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The great thing about cinema is that you can lose yourself in it and you can also find
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You can use cinema for entertainment and escapism and you can also use it as we use all great
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art to understand the world and our own selves better.
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Any true film lover will do both of these, often at the same time.
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And maybe as time passes and you grow older, you can map out your life and the person you
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are through the films that you have loved.
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And for a film lover to talk to other film lovers, there are a few joys greater than
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This episode is about exactly that as I got two close friends who are also cinema buffs
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to have a chat about movies.
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Now I know that these days, authorities can conversations for keywords and haul people
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off to jail if there's any suspicious language, regardless of context.
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But I can't help saying this, our recording today was a riot.
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This episode is da bomb.
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If you love films, this conversation may make you explode with happiness.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and
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Please welcome your host Amit Varma.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
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My guests today are Jai Arjun Singh and Subrata Mohanty.
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Jai is one of our best writers on cinema and we've recorded a popular episode in the past.
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I'll link that from the show notes.
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Subrata was a regular contributor to the cult film blog of the autees, Passion for Cinema,
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and he also hosts a fantastic podcast called Haal Chaal Thik Thak Hai.
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These two guys both love cinema and also know a lot about it and I thought I'd get them
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together to chat about films.
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The great films of the past that we miss out on because of the recency effect, how Indian
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cinema has developed over the years, how we watch movies as film lovers, how films have
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We also recommend many, many, many good films for you to watch.
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So you could think of this as an unstructured kind of film appreciation course.
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But before we talk cinema, let's talk money.
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Let's go to a unique kind of commercial break, Capital Gyan by Deepak Shanoi.
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This is like a show within a commercial from the kind sponsors of this episode, Capital
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When you had to bet on who will win the next Wimbledon, currently it seems Djokovic is
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Well, during 2003-2008 it was Roger Federer and Serena Williams, in the 90s it was Steffi
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If you have to bet, you generally bet on the best and the best are the folks who win consistently.
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Businesses are the same, a business with strong growth tends to keep growing and this growth
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can often last several quarters or years.
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Stock prices behave even more similarly.
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A company whose stock prices are accelerating or building momentum is often a company whose
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business is doing well too, but goes up, continues to go up until it doesn't.
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Just like Federer met Nadal and those wins became rarer.
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What if you only held a stock when it was in form?
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You moved on mercilessly when it stopped performing and were still okay to come back if and when
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This is the crux of momentum investing.
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Buy stocks in momentum, stick with the winners, prune your losers and be vigilant about when
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This isn't a new discovery, it's been studied and documented for decades.
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For everyone who says the market is efficient and that all information is priced in, research
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has shown that momentum is a well-documented anomaly.
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A portfolio of high momentum stocks has a strong chance of outperforming the broader
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Talk to us and we'll tell you more about such counter-intuitive but effective strategies.
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They're at cm.social slash scene unseen, bet on the company's informed, cm.social slash
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Hey, I want to repeat that URL, cm.social slash scene unseen, Deepak has been a guest
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on my podcast and he handles my money as well.
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My actions are the best endorsement.
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Jai and Subrit, welcome to the scene in the unseen.
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You know, before I said that, I had to mentally try and figure out ki kiska naam pehle loo
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and then I thought, let me go my preferred way, which is alphabetical order of first
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Yeah, because if it's last name, I always kind of come last, so I don't like that method.
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So first name is kind of better.
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Now Jai, you and I, of course, have done an episode before and Subrit, you're a first
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timer here, so I'd love to sort of start by asking you about your journey.
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And your journey is so intertwined with, you know, loving films and all of that, that,
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you know, that is not even a separate question.
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So, you know, tell me about where did you grow up, what was early life like?
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So Amit, if you are truly a Hindi film fan, then Jai is the thing that comes first and
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after that, it's Veeru, usually Jai and Veeru.
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Even I got that reference.
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So about my growing up, you know, I grew up in a really small town in southern Odisha.
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And like many of your guests often say, you know, there are there were only few things
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to do in such towns in 80s and early 90s.
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You played cricket, you followed cricket and every single, you know, opportunity that you
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got to watch a film or see the straight run Doordarshan channel and watch those TV serials,
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you did and do not just watch them, at least in my case, I literally, not literally, but
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I really drank them, you know, in the sense that every single scene, every single dialogue
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was has been permanently etched.
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I often have this sort of a, you know, bet with someone that I can pretty much sing every
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single 80s jingle fully in Hindi or English.
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Watch him run, watch him play, he's a winner all the way.
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You become a Maltova mum.
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The next one, the one with the long voice, this one takes 50 seconds.
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Malta and Coco, Malta and Coco something, that's what makes you a Maltova mum.
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I didn't know there would be an immediate test of a singer sewing machine.
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I like that because I thought the girls in that were cute.
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The Hindi or the English one?
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Yaar hai tumko bachpan ke wo din, sajaye sawaare tumne merit se, singer used to be singer
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Bachpan ki wo yaadein, wo baatein, sajaye sawaare tumne merit se.
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By the way, singer I didn't realize till much later when I was in Sri Lanka that it was
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actually a British company that was Sri Lanka based and when they left that, they left behind
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It was like the Indian agency houses that were left behind for tea and other commodities.
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So anyway, back, thankfully I cleared the two quick rapid questions that you gave me.
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It's a sign of my poor memory that I actually asked you about two of the really popular
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Ideally kuch obscured leke test karna chaya na, since you said every jingle.
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The TV serials, unke gaane, so on and so forth.
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So there was I think just the absolute lack of any other avenue to sort of engage yourself.
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But I think that was the case for most other kids also, but in my case I guess it just
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became somewhat more intense than others because I think a lot of us who have been on your
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shows as well are introverts.
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So you create your own sort of universe and you stay in it, you think about it, you play
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Lots actually, quite a bit.
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I mean all kinds of imaginary friends in my head.
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And they took a long time to go, they were there for a long period of time.
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So yeah, and then the other thing was that my father was also into films.
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So in our home, the idea that you would watch a film had no sort of stigma kind of thing
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attached to it, which oftentimes I saw in my other friends, their parents would comment
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But in our home it was like you go watch as many films as you want.
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And it used to be an event if there was a film on Doodh Darshan.
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Like my father would start telling us the previous day that tomorrow there is Kashmir
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He would start giving us that where was he in 1964 when he watched that film.
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When this song will come and when the movie will start playing, the minute he hears the
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first train of the music, he'll say, now this is the song.
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And you know, as a kid, all of those things seemed magic.
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In fact, the one thing that my father did, which I genuinely thought was magic and therefore
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then I sort of worked on it was he, he, I mean, we would play the radio and that guy
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will, you know, the announcer will say that abhi aap suniye film Mughle Azam ka, Nata
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Mangeshkar ka gana, Sangeetkar Naushad and whatever, Geetkar hai Shakeel.
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And my father will say, Khuda nige baan ho tumhara.
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And then the song will come and how did this guy know?
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By the time I was 12, I was beating my father in that game.
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So because it just became an obsession.
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So I mean, just to, you know, go back, I mean, since it was a small town, we barely had any
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exposure to Hollywood and you know, the, the whole Bollywood scene was initially you watch
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whatever came in the cinema hall.
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There was only one cinema hall, but I possibly, you know, this is like genuine cinema parody.
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So thing, main waha hota tha projectionist uncle hote the humara kaam chalta tha.
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But then the video revolution also happened.
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And then this, you know, this 25 rupees mein you rent out the video recording that player
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And then the idea was, how do you maximize because that's, you know, economics fixed
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cost of use pe kitna variable chala sakte ho.
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So then we would get six or eight cassettes.
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And then you know that you want to watch two.
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The other six were Tukka, whatever was there in that guys in that library, right?
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You just picked up and you started watching them.
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So this continued till about when I was in school.
