
it is still an extremely asshole
#
thing to do and I would not associate with
#
someone like that but do you want
#
to invalidate his later art, do you want
#
to say that people absolutely cannot change
#
so I am a little conflicted about
#
this you know so my feelings
#
about him have become very mixed
#
but my feelings about his art remain
#
what they were because I can't be
#
aesthetic judgement of something because
#
of something else that I came to know
#
later so I guess at some level we are
#
making personal judgements about
#
you know how much something triggers us
#
or affects us and by the way you mentioned
#
Animals, the film I mentioned
#
Cannibal Holocaust one of the controversies
#
around it was that six dogs were
#
killed live during the film while they
#
were killed this very elegant
#
classical-ish music by Riz Autolani
#
was being played in the background
#
and I can totally understand why you would never
#
watch that despite my praise of the film
#
so it's kind of personal but
#
at some level I think your one
#
judgement of the art should
#
stand apart from the judgement of the
#
artist but yeah very sort of
#
muddy territory, shall I go on to my next question
#
or would you like to add to this?
#
wanted to add to that again based
#
on what you said the one thing I just like to
#
say again this is where
#
self-analysis is such a
#
you can just get caught up
#
in it and obviously it's something that
#
are egotistical enough to want to do it
#
but it's so pointless at times
#
because I really don't know why you were talking
#
it struck me that I don't really feel
#
that conflicted about my
#
find out that they have done something really terrible
#
disapprove of even to the degree
#
of committing crimes that
#
in a fairer world than the one that
#
we live in they would be punished for
#
and that ideally they should have
#
been in jail at a point
#
when they were actually creating
#
some of my favourite albums or
#
films or books or whatever
#
even with that knowledge
#
I usually find it quite
#
yes injustice has been done
#
is really punishable then
#
assholery has been indulged in
#
but it doesn't matter that much to me and this
#
applies even to personal heroes
#
take someone like Bachchan
#
there are lots of things in his
#
in his real world personality
#
irritating including the things that he
#
tweets, these things that I keep hearing
#
I don't actually follow anyone on Twitter
#
but I keep hearing these things
#
or seeing screenshots and
#
of this person who no longer has a
#
personality of his own or whatever
#
none of that has made the slightest difference
#
I still feel inside me if I happen
#
to get onto YouTube and I
#
see a wonderfully performed
#
song sequence like Khay Ke Paan Banaras Wala
#
or O Saathi Re from O Kadar Ka Sikandar
#
which is a favourite film
#
I'm just watching it and thinking
#
is one of my personal heroes somebody
#
who made my life better
#
at various points in my life
#
the same is true for Sachin Tendulkar
#
came at a time in my life
#
when they were among the
#
when they were among the few
#
and I find it perfectly easy
#
or the dubious things that
#
one hears about Tendulkar
#
in the current day for instance
#
so I don't know maybe I just sort of find
#
that separation easier to pull off
#
maybe there's something about
#
those things because I don't
#
agonise a lot about these
#
I agree with you absolutely
#
fair enough now sticking to the
#
versus artist separation obviously comes about
#
because of the politics of our current
#
times and some of it is great and but some
#
of it worries me for example
#
you have spoken in the past of quote unquote woke
#
criticism and there is often a sense
#
all art is not just being
#
evaluated through the prism of that
#
phrase which both of us have made fun of in the past
#
although it speaks to the human condition
#
but also through the prism of a certain
#
kind of politics are the current
#
are the correct values kind of being
#
depicted here and the point is
#
it's easy for us to look at
#
something like a Kabir Singh and say that
#
oh that is obviously they are glorifying
#
a certain kind of toxic masculinity
#
and therefore we must condemn it
#
and I agree with that it's just horrendous
#
but at the same time the point is
#
in most art in most good literature and most
#
good cinema you have characters who are
#
conflicted characters who do bad things
#
you know characters who are
#
not woke I mean the whole point of
#
art is that you are depicting humanity
#
as it is humanity is imperfect humanity
#
contains multitudes but when
#
you sort of look at that art say
#
you judge a film because of what its characters
#
do it seems bizarre to me but I have seen
#
that happen or you try to
#
talk about what a film's politics is
#
you know then it becomes
#
to use a favorite phrase of many of these
#
people it becomes problematic for me because
#
I just want to look at art on its own terms
#
I don't care about what agenda
#
there is or what agenda you can read
#
into it where also a lot of overthinking
#
can go on so as a critic
#
what do you feel about this?