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And I think I can safely say that everything that was there to be shown on Doordarshan,
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Hindi, English, Malayalam, all regional languages, Saturday afternoon, I used to just watch every
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Any film related programs, you know, baato baato mein, this has been Handa's program
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and this tabas sooms, phool khile hain, gulshan gulshan and just, you know, watch every single
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one of them and just store it in your head.
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A few things happened then.
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One was the video library wala possibly saw the, you know, initial change in taste of
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And he started stocking up some, you know, Hollywood films.
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So Indiana Jones was one of those early ones, which was when I first realized kuch hai,
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there is something very different about these films.
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And he had some, the usual Superman, the original, which as kids we all enjoyed.
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And then, and then by the time we were 14 or so, we were interested in other kind of
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And so then that guy would give us one of the two, right?
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He would either give us some horror film.
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And I don't know if you know this, this, I mean, Evil Dead as a film has been seen by
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every single guy in Chota Kasba of India in the late 80s, early 90s, because the video
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cassette of Evil Dead was possibly the most, most sort of ripped and copied video cassette
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Baat mein pata chala ki wo Sam Raimi ne banaya hai.
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And much later I watched it again and I realized that maybe the craft is good, I mean, it's
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quite a, quite a good film.
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But anyway, so either we were watching crazy horror shit, which none of us had any idea
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whether it's good or bad.
#
So you know, Evil Dead and this whole early Craven filmography or carpenter filmography,
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some random, I mean, sometimes they should not even be full films and we would just watch
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some parts of it and then the cassette would get stuck or something would happen.
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And then the Doordarshan, you know, also started showing on these Friday evenings after 10
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And because I was a somewhat of a decent student, my parents thought that if he's sitting alone
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and you know, after dinner, he must be studying, which I was most of the days.
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But Friday, I would turn on the TV, put the volume to zero and watch those Friday night
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Doordarshan English films.
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I mean, some of those were really good films, somewhere like she'll be wearing pink pajamas
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So his return was variable, but I got whatever my teenage, you know, hormonal wants were,
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they were getting satisfied as part of that.
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So that was how it went on till about 17.
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At 17, I went to engineering college, which was just complete disaster in terms of, you
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know, liking, getting to see things, etc.
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So all that I did in engineering college was watch the standard Bollywood fair.
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And then occasionally you would get some video cassettes again, the same way and watch some
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But thankfully, since it was a bit of a bigger town, there used to be some like big releases,
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you know, the fugitive or something, those kinds of movies would come in the bodyguard
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in the mid nineties, early nineties films.
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But then in one of those years, I went to Kolkata for my summer training.
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And I did that at, you know, one of those MNC plants in Calcutta.
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And since I was always interested in it, people told me that you must go to this place called
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And I didn't have a clue about Nandan then, but then I went to Nandan and I realized this
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is like, you know, the cultural hub of Kolkata of a certain kind of a certain Badralok variety.
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And Nandan had then three halls, the two larger ones and one small, just about 40 seater.
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And the 40 seater would play like great films all the time.
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And so that, those two months, I think I did, I watched all kinds of things, mind you, during
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the same time, because of the sort of the desert that the engineering college was, I
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had gotten myself a membership of the local Max Mueller Bhavan.
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That engineering college was in a town that had a steel plant that had a German partnership.
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Nehru had done all these partnerships, each steel plant had, some was German, some was
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British, some was Russian, something else or some other thing.
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And so I had told one of my profs that please give me that membership.
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He was like, why would you want a Max Mueller, have you come here to do engineering or have
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you come to study in Max Mueller Bhavan?
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I thought, forgive me and give it to me.
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So I was reading quite indiscriminately all kinds of stuff.
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So I would go into the library, no idea, there was no internet or anything to guide your
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I was decent at quizzing, so I knew some famous books.
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So if I saw a famous book, I'd pick it up, otherwise it was like Milan Kundera, first
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Genuinely, I thought he was an Indian author, so I picked up the first one.
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First thing I remember is I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
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I was not like you, Amit, who was reading the whole of Shakespeare canon by the time
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But chalo, 18 mein main Kundera pad raha tha.
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And then when I finished all Kundera, then some, one day I saw Antichrist, Nietzsche.
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Toh maina kaha, shayad yeh bhi kuchh ki kitab hai, it looked well-thumbed.
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I don't know who was reading, some German expats were reading him, I guess, in that
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So I picked those things up.
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So I did the same thing in Kolkata.
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And that's where I think I saw some, I mean, I didn't know what, why they were looking
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different or appearing different, but I knew something intense was happening on the screen.
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I mean, I remember watching, you know, 400 Blows, and I realized, yeh kuch toh hai boss,
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yaha pe, something is there.
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And the usual thing was happening, it was some summer kind of fest, and they were just
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playing French New Wave and some Italian New Wave and all of those stuff, Pasolini, and
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so I watched a few of those, Sodor and whatever, 120 days.
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Then I came back, the usual life continued, but that got, became a bit of a thing that
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I'm missing out on something, something big is there out there.
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So every couple of months, I would make the Kolkata trip.
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It was like about six or seven hours in train and watch whatever was playing in the cinema
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hall, and Kolkata did have reasonably good, you know, new films coming in there, and then
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spend time in, in London.
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And that sort of whetted my appetite quite a bit.
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By the time I left it, then I did my post-grad in Kolkata itself, so that became a good sort
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of a place to do all of this.
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And then after post-grad, as luck would have it, I had a job that took me all over the
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world for the first 10 years.
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That I just completely sated myself.
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What also had happened, one big thing that people often don't realize, the, you know,
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these cable wallahs started showing TCM in India.
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Again, you know, I don't know why they don't do it now in India.
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That thing just ran for some seven, eight years.
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It used to be called TNT when they started out, the Turner Network Television, and then
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It's the Turner classic movies.
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It's still there actually in the US.
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There is an app, but you can't pay in India because that app is not available in India.
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There is a hack around it.
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I will maybe I'll tell you some other time.
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So the TCM used to just all the time show you, you know, the great films of the thirties,
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forties and the fifties.
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So that plus the, I mean, I used to be at least 20 or 25 weeks outside of India.
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And as luck would have it, a lot of it in Europe and as luck would have it for a long
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time in places like Poland and Czech Republic and in Poland in a place called Woods, LODZ
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it's called, but it has one of the great film schools of Eastern Europe.
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In fact, all the great Polish filmmakers actually studied or taught at the Woods filmmaking
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school and all of these guys, but you go in the afternoon, you can just, you know, spend
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your time watching films peacefully.
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I mean, that it was like a completely different world.
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So those seven, eight years where, when I sort of just watched whatever came, I mean,
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and when, you know, when I would be in the US, you know, two weeks in the US, I, my calm
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was six 30 get back, watch some of those US late evening television stuff, which was all
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I mean, all these tonight show and, you know, David Letterman stuff.
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And then around eight 30 or nine turn on one of those film channels and they were like
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And at any time something good would be coming.
#
So the one great passion of mine during that time was I just got caught into these, you
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know, this American seventies kind of one pack of filmmakers who I think are still somewhat
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I mean, I mean, you know, we talk of all of these sixties and fifties guys, but these
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guys are great, are great still.
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And that was staple HBO or whatever that free to air channels fair.
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I mean, there's two, put one or the other one that time.
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So yeah, so that by the time, you know, by, by the time I was like mid thirties, a combination
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of reading all kinds of stuff and watching all kinds of stuff and connecting the two
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had kind of made me what I am.
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I mean, in the sense that, you know, I used to do my work, but, you know, I, I was in
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a place where, you know, all of these things were coming together and I always had this
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great interest in connecting it more than just watching one film or a book or what,
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you know, just buy on its own.
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And there is a way to appreciate it on its own as well.
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My, the great fun I used to have was in sort of finding somewhat strained linkages at times,
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but it was good fun to find those linkages.
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And yeah, great memories of those days.
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I mean, being in New York, going to East village, there is a Korean videos store, very famous.
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I don't know if you shut down now.