#
I feel many many different things
#
about this and how many hours do you have
#
it's basically unlimited bro
#
could start controversially by saying
#
that I wouldn't even take
#
what you said about Kabir Singh as a given
#
watched the film myself so of course
#
I'm not going to make up my mind about
#
a film that I haven't watched and that I
#
don't really plan to watch
#
anytime in the near future but I do
#
know at least three or four
#
whose prisms I respect a great deal
#
which may or may not be important who did
#
not feel that way about the film at all
#
that the film is a glorification of toxic masculinity
#
they felt very differently
#
and these are liberal people I'm
#
talking about broadly liberal people
#
so I'm not making those
#
assumptions about any film
#
having said that I will
#
express my view on Kabir Singh only after
#
I've seen it not before that
#
this is not an expression of a particular
#
judgment or a non-judgment
#
having said that I also
#
again you've articulated a lot of the issues
#
it's not just a matter of viewing
#
just a matter of that because with
#
that then of course you also
#
come to things like the films of
#
going to say the birth of a nation but
#
definitely Lenny Riefenstahl's
#
Those are overtly political
#
and politics is what it is
#
so it's fine to condemn those but I'm
#
obviously not talking about those sort of edge
#
cases. What I meant was
#
they're also in parts at least
#
the use of the formal cinematic
#
achieve a certain effect
#
and many people still continue
#
holding forth on the problematic aspects
#
but what happens is that
#
very clearly defined ideology
#
from this point of view that what is
#
the film, what is the politics
#
of this film? What is the politics
#
of this film maker or script writer?
#
The thing is these are questions that
#
very often do not have clear cut
#
answers. Sometimes they do
#
of course sometimes they do
#
there are cases of films
#
that are made explicitly as propaganda
#
as you pointed out but with a
#
lot of art including art
#
self evidently to some people as
#
fulfill a particular agenda
#
what is really happening is
#
that a director or a novelist
#
trying to build a world
#
and in the building of that world
#
what is happening is that moral
#
or ideological positions are being suspended
#
to a great degree and what they are
#
the characters within this world
#
now if those characters include
#
are quote unquote problematic
#
then you still will have a
#
situation where a serious novelist or
#
a serious director or a script writer
#
if they are trying to create this work honestly
#
be putting themselves in the
#
mind space of this character
#
will be forming certain degrees
#
of empathy for this character's actions as well
#
it can easily seem to someone
#
who is looking at the film only through
#
a very specific ideological lens
#
it will seem like glorification
#
whereas the truth might actually
#
be a little more complex, it might just be tied
#
into the process of world building
#
which is something that most
#
serious creative people do
#
you have been a novelist yourself
#
I know you have written other sorts of
#
you know what this is about
#
when you are dealing with this
#
very difficult business of creating a world
#
from the inside out and putting yourself in the heads
#
of different sorts of characters
#
you are not necessarily thinking about
#
for your reader or your
#
and I think a lot of these
#
they only want a clear cut answer
#
what is the politics of
#
this particular novelist
#
in creating this character
#
and then those are subjective judgments
#
anyway but then a lot of the people
#
who make those judgments will behave as if
#
compromised or just not engaged enough
#
and that's one of the most troubling aspects of
#
some of the political conversations around
#
cinema and literature these days for me
#
I know speaking as someone who is
#
I am on this podcast with you
#
right now saying all these things
#
and what will be a public forum soon
#
that I feel very constrained
#
if I find myself in the presence of
#
and on about how regressive a particular
#
film is oh this character is so problematic
#
this film is so regressive
#
I'll sometimes feel like it's not worth my
#
change the subject or something
#
and that's a pity because that is definitely
#
affecting discourse and I know there are
#
many people like me who feel that
#
who feel that a lot of the
#
left liberal slash work
#
criticism, cultural criticism has
#
or narrow ideological definitions
#
rather than looking at the entirety
#
of what a film or a book might
#
be doing the many contradictions
#
a particular creative work
#
one of your earlier guests on
#
the scene and the unseen Paramita Vohra
#
has spoken very eloquently
#
about this in the context of a lot
#
of Hindi films that get
#
sweepingly described as regressive
#
or problematic or toxic
#
and she's defended them in her writings
#
and in some of her talks
#
as well about how so many of these
#
works are actually far more complex
#
than many people realize
#
there are different things going on
#
in there you might have