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If you go there, you will, I mean, just the best of world cinema would be there for you
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And I remember actually meeting Spike Lee there, who was shocked to know that somebody
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in India watches this film.
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They were like, what are you saying?
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Firstly, how do you recognize me?
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I mean, I recognize you.
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I said, what have you watched?
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I said, I watched Do The Right Thing.
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And what are you getting out of it?
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I was like, I don't know.
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You know, this fight between some African-American and Italian families in New York borough.
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But yeah, I mean, so yeah, I mean, to cut a long story, not so short, this is really
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It's, it's a constant evolution, but a very strong passion for both books and movies.
#
So I sometimes feel that, you know, a long story can never be too long.
#
Borges once made a map of the world, wrote a story about a map of the world, which was
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as big as the world itself, you know, and I think the best stories can actually be longer
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than what their story is about because like itna kuch hai, by the way, that Shakespeare
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Tana just reflecting on that, I did read all of Shakespeare at 10.
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But my favorite play of Shakespeare was Titus Andronicus.
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So it is clear that I did not read with much discernment, but well, it was exciting, the
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story was going on, I read it.
#
I want to take off on something you said, which intrigued me a lot and ask kind of both
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You mentioned that, you know, your father would watch all of these films and they had
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a lot of, watched that songwala show and it had a lot of resonance with him and he'd be
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able to name the song before it came just from who the playback singer is and all that.
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And you could also do that by 12.
#
And what what I see happening there is that there is obviously a part of your father which
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is touched by that, which is touched by a particular kind of culture, a particular kind
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And through that, you are sharing in that.
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And typically what happens is men don't share feelings, especially between father and son,
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especially in a society like India, we're never sharing feelings, you never really know
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the other person, you're kind of imprisoned in your respective roles and the grooves that
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And I'm just thinking aloud here.
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But when you said that, it seemed that that is a very interesting way to get to know somebody
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else, especially in this particular kind of relationship through a particular kind of
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Like I think my father also, until the end, wasn't really communicative.
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But I could get glimpses of his by the kind of things he wanted to read in his last days.
#
He'd asked me to, you know, he shared my Amazon account, so he asked me to buy some Stefan
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Zwick for him on the Kindle, which I did, and then I started reading Zwick myself and
#
all I had read of Stefan Zwick before that was the Royal Game, which was about chess
#
But then you look at his writings on exile, on feeling not at home where you are.
#
And there is something in that.
#
So you know, what are sort of your thoughts on this, on how these shared interests between
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people are not just shared interests, but they are a kind of connection.
#
Because you are getting your inner sense when I tell you about a book I really like, I am
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bearing a part of myself to you and vice versa.
#
Before I come to that, Amit, I just wanted to say, listening to Subrata, I was just reminded
#
again of how even when the specifics of our lives are different, you know, like someone
#
growing up in a small town, someone growing up in Delhi, for instance, but there's something
#
about, there's a shared experience when it comes to Indians of a particular generation
#
going through this journey of the 1980s.
#
So much of what you said was just instantly relatable.
#
Even though, you know, the specifics of my life may have been different, you know, what
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you said about the horror films, today I think of myself as someone who's, you know, at risk
#
of sounding pompous, something of an authority on horror cinema is something that I've been
#
very interested in, you know, going back to the 1910s, 1920s, all sorts of horror films.
#
But listening to Subrata, I was actually reminded that one of my entry points into horror cinema
#
was for base reasons, which is for the potentially salacious content.
#
Because as you know, in the 1980s, certain sorts of horror films were among mainstream
#
films that were somewhat available at video parlors.
#
They were the ones that where you had the most chance of seeing nudity, for instance,
#
you know, you have the classic American, the 1980s American cliche of the coeds making
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out before the monster comes for them, you know, and the whole moralistic thing, the
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evil dead, the Friday the 13 series and so on.
#
So I was reminded of that.
#
And of course, what you said about the Friday night films and what you said about the regional
#
language, the non-Hindi language films that would play on Sunday, there's so much shared
#
To come to what you said just now, Amit, I was also, it's true, obviously, you know,
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the way in which we get to know other people through these shared tastes.
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And in fact, since you mentioned parents, and since you mentioned a father specifically,
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I was also reminded that I had quite a problematic relationship with my father in the sense that
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my parents were divorced when I was nine or 10.
#
My father had a history of substance abuse, there was domestic violence, etc.
#
It wasn't a very happy situation.
#
And then he passed away a few years ago, and again, in very sad circumstances.
#
And there's a lot of regret that I have when it comes to him not being able to bond with
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Yet one of the fondest and gentlest memories that I have vis-a-vis my father, which is
#
also something that's a reminder that there was a point in his life, at least when things
#
were relatively normal, when he was interested in the same things that I would independently
#
become interested in later.
#
When I was 16, on my birthday, he gifted me an old book of his, which was actually a book
#
of his dating back to the early 70s.
#
It's Garson Cannon's book on Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, Tracy and Hepburn.
#
It's a very personal book on Tracy and Hepburn written by one of their closest friends.
#
So it's a warm, affectionate, up-close look at these two great stars.
#
And my father, when he was fairly young, just in his early, when he was around 20, 21, he
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bought the book and he had it with him.
#
He gifted it to me more than 20 years later.
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And I still have it with me.
#
He has a very nice dedication on it.
#
And it strikes me that I never actually sat with him and discussed old films with him.
#
That never really happened.
#
But this did provide me a window into the things that he might've been interested in
#
And of course, with my mother, it was a different relationship.
#
It was a much, much closer, much more long-lasting relationship.
#
Some of my movie love came from her.
#
She was a very egalitarian viewer.
#
She never really had a high-brow taste, but she was into all sorts of films in the 90s,
#
which was supposedly such a bad time for mainstream Hindi cinema.
#
She would be sitting and watching video cassettes of everything and refusing to even fast-forward
#
the songs, which is something that everybody did back then because the songs were so lousy
#
and you just felt like you deluded yourself that the rest of the film is worthwhile.
#
But to fast-forward the song, she would insist on the song being played all the way through
#
no matter how tuneless it was.
#
So that, of course, also played a part.
#
At the same time, she also, from her South Bombay childhood, she had memories of Hollywood
#
films of another era, which were perhaps more sophisticated films.
#
So that did come down to me a bit.
#
But what you say about the shared experiences is obviously completely true.
#
I mean, just on that book, Hepburn and Tracy book, they never married.
#
Tracy was still, you know, he was married and he never...
#
But Tracy was, I mean, he was really ill in his last days and, you know, it's an industry
#
lore as to how Hepburn took care of him in the last few years.
#
And again, these are things that have picked up just watching some random documentary in
#
some evening or somewhere.
#
I mean, it's just amazing how many things you pick up if you just are interested in
#
films about, you know, about just the people and the characters.
#
But going back, you know, the interesting thing is my, you know, about father and shared
#
interests and things of that kind.
#
I mean, there is always this part of you that wants to prove, you know, to your father that
#
you are good, right, and you're good in the things that he values, right?
#
So that obviously, so this was not the rebel phase, this was the early phase when, you
#
know, you would like to show to him that you are, you are really a good guy.
#
And so I was, I was interested in doing that.
#
But quite honestly, somewhere the thing also changed where I really started liking that
#
And I often, I mean, I have these arguments, I've sometimes written about it as to run
#
I mentioned this a few times.
#
You can, you can, you know, point to, you know, the 40s and the 50s and the 60s of Hindi
#
And Hindi cinema is what I'm more comfortable with.
#
I've seen some of the other language cinemas during that time.
#
And some of that might be true, might hold true for them as well.
#
Maybe the story might not be sometimes great, the acting could be a bit hammy and theatrical.
#
But when it comes to music, for that 20, 25 years, I mean, I've, with reasonable amount
#
of objectivity now that I've heard a lot of the, you know, just the Hollywood musical
#
golden age of 50s and 60s.
#
And then listen to, you know, the other songs, the other stuff.