#
one scene or one line of dialogue
#
terrible and patriarchal and
#
whatever but there will be something else
#
there will be another impulse in the same
#
scene that will also be working against
#
that or providing a cushion against
#
that and that's how a lot of popular
#
I don't know if any of this has made sense
#
No it makes a lot of sense
#
I mean just a couple of episodes ago I had
#
Kavita Krishnan the feminist on the
#
show I mean why am I even saying
#
a feminist we are all feminists I would hope
#
one of the things Kavita spoke about was how
#
people look at Enid Blyton today where they are trying
#
to almost in hindsight cancel
#
Enid Blyton and her point was look I read
#
Enid Blyton I loved Enid Blyton and the
#
characters I identified most with
#
and the characters that Enid Blyton
#
in fact made stand out were the people
#
who were bucking the system the tomboy
#
for example among the girls at Mallory Towers
#
you know so you got to look a little deeper than
#
the fact is that society is
#
regressive people are complex
#
and it's a job of art to capture all of this
#
and not necessarily to pass judgement otherwise
#
you become facile propaganda
#
tell me what you think about this is that there are
#
or two sort of phenomena that
#
kind of lead to this phenomena one is
#
that on the one hand it might
#
seem that in the age of social media all
#
of history is available to us you know unlike
#
you and me we don't have to scramble to watch movies
#
from the past as we used to
#
do in the 1980s in your case going
#
to embassy video library is borrowing
#
now it's all on the click of a button
#
legally or otherwise but
#
actually that's not totally
#
accurately in the sense that yes it is all out
#
there but I think as Jonathan Haidt pointed
#
out in an episode of a podcast I produced
#
Brave New World which is hosted
#
by Vasanthar he spoke to Jonathan Haidt
#
and if I remember correctly Haidt it was
#
Haidt only who pointed out that
#
what most people consume on
#
social media is what has been produced
#
in the last three days so it's
#
very current is bound to the current time
#
they're not really going too far back into the past
#
now in your case your education
#
of cinema like even when you said that
#
you don't watch too many films today the bottom
#
line is you have put in a lot of time
#
watching films and watching films
#
of it informs the way you look at
#
cinema and that's true of every
#
good film critic including you know
#
someone like Bharatwaj Rangan comes to mind
#
who was also you know such a star during the
#
blogging days and a fantastic critic
#
so you know you have this
#
bedrock of historical exposure
#
which informs whatever you do
#
is kind of stuck in the current
#
moment where everything you're consuming
#
was maybe produced in the last three days
#
and all of that and this can sometimes
#
garble your perspective
#
and you almost in a sense become
#
now this brings me to the second factor and this is
#
true especially if you're on social media
#
where you're even more trapped in the present because
#
everything is off the moment
#
where in social media what is
#
the imperative for a lot
#
of the people out there especially the young people
#
is to raise their status
#
within whatever in groups they have chosen within
#
vast silent majority haven't really made
#
such choices and luckily I think
#
you know you spoke about these things
#
that you're saying on my podcast in a public forum
#
but I would imagine that podcast listeners who have gotten
#
this far are not the kind of people who outrage on
#
social media anyway so you and
#
social media people form their echo chambers
#
and they need to raise their status within
#
those echo chambers they need to posture
#
their purity in different ways
#
they can do it by attacking people on the other side
#
and always attacking people never engaging
#
with arguments they can do it by attacking
#
people on their own side for not being pure
#
enough which eventually happens to
#
everybody in fact most of the people the
#
vokes cancel or seem to be former vokes
#
in a sense in current times
#
so you know they're going to come for you
#
eventually unless you produce absolutely nothing
#
and only outrage in which case you're safe
#
and therefore these two come together
#
that on the one hand you don't really
#
have a deep understanding
#
of whatever it is you're critiquing whether it's literature
#
or cinema or whatever and on the other
#
hand you need to posture all the time and this
#
shit on a film you say that
#
oh it is regressive this character
#
is problematic this director
#
tweeted this when he was 16 years old
#
absolutely no cost to this kind of
#
posturing to you but it has
#
such a harmful effect on the discourse because
#
these people may be a vocal
#
minority but because they are
#
the vocal ones the majority
#
of the discourse seems to be like
#
this so you know do you kind of agree
#
with this are there things that you would add to this
#
and if this is broadly what the picture
#
is then do we have hope moving
#
I don't know well as a part time
#
journalist I always say there's no hope moving