#
I think this was second to none, you know, just the idea of the composer coming up with
#
those tunes, the lyrics being written in a way that is both relevant to that script,
#
but on its own great poetry.
#
Some of the best singers, I don't think the three have come together so well at any time.
#
I mean, there might be just a few similar phases, maybe some late, you know, 19th century
#
France and maybe, maybe Hollywood, you know, the golden age of Hollywood musicals.
#
But I mean, it's very difficult to find that kind of coming together of talent and just
#
the quality of that output.
#
And I don't think people fully appreciate now in India, what was that phase like?
#
And I guess it will take maybe another hundred years later, we'll just be wondering how did
#
And for at least me, I was deeply invested in it.
#
And it's almost like now it's, I mean, every day I just go deeper into it.
#
You know, it's on a standalone basis.
#
Even when I was a child, I realized this was something really good.
#
And often I realized also it was something precious because I could compare it with what
#
I was listening to then, which was sort of prevalent in the Ganesh, Pooja, Pendals, where
#
I was growing up, you know, and I realized that was, we've lost something precious,
#
but whatever this was, this is really, really good stuff.
#
And that realization was maybe my father stoked it, maybe in order to impress, I continued
#
to sort of invest time on it.
#
But once I was out of it and just on a standalone basis, I just became completely obsessed with
#
And that obsession continues.
#
I mean, I have not gone back and watched a lot of old Hindi films a second or a third
#
But songs every morning, I mean, I start my day with, after the initial Bhim Sen Joshi
#
and Malik Arjun Mansoor and Kumar Gandha, that's like for about 20 minutes, my first
#
So I, you know, so yeah, so my father led me into that.
#
And then, you know, I'm always grateful that I discovered something that has given a lot
#
of comfort, in some sense, meaning to my life from there on.
#
I mean, it's like I said, it's an OSS in my life.
#
If everything else is going wrong, that thing in the morning just puts everything into perspective
#
that no matter how bad they are, this will always stay with me.
#
And this appreciation of what I'm hearing will always stay with me.
#
If I can just add something to that, Subrata, you of course are talking more about the audio
#
experience, the combination of the song, the lyric, the quality of the singing, the composition
#
There's that other dimension to it, which is not consistently there, but certainly in
#
the films of some directors like Vijay Anand, Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor, to some degree, Bimal
#
Roy, the visualization, and of course, we all know that there are many instances in
#
old Hindi cinema of a great song not being brought well to the screen.
#
The lip syncing is a bit off, the actor's gestures are a bit off, the editing is less
#
But there are so many other cases in the films of the filmmakers I mentioned, where there's
#
so much attention to detail that's gone into how the thing appears on the screen.
#
In films like Guide, for instance, or Kaagas Ke Pool, or many other films, some of Rishikesh
#
Mukherjee's work as well, some of the later work.
#
And it's really quite a remarkable achievement to have all that brought together so well,
#
especially given the conditions in which many of these films were made, where music was
#
composed separately, the lyrics were written separately.
#
Very often, in some cases, musical sequences were shot by the assistant director rather
#
than the main director.
#
This wasn't the case for people like Guru Dutt and Vijay Anand and Rishikesh Mukherjee,
#
but it was the case sometimes.
#
So that really, and I'm speaking now as someone who has to admit to having come a bit late
#
to that particular world.
#
It was fairly late in life that I really rediscovered or properly discovered the Hindi cinema of
#
the 50s, 60s, found myself sufficiently immersed in it, despite the many little flaws or little
#
or big flaws that you pointed out, the awkwardness, the tonal unevenness of many of those films,
#
the formulaic nature of some of them.
#
But the good stuff, fairly late in life, it just swept over me.
#
And that's also one reason why I ended up doing this book on Rishikesh Mukherjee, because
#
it just came from a place where I had suddenly in my 30s, I said, wow, okay, I've discovered
#
And there was a time when I used to think of cinema only in terms of the good cinema
#
only in terms of the Godads and the felonies and that sort of thing.
#
And suddenly this is a new language that I'm rediscovering and finding warmth and something
#
really stimulating in it as well.
#
Yeah, so I mean, you know, since we are talking about this, sometimes I, you know, mention
#
this just to give people a bit of context about some of these people and some of these
#
names and maybe later they became caricatures of their own sort of what they were doing.
#
So for instance, take Raj Kapoor, by the time he was 25, he was running a studio.
#
He got some of the best talents together, you know, Shankar, Jaykishan, Hasrat, Shailendra,
#
Lata, Mukesh, K.A. Abbas for writings or scripts, Ramanand Sagar was his assistant.
#
Of course, he went on to make Ramanand with those arrows flying from one end to the other
#
and one of them disappearing and much to the surprise of Lakshman.
#
I mean, this entire Kedar Sharma, there were a whole lot of people that he brought together
#
I mean, he was just leader of men, women, whatever you might call it.
#
And then he was asking them to, I mean, those initial films, I mean, you know, Aag is a
#
I mean, it's still a very powerful story and very different story.
#
I mean, it's a story of three different women, one of who has actually had, and he kind of
#
repeated the story later in Satyam Shivam Sundaram.
#
But you take Avara, you take Sri Charsobi, these are just almost like, you know, for
#
a 27 year old, for a 28 year old to be producer, director, then do all of these things together
#
and bring that story to light.
#
But these are not like just domestic successes, I mean, Avara was just an international global
#
I mean, even when you go now to Greece, you know, forget the Eastern Europe, that is of
#
course a well-documented story, there's just fans of Nargis and fans of Avara.
#
But just to point one particular and sometimes people fully, I mean, don't appreciate this.
#
So just take Sri Charsobi's, right?
#
There's Sri Charsobi's, I mean, for those who have not seen the film, there's a classic
#
story of a guy coming from a village, comes to big bad Bombay, he's a, you know, he's
#
a simpleton, but he's a guy who sort of, you know, he knows the ways of the world, very
#
quickly gets to sort of appreciate it, falls in love with a girl in the Juggi, who's Nargis.
#
So this is Raj Kapoor who comes in.
#
And then of course, he's really a deft-handed card, and so he starts playing that, Amit.
#
And after some time, you know, gets sort of drawn into this, you know, people who, you
#
know, who are rich, but also who are, you know, doing all kinds of nefarious stuff.
#
And then he, there is a pivotal moment in the film, right, where he's taken Nargis to
#
a party, because he's been invited, and this is all the rich and the famous of Bombay.
#
This is a short, almost a replica of the Taj Palace, possibly in the RK studio in Chembur.
#
And there is Nadira, who's in some sense, you know, the other sort of love interest,
#
who's, you know, she has that long, thin cigarette holder, and she's smoking that, and you know,
#
And Nargis feels uncomfortable, and there are some, you know, remarks made, and she
#
decides to leave, in the middle of the party.
#
And then Raj Kapoor follows her, trying to, you know, call her back.
#
And that's when Nadira sings, Murmur Ke Nadekh, right.
#
She's essentially, don't look back.
#
If you see the whole picturization, so what happens is she says, Murmur Ke Nadekh, and
#
then gradually, after the first stanza, you can see that Raj Kapoor has realized there's
#
no point in following Nargis now, and this place is glitz and glamour, and all of this
#
I mean, and you know, I have sort of arrived, why should I go back?
#
And then, not just he sort of, you know, he realizes this, he decides that he will accept
#
And then he joins in the song, I mean, so far it was just Asha singing for Nadira, Murmur
#
So Raj Kapoor joins in as Mandadeh, and he, there are two stanzas that he sings, right.
#
One of them is, Naino Ke Saat, sorry, Mausam Ke Saat Jo Badalta Jaye, Jo Iske Saache Mein
#
Hi Dhalta Jaye, Duniya Uski Ki Hai Jo Chalta Jaye, right.
#
Both the stanzas are deep in their meaning, that, I mean, you just need to, if you have
#
to be in this game, you have to play the game, you have to modify, change yourself, and that's
#
how you actually win this game.