#
with pretty much everything you know
#
using the term virtue signaling
#
because I think it's a very
#
easy term to use I'm very
#
tempted to do it and I do end up doing
#
it especially in private conversations
#
but one reason I don't like
#
using it is because of something that you
#
touched on which is that
#
when for instance and I'm not really
#
on Twitter but on Facebook
#
sometimes and I go through these phases where I
#
see a lot of feeds and things
#
virtue signaling being used in a deprecatory
#
in the past have thought of as virtue
#
signalers and then I wonder
#
maybe people are thinking that way about me
#
as well in other contexts so you know
#
so it just becomes one of those loops
#
and you know and it's and even
#
a term like you know the workster
#
used federatively which is
#
something I like doing and I like doing it
#
in a slightly sort of cheesy way
#
you know using the word
#
using the Star Wars terms
#
it's fun to do that but
#
part of me does feel a bit
#
uncertain and uneasy when
#
I do it because I know that
#
there are probably contexts in which people can
#
feel they can say the same thing about me
#
as well based on things that I've
#
broadly agree with everything you're
#
me though you know and now
#
just to again perhaps come back a little bit
#
to what we were talking about a bit earlier
#
I was on a conversation once
#
with you know just doing this online
#
for somebody and there were these
#
very engaged young people talking
#
about films and asking for recommendations
#
and then subsequently one of them
#
started following me on Instagram and I happened
#
the Instagram page and I saw
#
The Philadelphia Story, the 1940 film
#
The Philadelphia Story with Catherine Hepburn
#
and Cary Grant and James Stewart
#
one of my favourite films from that era
#
patronising and condescending
#
you know stuff like that
#
main female character Tracy Lord
#
over the course of the story the fact that
#
just sort of being manipulated by all
#
the men in her life and eventually just driven
#
to the right man etc etc
#
and I was just looking at that and thinking you know
#
The Philadelphia Story of all films is
#
being described as nauseous and misogynistic
#
words you know it's incumbent
#
with a little more care
#
because ultimately what's going to happen is
#
words like misogynistic
#
Islamophobic or whatever
#
condemnatory words but what's happening
#
in a lot of the current discourses they are being
#
ways that they'll end up losing their potency
#
to start with. For someone like me they've already
#
lost their potency. I see the word
#
misogynistic written somewhere
#
my first impulse is to think there's just
#
some worster overreacting to
#
something. That's my first response
#
rightly or wrongly. And I find this
#
problematic, the word that we
#
but at the same time I do have
#
young people who are living in this time
#
that's available to them all the time. Even someone like
#
get a recommendation for
#
Mayor of East Town or whatever
#
which is just 7 episodes or something
#
motivated enough to watch it
#
because of the recommendations and because I like
#
Kate Winslet or I like the genre
#
or something. I'm still taking
#
7 hours of my time out and at the end of it
#
I'm thinking wow even if it was good
#
I've just spent so much of
#
This is despite the fact that I'm also aware
#
that there are older things that I need to
#
columns or for some of my own writing
#
and I need to find the time for that.
#
I can only sympathise with
#
young people who are in this world where
#
they are binge watching maybe 4 or
#
5 or 6 series every month
#
understandable that they will end up lacking
#
don't really think there are going to be any easy solutions
#
to this. I've been in classes like
#
I indicated just now. I've been in classes
#
with utmost sincerity have asked
#
all these old films that we want to watch
#
mostly mean films that were not made in this
#
Films made before 2000.
#
generation of movie buffs right now
#
who think that anything
#
pre-Christopher Nolan is
#
ancient. But they don't have the time
#
to do this and I do have basic
#
sympathy for that because all of us have finite
#
time. We are just being inundated
#
with so much information
#
so many things to watch across all the OTT
#
platforms, across all the other
#
that pressure. So I can imagine what it's like
#
to this. I mean the only
#
the only piece of advice I could give
#
if you have 7 days a week to watch
#
to spend 4-5 hours per day
#
watching things, just try and
#
create a schedule for yourself
#
tell yourself that 2 days
#
a week you will watch something that was made
#
Something that comes out of a movie recommendation
#
or a criterion recommendation
#
or whatever. And even that won't be enough
#
because then they'll end up watching American
#
films or French films. They might
#
not engage with old Hindi
#
cinema which is something
#
that's very difficult for young people
#
to engage with now because
#
everybody has grown away from that tradition
#
of the song and dance and
#
the masala. It's very difficult
#
tuning your mind to that sort of thing.