#
That whole picturization for about seven minutes, you can't get more, you know, better visual
#
sort of storytelling, right.
#
It just captures everything in a nice lyrical format, great song, great dancing, acting,
#
Very difficult to have so much of information packed, and so much of, so many emotions,
#
the change, and he was doing it when he was 27, right.
#
He was himself dancing, and you should see the way he changes his, you know, the demeanour
#
changes his, sort of, how he behaves changes right after he's decided that, okay, she's
#
gone, now let me just plunge into this, you know, head first.
#
He was also, I think, a wonderful song actor, Raj Kapoor, you know, and now someone like
#
Raj Kapoor is very easy to, sort of, think of in caricature terms today, you know, today
#
a lot of the cinema is just unfashionable today for many young viewers, but even people
#
of our age who are, sort of, perhaps a little more intuitively drawn towards restrained,
#
subdued forms of storytelling rather than the melodramatic or the hyper dramatic forms,
#
you know, you look at someone like Raj Kapoor or an actor of that vintage, you just, I was
#
watching Barsad the other day on the big screen at the India Habitat Centre.
#
Now I have to say, I really think there was a big quality leap from Barsad to Awara, because
#
Barsad is a film that is difficult even for someone like me to watch, but the number of
#
titters in the hall, you know, young people were just laughing almost throughout the film,
#
at anything that seemed to them even slightly more dramatic than what they used to, so you
#
know, so then someone like me gets a bit defensive at the same time, even if I can sort of see
#
the point of what's going on, but I maintain that someone like Raj Kapoor I really feel
#
was a wonderful song actor, which is something that, you know, it's an aspect of acting in
#
Hindi cinema that many people have forgotten about now, partly also because we've entered
#
an age where there's very little lip syncing that happens, you know, you have the more
#
realistic mode of a very good song maybe playing in the background, actors not lip syncing
#
and so on, and as a result, there was the earlier generations of actors who did this
#
When you watch the films today, many people look at it and say, oh, they're just singing.
#
This is not acting, you know, whereas, you know, you look at some of the best of them
#
and they've really thrown themselves into that moment, they are performing the moment
#
Raj Kapoor was one of them.
#
I just wanted to add very quickly, since you said this, though I don't really like facile
#
comparisons, when I watch the best of Raj Kapoor's early work, especially these scenes
#
in Awara and Sri Charsobees, which are visually so striking, you know, scenes like that long
#
dream sequence in Awara, a moment where Prithviraj Kapoor is standing by the window and you
#
have that you have that shadow flitting across that face.
#
It always reminds me of Orson Welles in Hollywood 10 years earlier, and that famous court where
#
he was given, you know, full freedom almost by RKO to make his first film.
#
And he said, I felt like a boy with this giant toy train set.
#
And when I look at Raj Kapoor's early work, you see that same enthusiasm, where can I
#
What can I do with shadows?
#
How can I construct this frame?
#
And I think that there's something to be said about that as well, you know, at that age.
#
Lots to double click on.
#
And the first one is kind of this, like when you mentioned that, you know, young people
#
watching that, they're laughing because it's so melodramatic, it's so whatever.
#
And that's resonant with me, because once upon a time, I would have been one of those
#
I recognize that I found a lot of I mean, my tastes were obviously drawn towards the
#
more minimal, the more restrained I was, in a sense, fortunate enough to be shaped a lot
#
We discussed this in our episode together, Jay, that I once upon a time, I didn't I looked
#
down on Bollywood a little bit, which obviously was a sort of terrible attitude.
#
And recently, I was sort of watching Squid Game.
#
And I loved Squid Game.
#
But a part of me kept finding, you know, things to quibble about the way they acted.
#
And you know, it's not kind of from the Western Realistic School and all that there's a particular
#
And and I kept realizing that the quibbler was just getting it all wrong.
#
That you know, that I should just enjoy it for what it is and not try to fit it into
#
my perception of what is worthy art.
#
Like I was reading this book called The Immediate Experience, which is a collection of Robert
#
Warshaw's essays, famous critic from back in the day.
#
And and the title says everything, The Immediate Experience and Warshaw's whole contention
#
was that, you know, you you respond in a particular way to a film in the moment.
#
And that response is what matters.
#
You know, baki sab jo theory lagate hai, jo gyan batte hai, all that is irrelevant.
#
How are you responding to a film in the here and now?
#
What is the immediate experience?
#
And Warshaw, of course, was an enemy of pretentiousness.
#
He never liked to use the term film.
#
He would always say movie.
#
He championed, you know, B movies, action films, which were otherwise ignored by, you
#
know, kind of the mainstream sort of critics.
#
And that struck a chord with me when I think that sometimes when we criticize cinema or
#
criticize literature or whatever, are we overthinking it sometimes that maybe what really matters
#
is how does it make me feel in that moment that, you know, your father can see a classic
#
film and hear a classic song and feel a particular way, and 30 years later, it can move you
#
And that alone tells me that, my God, it's achieved something to have that sort of resonance.
#
And after that, if you're going to quibble about, kya acting naturalistic nahi thi, ya
#
editing aise ki, yahaan se yeh kiya, aisa nahi karna chahiye tha, and I think and it's
#
with age that I've kind of that I kind of recognize this, that stop overthinking art.
#
You know, sometimes you just got to sit back and soak it in.
#
So what are sort of your ways of thinking about it?
#
And you know, especially you, Jai, you're a professional critic in a manner of speaking.
#
You've made that journey through different kinds of criticism.
#
And we've again discussed some of that journey in our prior episode.
#
So what's your sense of that?
#
Has there been a change in you as well with how you view films and art?
#
Amit, it's a difficult question.
#
I can see both sides of it.
#
I mean, I, you know, I'd actually like to just go entirely with what you said just now
#
about the Warsaw opposition, you know, just let it let the experience sweep over you react
#
honestly to to what what you have experienced in the moment and just do that.
#
And I've had some wonderful moments of that sort also, you know, I can just give you an
#
example of the top of my head.
#
I'd written a piece about this, you know, the way that, you know, I was watching Zoya
#
Akhtar's Dil Dhadakne Do, which is and, you know, and, you know, there's this, which is
#
not really one of the most critically acclaimed films.
#
It's one of those films that people think of as it's a time, but it's a it's a film
#
about rich people's problems.
#
And it's not really gritty in the way that Luck by Chance or Gully Boy is.
#
Honestly speaking, I still think it's my favorite of her films because it just worked on every
#
And I was I was just watching it.
#
And there's Ranveer Singh on the screen just doing, you know, just just walking around
#
being this spoiled rich brat or whatever.
#
And I'm just, you know, just interacting with his parents.
#
And I just intuitively at one point just leant across to my wife, I was, you know, she was
#
near next to me and said, you know, I think this guy might be our best actor since since
#
You know, I just said that very spontaneously.
#
And of course, later, I sort of thought about it and said, oh, yeah, you know, this is that
#
was a on the one hand, I I get, you know, the value of that instinctive response.
#
But at the same time, there are practical difficulties also, you know, you're say you're
#
writing a review that's being written on a three hour deadline or something.
#
Then, of course, it makes sense.
#
You're sitting in the hall and you're, you know, you're taking notes there.
#
You're trying to capture the immediacy of your experience.
#
You're very aware that that at some point you will, you know, you'll be exiting this
#
this dark hall and suddenly the world, the brightly lit world is going to be impinging
#
And then, you know, you'll be overthinking, you'll be remembering the film and maybe feeling
#
sheepish about some things that you that you loved while you were watching them.
#
You're trying to capture honesty, capture your reactions in the moment and then write
#
the review as quickly as possible and send it out.
#
But what if you're writing in the form of writing that you have to do is a long form
#
analytical essay with a deadline three weeks into the future.
#
At some point, you will I think it's just human nature to to be analyzing a little too
#
much to change your view to say, OK, you know, I sort of had this rush of emotion in the
#
hall, but now I've thought about it a bit and maybe, you know, I don't feel that way
#
So I can see the value of both positions depending on the sort of piece you're writing or the
#
sort of discussion that you're having about the film.