#
So no easy answers at all.
#
There's no hope basically.
#
do I kinda agree? I guess I kinda agree. But
#
I mean I don't wanna die anyway so if you look
#
at the really long long term of course there's no hope.
#
But hope for what? The fact
#
that sometimes I have to remind myself that look I am in
#
my 40s and most of these young people
#
have a different frame of reference entirely.
#
this tweet recently. I think Aakar Patel did it
#
whose tweeting recently is incredibly entertaining.
#
referring to some piece of news somewhere and he said
#
Obladi. You know basically Obladi
#
but he spelt it Obladi.
#
So below that someone commented Oblada
#
and below that someone commented Life Goes On.
#
And I am like only someone of my generation
#
actually gets this. In fact the moment I saw
#
the reply Oblada I was tempted
#
to type Life Goes On till I saw someone's
#
already done it. Reference of course to the famous
#
Beatles song. Please tell me
#
That's something you've got to remind
#
yourself that these people have a very different
#
frame of reference that
#
you know that they may not have
#
sort of heard or watched or read
#
all of this stuff from the past.
#
now happened is and I don't think that
#
this sort of a lot of these shallow expressions
#
from people who haven't engaged with cinema
#
but will nevertheless pass judgement on it on the basis
#
of their politics. I don't think that
#
particular context which is I don't think less
#
people are serious about cinema. If anything
#
I think there are more serious film
#
watchers now than ever before because you have
#
the means to engage deeply
#
with cinema and all of that.
#
So I don't think that that is
#
necessarily an issue but what is necessarily
#
an issue is that a lot of the shallow
#
posturing is just dominating the discourse
#
a newcomer who would earlier 15
#
years ago perhaps have discovered a movie
#
through reading something that you wrote on your blog
#
will now not want to watch
#
the movie because somebody else has called it
#
toxic or misogynistic or whatever
#
and that pollution of the discourse
#
But you know moving aside from
#
this sort of political angle which is what it
#
is, one of the good things that has definitely
#
happened is in terms of form
#
like it strikes me that in the same way
#
that you and I we were talking about
#
how in our writing we were liberated by
#
blogging because that form removed
#
many of these constraints that we otherwise
#
have. And it strikes me that
#
there has been a sort of
#
a revolution of form within
#
the audio visual medium
#
in the last two or three decades as well
#
which you know for me most significantly
#
when HBO brought out The Wire
#
that for me is a turning point and
#
obviously there were great shows before it.
#
I mean Kieslowski made Decalogue for Polish television
#
so that is of course a pinnacle
#
incredibly exciting about The Wire
#
allowed its creators to take on
#
an almost novelistic sweep.
#
Like before that I would think of each film
#
as a sort of, if I had to compare it to literature
#
I would say it's really a short story of sorts.
#
It's one kind of narrative
#
you have two hours, three hours is a limit to how
#
deep you can go. That's what it is.
#
What The Wire really did was it didn't have
#
one main character. It had a whole bunch of
#
characters with tremendous depth.
#
It had that sweep. It had that range.
#
And what we now have because of the
#
Netflix kind of kickstarted
#
or really got going with House of Cards
#
in the subsequent decade is
#
that you have this form. So in formal terms
#
your audio visual storytelling
#
and go places. So number one
#
is significant? Because I don't know what the term
#
cinema even means so I'm using the general
#
catch all term audio visual storytelling
#
but it just seems to me that this has way more scope
#
did. In the same way as
#
for example printed books would have
#
enabled longer forms of literature
#
which might not otherwise have been the case. So on the one
#
hand there is this but on the other hand
#
you also have the means of production
#
becoming much much cheaper
#
which is why you have people on
#
expressing themselves doing brave new things like
#
I don't know if you watch the vlogs
#
of Casey Neistat who is a
#
YouTube creator who is doing very cinematic
#
things. At one point he would post a vlog a day
#
and they would all be basically short films
#
of him doing interesting things but made
#
in a very cinematic way creating a language
#
of his own very influential. Similarly
#
of the stuff that becomes popular is just
#
wisecrack based stuff or funny
#
stuff or memetic stuff but there was
#
also a lot of other deeper
#
stuff that was going on there which
#
was absolutely mind blowing and it's hopefully
#
still going on in the rest of the world though
#
So two separate questions. One
#
do you see that this expansion of
#
form as something that has led to
#
a golden age of cinema which I believe
#
we are in. There's a lot of crap around but I believe
#
that you know and could be the
#
selection bias based on what I get to see
#
now as opposed to what I got to
#
see say 20 years earlier. But
#
you know would you broadly agree with that
#
and then do you see is there a sense
#
of excitement also about these
#
new forms of filmmaking
#
that is being enabled by technology?