#
And I think it's just a practical thing.
#
I think I may have mentioned this in our earlier conversation.
#
But one reason why I always found it difficult, even when I was a much younger, more energetic,
#
more enthusiastic film buff, going to film festivals in my 20s.
#
One reason I found it difficult to watch three or four films on the same day was because
#
I needed that time to myself after watching one film.
#
If it stimulated me in a certain way, I would need to go and sit by myself, maybe just make
#
some notes, maybe, you know, get my bearings, articulate to myself or on paper or whatever
#
what I felt about that film before going in for the next film, because otherwise you're
#
watching one film when you're watching another, you're watching a third coming back home
#
And the immediacy of the experience of the first and the second film are gone.
#
So it's a difficult question.
#
This is just I'm probably just rambled on and on.
#
But I think I can see both sides of the way of doing this.
#
I mean, I have always been that viewer.
#
I mean, I just go to a movie and I just respond to it the way, you know, it comes to me.
#
I mean, there's not a lot of thought then or sometimes even later.
#
I mean, I do the connects much later, not in that day, because I have no deadline or
#
I'm not writing anything.
#
But most of the I mean, most of how I watch a film is exactly that way.
#
I mean, I it's just just experiencing it at the moment, during the moment and enjoying
#
And that really is in some sense also explains some of these things.
#
I mean, like, I just like sort of the big, you know, emotional kind of film.
#
I mean, give me a Casablanca, I'll watch it any number of times.
#
It's just a great film.
#
I mean, you can say that maybe there are better films in the in 1942 than that, forget about
#
in the history of Hollywood.
#
But I mean, I remember the first time when I saw it and how great it felt every time
#
And so and the same thing applies to, I mean, all of the 80s and the 90s, I mean, whatever
#
barren time they were, they were my time.
#
I watched all of them, you know, Rajiv Rai for the win any day, right?
#
You know, suppose you if you've watched Yudh, you know what I'm saying.
#
I mean, Yudh and Tridev are two great films and Rajiv Rai was absolutely peak of his
#
I don't know what Yudh is, Yudh is the original film where Anil Kapoor says, Jhagaas, right?
#
So you know, if I can just add something to perhaps, you know, with a more specific concrete
#
example to, you know, just expand on that, I think both things can also go together if
#
you're a professional writer.
#
So, you know, so for instance, I mentioned the Rishikesh Mukherjee, you know, my starting
#
point for the Rishikesh Mukherjee book happened when I happened to watch a number of his films
#
close together and I suddenly felt this thrill of recognizing that in films that otherwise
#
didn't really seem to have anything in common in terms of their plots.
#
There were these little thematic, these themes running through the films, which seemed to
#
point to a particular sensibility or a particular director or scriptwriter who was interested
#
You know, it could be a theme like disguise, pretense, whatever, something like that.
#
In films where the storylines were completely different, maybe made 20 years apart.
#
But so I felt that thrill of that recognition of, you know, that there's a sensibility here
#
and I want to explore the sensibility, maybe write about this director who's made these
#
So that is the immediate thing, the immediate emotional response.
#
But then when you're sitting and working on the book over a period of two or three years,
#
while writing those same things, you're also, you know, perforce, you're just, you know,
#
you are analyzing, you're bringing in other things, you know, about other films from similar
#
genres, you're providing that contextual stuff in.
#
So all that also goes in.
#
So the starting point may be the direct immediate emotional response.
#
But then as a professional writer, you will also bring in some of the post facto analysis
#
Yeah, that's a great point.
#
I mean, first, we, I guess, experience the world and then we try to understand it and,
#
you know, and what you said about film festivals is really, is resonant to me in the sense
#
that until COVID happened, my annual vacation was spent in Bombay itself, where the Mami
#
Film Festival would happen and I would go and I would watch four or five films a day
#
I was an expert at optimizing, obviously, and just watch 28, 29 films in the week that
#
And I get that, that you don't have the space to sit back and reflect.
#
So it is all visceral, visceral, visceral, you're not really thinking about stuff.
#
But at the same time, I guess, you know, you don't have a choice.
#
You just want to take in as much as you can because some of the greatest delights are
#
the unexpected ones, something you've never heard of and it just kind of blows you away.
#
And of course, I think the last couple of years I was, you know, live tweeting, I was
#
putting out a tweet about every film I watched and that was, in a sense, I realized post
#
facto a way of taking notes for myself also about, you know, what I liked and didn't like
#
there and I'm just thinking aloud here.
#
I remember this quote by some translator, I've forgotten who, I came across this while
#
researching for this episode on translation I did with Aruna Vasena.
#
And the quote was something to the effect of that even the act of writing is an act
#
of translation, because you're taking your thoughts and you're translating them into
#
And it strikes me that when you're trying to write about a film or write about anything,
#
you know, where you come out of that experience mode and you get into describing it or understanding
#
it, it becomes really difficult because it can then be contrived.
#
Like when I think of the great moments in movies, which really moved me at the time,
#
which just had me tearing up immediately, you know, as a young person, dead poet society,
#
the last scene, right, for those who haven't seen it and enormously affecting for me.
#
Those scenes are so powerful because they just capture the essence of the whole thing
#
and they hit you in the gut with it.
#
And for me, they are impossible to write about.
#
I can write about other aspects of the craft and, you know, other things here and there.
#
But for me, I can't capture that essential thing, you know, and I understand that part
#
of our job is not just to experience the world, but to write about it.
#
That's what writers do.
#
That's what we all try to do at, you know, differing levels.
#
But it seems incredibly difficult in one person.
#
And you're right, I agree with you that it's possible for both to go together.
#
And to me, my favorite film critic for that reason is Roger Ebert, because you got a sense
#
You got a sense of how a film moved him deeply.
#
And at the same time, you got insight into the craft and, you know, like his writing
#
about Rameen Bhairani, for example, when he wrote about the film Goodbye Solo.
#
You know, the review moved me so much that I watched the film and was blown away by it,
#
you know, where he, you know, Bhairani is getting to the heart of the human condition
#
And you know, Ebert's writing about that film, you know, leads you there as well.
#
And I also want to want to ask you a question somewhat related to this, but also before
#
that also just to add that, you know, you can also take this business of reacting only
#
emotionally and only this in the moment.
#
You can perhaps take it too far at times, you know, someone like Pauline Kyle, for instance,
#
she was famous for and she's been criticized a lot for it laterally.
#
She was famous for insisting on never seeing a film a second time.
#
Which at once, you know, just, you know, your scribble away is sitting there in the dark,
#
you know, which is wonderful.
#
And of course, we know her body of work and where it came from and the passion.
#
It's not in doubt at all.
#
But she never kept herself open to revisiting a film and possibly changing her mind about
#
That's something that can also be done, right?
#
You might very honestly have a particular emotional experience to a film watching it
#
And then 10 years later, you're watching it again and you have a different sort of emotional
#
experience, which might be, you know, it might not be as good as before or it might be good
#
in a different way or whatever it is, but you feel differently about it.
#
Someone like her did not keep herself open to that possibility.
#
And she has been criticized for it by other critics as well, you know, for just closing
#
I wanted to ask you, Amit, since you mentioned some time back that you feel like you've become
#
a little more open to other modes, to the more dramatic or, you know, the other forms
#
of expression that aren't necessarily psychological realism.
#
I remember I'm asking you this because on two or three separate occasions on email lists
#
that we've been on or conversations that we've had, I've seen you put up your list of ten
#
So, you know, so I remember the first time I saw this may have been around 15 years ago
#
and the last time may have been four or five years ago.
#
So you have films like Decalogue in it, you have John Huston's The Dead, which is a film
#
that he astonishingly made in his 80s from the James Joyce story, In the Bedroom, if
#
I remember right, films like that.
#
Films that are mostly, you know, from a certain mode of understated psychological realism.