#
pretty much everything you've said even though
#
a lot of this stuff you know
#
TikTok for instance is something that I haven't
#
experienced. I know about your
#
a lot of what has been done there and
#
find myself quite irritated by
#
some of the snobbery that was
#
aimed at TikTok especially when it was done
#
expressing their creativity if they had
#
certain forms of creativity and
#
another class who were sort of
#
looking down on it and just being very condescending
#
and saying some appallingly
#
classist things about it. So in
#
principle I agree with that completely
#
really experienced as much TikTok as you have
#
these shows I haven't seen The Wire
#
I haven't seen so many of
#
these iconic shows. I haven't even watched Breaking Bad
#
for instance. There are so many
#
shows that you'd be astonished to
#
learn that I haven't watched and
#
I don't think I'm going to end up doing it because
#
my mind just recoils at the idea of
#
taking out 30-40 hours for
#
something like this. I don't know if I'll
#
be able to do it now. But again
#
in principle and also based on
#
with these things because there are some series
#
that I've watched including
#
a few of the Indian series which
#
I've been asked to specifically review
#
which I keep getting told are not as
#
good or as polished as the best
#
but I liked a lot of stuff
#
and I have great respect for the format
#
in the hands of a good showrunner
#
create this long narrative arc
#
to just sort of plan it out
#
this trajectory where something
#
that has been done in episode 1 or
#
episode 2 makes complete sense
#
only perhaps in season 2
#
It's been planned out that well beforehand
#
and that's something that
#
you can only admire. I often
#
that Alan Moore had been 30-40
#
years younger because I think he
#
would have been a fabulous showrunner
#
and I'm not just saying this because there's actually been
#
a series of Watchmen but
#
someone like Alan Moore
#
or younger version of Alan Moore
#
could have done with something like
#
From Hell or Watchmen or something
#
absolutely brilliant series
#
because he did that so much in his actual
#
directions that he gave as artists
#
back in the 80s and 90s.
#
in principle I'm a big fan of this sort of
#
there was a time I think maybe 7-8-9
#
years ago when people were raving about
#
there's this golden age of television and how
#
so much of what we have on
#
television is brilliantly cinematic.
#
most of what you see in cinema halls.
#
going to be cinematic? It'll probably
#
just be pictures of people talking
#
because I still have that
#
stereotyped idea of what a TV
#
show looked like say back
#
talking about international shows. So
#
of course I was pleasantly surprised by what
#
I did end up watching eventually and
#
get that this is a very exciting
#
time. I do tend to be slightly
#
partly because of the recency biases
#
and things that we have. Partly
#
because I'm so old in my head
#
that I find it very difficult to think of
#
anything other than 1940s
#
the golden age of cinema.
#
the silent film was heading
#
towards this great apotheosis and then
#
destroyed by the coming of sound.
#
again in principle yes I have
#
referring to the current moment as a golden
#
now I've come to know that
#
given that you live in that era
#
the Philadelphia story for you must be something made
#
by young whippersnappers. But it's
#
so fascinating that we can kind of
#
inhabit not just different characters
#
but different eras in this way and immerse
#
ourselves in different worlds. I mean that's the beauty of
#
cinema, literature, art, all of
#
that. Now so we've already
#
chatted for around three hours and we haven't
#
even spoken about books. I wanted to
#
speak to you about writing and your writing process
#
we haven't even gotten there. And I
#
wanted to chat with you about Hindi cinema and Rishikesh Mukherjee
#
as well which we will save
#
for a future episode. So I will
#
extract that promise from you now that we'll
#
talk again. But before we end
#
this particular episode, normally
#
I kind of end my episodes by asking
#
books that they love. But in your
#
case it's going to be both books and films
#
that you know and I don't want a
#
best of list. That's an
#
insane expectation. But just
#
you know off the top of your head
#
five books or films that you feel
#
you would like to share with the world?
#
prepared for this moment in the podcast
#
even though it's such an obvious one.
#
Or three of each or whatever
#
comes to mind. I don't want it to be
#
How about three hundred of each?
#
I'll take the easy way out by recommending one
#
Rishikesh Mukherjee film that no one
#
seems to have heard of. Including
#
possibly Rishida himself.
#
But it really is, it is honestly
#
defensively about it because it's the sort of
#
even those who do discover it
#
unfortunately it's available only in a
#
very ordinary print online on YouTube
#
restored or anything. It's a 1965 film called
#
Bibi or Makaan. And Amrit
#
in fact I actually think this might be a film
#
that might even be worth your while
#
to at least try and watch some of
#
because I think you'll at the very least
#
agree with me that it's a very interesting
#
Hindi film for its time
#
for what it does with the musical form.
#
It was produced by Hemant
#
Kumar who was of course this great
#
music director and it was
#
Gulzar Saab's first collaboration
#
as a lyricist with Rishikesh Mukherjee
#
and it's this film that's
#
basically almost operatic
#
in terms of how it tells
#
this fairly lowbrow comedy
#
story of friends who are
#
forced into a cross-dressing
#
shenanigan because they
#
can't get accommodation
#
so two of them have to pretend to be wives of the
#
other two. But it just uses
#
as things that take the narrative forward
#
actually require the actors to be
#
performing, requires a certain degree of
#
orchestration in terms of how
#
the movements are done and so on
#
it's definitely a counterpoint to
#
the idea that many people have that
#
that a lot of Hindi cinema just
#
used musical sequences as
#
completely divorced from the main narrative
#
so it's a film that I have a lot of love for
#
it's also the Rishikesh Mukherjee comedy
#
that adds a direct precursor to
#
the later well-known comedies like
#
Golmaal and Chupke Chupke
#
I've already spoken about I'm not going to
#
I'm not going to say Jaane Bhi Do Yaro either because
#
that's just too obvious
#
and because I'm probably fed up
#
of the film by now I don't think I could watch it again after
#
having watched it those dozens of times
#
for the book that I did on it
#
films of the 1940s again coming back
#
to 1940s Hollywood that I
#
have a lot of time for and
#
one of them of course is
#
called An Ace in the Hole
#
also known as The Big Carnival
#
resistant as I am to things like
#
relevance or topicality
#
it feels like a very relevant film
#
for the current day as well it's 70 years old
#
and it has Kirk Douglas as this
#
reporter who tries to exploit
#
a very tragic situation
#
involving a man who's been trapped in a
#
very pertinent to the media carnivals
#
of the current day as well
#
and of course there was a Hindi film from a few years
#
ago called Peepli Live which also
#
explored similar terrain
#
a media carnival built around
#
well those are three books
#
Eanard Blyton's Far Away Tree series
#
that made up these stories
#
little brother and sister who
#
move to the countryside and then
#
these magical lands at the top of a
#
the woods it's also one of those books
#
opened my eyes to the possibilities
#
places that otherwise can exist
#
as someone who's a huge
#
for the longest time one book
#
that I love is Shivaji Savant's
#
which was written in Marathi
#
I've read the English version
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and I've also read a great deal of the Hindi version
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the Hindi translation is the only
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book that I've read a lot
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of in the only novel that I've read
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it also ties in a little bit with
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some of the stuff we were talking about earlier because
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this is a book that centred around the character
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was one of my personal heroes growing up
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one of those tragic figures
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those anti-hero figures that
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that I felt a tremendous affinity to
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perhaps as a melancholy child myself
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what Shivaji Savant did with
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with some of the things we were talking about earlier about
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the problematic behaviour of people
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and so on, how he puts us
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and tormented character at precisely
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the point when that character is doing
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some morally very questionable things
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during the humiliation of Draupadi
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in the Swayamvada after the dice
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came, Kald's part in that
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there's this brilliant 20 page passage
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in this book which counts among the
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finest bits of literature I've read anywhere
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in his first person voice, Shivaji Savant
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a point where he actually wants to be
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the saviour, he wants to be the
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chivalrous hero to this woman who's in
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distress, he goes from there
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a series of things that happen
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is working in this very fevered way, the way he is
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responding to the things that are happening
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around him, he goes from
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there to actually saying
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some of the cruelest and most savage
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things to her in her moment of distress
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and the way that's done
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is just an eye opener for what
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literature can achieve in terms
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of putting us in the mind space
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of a problematic character
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or somebody who's doing something problematic
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and making us empathise
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and perhaps seeing that
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the right context or the wrong context or whatever
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I love that book for that reason
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Kazuo Ishiguro's confounding
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Which you've described memorably as a book
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that spends 500 pages going from
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That's your description
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You don't even know what you've written
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That's a pretty good description
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I'm very proud of myself
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I should start plagiarising myself now at some point
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506 novels, this was easily
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I think it was possibly the only
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one of his first six books that
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wasn't shortlisted for the Booker Prize
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I'm not sure if I got that right
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But it was definitely a book that
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confounded a lot of people for very good reason
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introductions in literature
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to what surrealism means
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and completely exaggerated
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Directions mean nothing, where geography means nothing
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Time means nothing, everything is stretched out
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equivalence for these things in
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or in some of the paintings that I knew
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The Persistence of Time
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with the melting clocks