#
And I remember that I saw two lists that you had made maybe a few years apart that were
#
more or less the same, more or less the same films in them.
#
Do you feel like if you were to make a list today that there would be, you know, you don't
#
have to name the films, but that there would be one or two films that don't fit that particular
#
mode of psychological realism or understatement, something that's louder, brassier, would there
#
be something like that?
#
A film or a web series even?
#
Come on, Amit, Devdas by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, never, never.
#
In fact, I remember Devdas by Bhansali is Devdas and Parinita came out around the same
#
And I really liked Parinita as an example of melodrama well done.
#
And Devdas is an example of melodrama overdone.
#
But anyway, I won't elaborate on that.
#
But that's a great question.
#
And it's also a great observation because, you know, in the note that I send you guys
#
in the email, I said, let's talk about five underappreciated film.
#
And that got me to thinking about what are my favorite films today.
#
And I realized the folly of ever having made a list like that.
#
Like, of course, we love making lists, 10 top films, 10 whatever.
#
And I think when you're a teenager, it's fine.
#
But I think later, I think, I mean, for me, everything contains multitudes in a way that
#
I can no longer, you know, rankings and star ratings and all that just seem weird to me.
#
And it seems to reduce a film down to a set of qualities which you are then quantifying.
#
If I'm to talk about, make a list of films, I would probably do that on the basis of what
#
moved me at the time, what I felt like at the time and, you know, not pontificate on
#
greater artistic merits and all of that.
#
And the thing is that my sensibilities are what they are and my tastes are what they
#
So there's no value judgment.
#
I may not have a taste for a particular kind of maximalist, expressionistic art or film
#
But unlike in the past, I will no longer say that is bad.
#
I will simply say, ki matlab mere vibe ka nahi hai, right?
#
So even in terms of literature, for example, I recognize that Salman Rushdie is a great
#
writer that Arun Tati Roy writes gorgeous prose.
#
But their writing is, you know, my taste is more towards the minimal, which is why, for
#
example, Japanese and Korean authors are much more likely to like them.
#
Among Indians, I like Vikram Seth more than Rushdie, for example.
#
So I think that is where I kind of, I mean, your tastes are what they are.
#
But I can appreciate other stuff.
#
And there are things I like now, there is art I like now, which would not fall into
#
that psychological realism sort of domain.
#
Like, for example, I think one of the great novels of all time is Raag Darbari, right?
#
And I love reading Woodhouse as a kid.
#
And those don't easily fall into, you know, those narrow categories.
#
But broadly, I would say that, I mean, I was just about to say, you'll never find a Bhansali
#
But the point is that Bhansali is a bad melodramatic filmmaker.
#
I'm sure there are good melodramatic filmmakers.
#
So my appreciation of melodrama exists, but not his.
#
We need someone like Paro Mehta Bora here to defend Bhansali now, because I don't think
#
I can do it sufficiently.
#
Paro, if you're listening.
#
So you know, before we get to get back to Subrit's life, I want to double click on one
#
of the points you said where you talk about the music of that era.
#
And I have a couple of questions about that.
#
That one, when there was such a perfect confluence of great music, which was not great music,
#
which wasn't appreciated by people, everybody loved it, you know, when there was that confluence
#
of great music and all of it kind of coming together, the lyrics, the musicians, all of
#
One, why did we lose it?
#
Because you'd imagine that even left to pure market forces, that is what is successful.
#
That is what is working.
#
So why would it suddenly go, especially given that today we live in a time where there is
#
It is not as if if the mainstream changes, you're stuck.
#
That's not the case today.
#
You have a, you know, a thousand flowers are blooming all over the place.
#
So one, I mean, I'll ask you two questions, but one at a time, I guess one, why did we,
#
you know, why did it, what are your theories on why that era ended?
#
I mean, of course, I mean, one of the good things about life is to sit and theorize on,
#
you know, what happened.
#
And I think I've done this conversation with folks a few times in the past, but just one
#
I don't know many people if they realize that in 86, 87, Doordarshan actually had a TV adaptation
#
of Raag Darbari and it used to play on Thursday nights at 10 o'clock with the opening, you
#
know, whatever the title song of just about a minute by Bhim Sen Joshi.
#
And the song, and the song went, Saath Sur Ke Saath Rang Hai.
#
Is Duniya Mein Saath something Hai, Is Ke Uske Is Duniya Mein Raag Darbari.
#
It was a beautiful, yeah.
#
And Alok Nath, fresh from his success as Master Haveli Ram of Buniyat.
#
And well before the world knew of his predatory ways.
#
And yeah, well before he became the sanskari, you know, father, was the pehelwan in those
#
It was a six or eight episodes.
#
But I remember that because I, so I actually saw Raag Darbari before I read Raag Darbari.
#
I distinctly remember watching, I remember watching everything and I was watching everything,
#
but it clearly left a mark because I realized again, I am not processing, I was 10 years
#
And it stuck in my head that there is a thing called Raag Darbari.
#
And then later, the moment I came across, I mean, by the time I was 14 or 15, you know,
#
there used to be this magazine, Hindi magazine called Dharm Yug, it's a legendary magazine.
#
The editor was a guy called Dharm Veer Bharti.
#
If we lived in a country that appreciated its own writers well, Dharm Veer Bharti would
#
have been in the same league as Hemingway or Faulkner.
#
Because Dharm Veer Bharti, before he turned 30, by 1954 had written three of the greatest
#
Hindi novels of all time.
#
You've written Andha Yog also.
#
He wrote Suraj Ka Saath Wa Ghoda and he was just, and then he just left.
#
I think if you remember Sara Rai in your episode, she mentioned that her mother used to be corresponding
#
with Dharm Veer Bharti because Dharm Yug used to be a Times of India publication or whatever,
#
now Bharat Times publication.
#
And Dharm Yug used to have some of the best cartoons, I mean, the last page, the best
#
writing on Hindi literature, even really quality writing on cinema.
#
And why did I come to Dharm Veer Bharti?
#
I've lost the thread on this one.
#
But yeah, so sorry, yeah, so Shrilal Shukla and then, you know, I started reading all
#
these Dharm Veer Bharti and, you know, all of these guys and, you know, I realized that
#
there is more here, you know, in terms of just the Indian literature, which again gave
#
me a lot of satisfaction as I went through that.
#
In fact, some of these things like Suraj Ka Saath Wa Ghoda was an unreliable narrator
#
way before sort of unreliable narrator was a sort of a thing in the 60s and the 70s.
#
Anyway, going back, coming back to the point on what happened with, you know, the talent.
#
One is, you know, it is difficult for such talent to come together and then have very
#
We almost had 20 years of it, which is by itself just amazing.
#
And you know, these initial set of people, I normally start with Anil Biswas and then,
#
you know, possibly SD Boman, I placed Shankar Jaikishan a bit lower because I think part
#
of the reason why we lost it eventually was because of Shankar Jaikishan.
#
These were good guys, but they were, after some time, just got driven by a lot by what
#
market wanted and also did a bit of politicking in terms of awards and all of that, it screwed
#
up the sort of just the normal environment of people coming together and doing good quality
#
So, just that early set of people, Anil Biswas, SD Boman, Chitragupta Roshan, they were, I
#
see Ramchandra and Madan Mohan, these are like really good quality composers.
#
But you only had that much of time.
#
I mean, many of these guys actually had very poor lifestyles.
#
I mean, almost all of them died of cirrhosis.
#
Almost all of them who died early.
#
I mean, it's not, it's normally not mentioned as specifically, but you will realize that
#
some of the great names, they all died before they turned 50, only for one reason.
#
And so, in some sense, one reason is it's just natural.
#
I mean, they died, who replaced them were somewhat, you know, Arsat's versions of these
#
So obviously, you wouldn't have the same quality.
#
Second, I just think that what happened was very gradually at the margins.