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But I think this may have been the
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first time that I really experienced
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a novel and I was blown away
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by it all the more so because
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I opened that book with no
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what it was going to be like
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I just thought it would be a regular
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and then I found myself having to figure the book out
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in the process of reading it
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and figure out what this writer is trying to do
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and it was a fascinating experience
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That's it, three of each
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The Unconsoled, it gave me so much
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joy and delight and I'm really glad I didn't have to
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write about the book because then I would have had to
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work so hard trying to articulate why it gave me
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so much joy and delight because you're right, it's just
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a confounded book that way
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and you mentioned Bunuel's
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some of his surrealistic work
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and I especially am a big fan of the last three films
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he made in the 70s, all of which were co-written
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with Jean-Claude Carrier, who I think died a few months ago
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You know, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
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which is about a bunch of people who are sitting down
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to a meal, but they never actually
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eat anything, it's just
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they keep sitting down and the meal never happens
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The Phantom of Liberty, which is again a delightful
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pounding film, where you know, he'll
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start with the camera on a set
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of characters in a scene and
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you know, one of them seems to be the main
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guy, but then it'll follow some random
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person he meets and do another scene with that guy
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and so on, and it's all disconnected
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it's not even connected segments, it's all kind of
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disconnected, like you know
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passing the ball kind of thing, and then
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finally in 77, he made that
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Obscure Object of Desire, which
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included two actresses playing the same woman
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thus, you know, adding to her
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mystique and all of that, so those three
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films of Bunuel, which were made when he was
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in his 70s, if I remember correctly
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not just in the 1970s, were
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The Phantom of Liberty is a great favourite of mine
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as well, and John Claude Carrier actually
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I spoke with John Claude Carrier about it
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many years ago, around 15 years ago
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or something, and he told me that
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for that film just came from a little conversation
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he and Bunuel were having, where they were saying
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why don't we do something like that, why don't we do something
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that completely defies the laws of
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narrative, so you have this, let's imagine
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where a husband and a wife are arguing
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ferociously about something, and we
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don't know exactly what they are arguing about, but
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their argument pivots on the contents
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of a letter that is shortly
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to be delivered to their house, we
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figure this out from their conversation
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in this very abstract way, and
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there are tears and recriminations
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and then there is a knock on the door
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and one of them opens the door
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and the postman is standing there with the letter
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hands the letter over to them
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they start to open the letter, the camera follows
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the postman out the door
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to see what he is up to next
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also made me feel the same
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to watching some of those funeral films
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all the films and books and everything that we
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mentioned, I will link it from the show notes
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Jay, thank you so much, this has been a pleasurable
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conversation, I hope we can meet again
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in person and just chill and have
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coffee and go to bookshops, but I think that is going to
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take a while, but in the meantime, you must
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promise to come back again and we will talk more
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about Hindi cinema and Rishikesh Mukherjee, do we have
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Thanks a lot for calling me, this has been
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and to do this over 3 or 4 hours
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or whatever it's been, that said, we
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definitely need to do at least
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one follow up to this, possibly
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let's do this, specially if this pandemic
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continues for another decade
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that coffee should happen at some point too, please
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come to Delhi whenever it's safe to come here
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Rishikesh Mukherjee, lots of other things to discuss
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Thanks a lot, we will discuss all of that as for when
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is it safe to go to Delhi, dude I don't even
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feel like it's safe to go from Andheri to Bandra
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right now, but I have to get moving at
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some point, so hopefully we meet again
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to scene unseen dot i n slash
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support and contribute any amount
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you like to keep this podcast