#
There was this attempt to have more and more of orchestration, which up to a point was
#
So, you know, you don't realize that by the mid 60s, there was almost this, you know,
#
there was this competitive race on how many piece orchestra can you put in, with Naushad
#
I think he hit first 100 in Aan, an early 50s film.
#
But after that, you know, and so what he would do is he would book the studio and he would
#
book every single, every single, you know, instrumentalist in town, all 100 of them,
#
I think the first one, I think where he did something of this kind was Aan.
#
Aan, by the way, was a film, very famously, it was a long film, and they took it out and,
#
you know, in various film circuits and one of the famous reviews of Aan was it went on
#
You know, also the first technical film, yeah, Dilip Kumar and Nadira, Maan Mera Ahisan,
#
So this kind of a race to bottom on how many pieces you can use, how grand the music can
#
be, in the hands of somewhat of a better quality, you know, composer and artist, it can still
#
And let's be honest, I don't know how to get into controversies here.
#
Many of these music composers are completely dependent on their assistants.
#
And it's reasonably well known, most of our great music composers couldn't write music.
#
They were just not taught that way.
#
These were all, sit on the harmonium and make a melody.
#
And then the assistants, some of whom are lost to history because they have not been
#
Now a lot of us and a lot of other people have documented them.
#
They would actually fill the, you know, the substance of the song, right?
#
I mean, some of these great names, Sebastian de Souza, Anthony Gonzalves, these are mostly
#
Goan guys because they were taught in the church how to write music, and then they could
#
write and they could, you know, give it to other instrumentalists and they could play
#
And Naushad had a very famous assistant who himself composed for Pakeez Ghulam, Mohammed
#
and then of course Mohammed Shafi, these were great names.
#
But anyway, coming back, you had this race for more number of pieces as it started becoming,
#
you know, it started going into less talented hands.
#
It started turning into a bit of a noise, but then, you know, people were not, you know,
#
And for some reason, you know, I think every decade people have lamented that music is
#
becoming worse, but nothing would reverse it.
#
I have no idea why, right?
#
I mean, you know, you just got into this gradual decline of having more and more noisy work.
#
And then somewhere the nature of the story and the script sector also started changing.
#
And I think we started taking in, you know, a lot of this with less discernment.
#
I think people were, there would be, you know, sort of pauses in this, I mean, you know,
#
some of the good work was continued.
#
I mean, Khayyam was there, Khayyam was one guy in every decade since 1950 to 1980.
#
He would make good quality music.
#
RD came in and he had, he contributed to some of this noise, but he also continued to do
#
But I think, I mean, I don't like to take specific names, but for many of us, you know,
#
Kalyanji, Anandji, Lakshmi Kanth, Pyarelal, later parts, they were just creating, you
#
know, just noisy stuff with no melody in it, occasional good songs.
#
And by the time then we had Bachchan, then somewhere the whole thing had changed, what
#
people were going to watch films for had changed.
#
And I also think that, you know, as radio started becoming less important, because in
#
radio you would listen to the song, you were not having the benefit of the visualization.
#
By 80s then radio was also on terminal decline.
#
When it didn't matter then what you're presenting and how visually attractive that was, that's
#
all that mattered, right?
#
So that also started changing.
#
So I just think that the primary reason is you just had a good fortune of 20 years of
#
great people being together.
#
The moment some of them dropped off, you would have had the eventual decline of that kind,
#
So my second question regarding this is that, did you or do you have to be a particular
#
kind of person to appreciate that kind of music?
#
Because you know, you put someone from a different environment and make him sit down and listen
#
to say Anil Biswas or S. D. Berman or whatever, and it may not strike a chord at all.
#
There may be absolutely nothing happening there.
#
I shouldn't say it may not strike a chord.
#
Of course it will strike a chord, but it won't strike a chord, strike a chord.
#
And does the kind of art which you consume also shape the kind of person you are?
#
And this could work sort of in a virtuous cycle or a vicious cycle or whatever.
#
Those kind of tend to imply that there is a judgment call about what is good and what
#
But you know what I mean?
#
They could feed into each other.
#
If you are a sort of a reflective kind of person who likes quiet music and you listen
#
to that and it just matches and you listen to more and more of that and there is a market
#
demand and there's more and more of that getting produced and so on and so forth.
#
You know, and equally you could enter a cycle of a different sort.
#
You know, and what I sort of find delightful about the present era, maybe the last 10,
#
15 years, not in terms of music, which I know nothing about, but just in terms of creativity
#
and art and all that is that the means of production is so democratized that everyone
#
has it, that there is a potential for niches forming, which you would otherwise not even
#
have assumed are there.
#
You wouldn't know they exist.
#
You know, you can have a gardening podcast where you would have thought, iska market
#
kahan hai, but it can be widely popular or at one point, people would have said, you
#
don't know who will listen to a five hour conversation, right?
#
And I'm just thinking in the one domain that I know about, but I would imagine the same
#
is true for music, that what you should have in this era, I would assume is that the long
#
tail is being catered to that no matter what your tastes are, someone is making something
#
which, you know, feeds into that and vice versa.
#
But instead A, and this kind of bewildering that why should a particular kind of music
#
just vanish when it was clearly so popular and pleased so many people in such a way that
#
we still remember it fondly.
#
And secondly, does it mean that a particular kind of life, a particular kind of Thera,
#
a particular kind of person is, you know, in a sense, not there anymore?
#
Maybe I'll take a crack at it and say you can add.
#
See the, I mean, there is a truth to this, that you are, you have to be a certain type
#
or you become a certain type as you continue to appreciate this kind of music.
#
I've seen this for this kind of a Hindustani classical or even for gazelles, you know,
#
we tend to be of a certain kind.
#
Although even among us, you know, the sort of the, whatever you call it, the tyranny
#
of small differences between us is often we are more judgmental about each other.
#
That was, you listen to gazelles, I listen to better stuff.
#
But it does happen, I mean, you do tend to become a certain type and I think that's true.
#
The one thing in, at least in my case, I've, like I say, I keep my ears open and I trust
#
my ears also reasonably well.
#
So it is that, you know, then gradually after I sort of got deeper into this, I kept my
#
ear open to the idea that you could have good music even in Hollywood, because the first
#
time when I heard, say for instance, the sound of music, you know, I got that, I said, plastic
#
pack aata tha, with Rogers and Hammerstein written, pata bhi nahi tha yeh dono hai kaun,
#
the sound of music, right?
#
First time I heard, barring that Doremi, everything else seemed like noise to me, yeh kya hai?
#
Then after, you know, after many years, and then you heard everything, you know, the show
#
board, yeh wo, I mean, Learn and Lovell and all the other greats.
#
And then, then wo kaun then open to them also, like you realize ki yeh bhi ek music hai.
#
In the same way then I got into, for various reasons, into some of the opera stuff, right?
#
I mean, some great, both Pikini and Verdi, I mean, heard, if you don't, again, many people
#
don't remember, Doodh Darshan is to actually air the, some of the great operas as well.
#
I mean, one of the great Saturday afternoons that I spent was actually watching Tosca on
#
Nobody remembers, nobody even appreciates what Doodh Darshan was doing for us during
#
And I had no clue, it's just that for two days they were showing ki Tosca aayega Saturday
#
Tosca aayega toh humbe baith jayenge hai, humbe kaunsa kabab hai.
#
But then you started appreciating that as well.
#
So if you keep your ears, and off late, I mean, again, just to go back to this point,
#
at least in the last couple of years, maybe the lockdown and everything else gave me some
#
I'm listening to all these people, yeh, this Dua Lipa and Olivia Rodrigo and you know,
#
the Lizzo, Billie Eilish, of course, but you know, this latest, this Lizzo song which goes
#
as about damn time, great music and whatever the latest Beyonce album, Renaissance, absolutely
#
I mean, mostly she's again gone back to dance, and you know, it's quite pumped up.
#
It's not like those reflective lemonade stuff.
#
People often say that I'm of a certain melancholic disposition, like my son keeps asking me,
#
what is this you listen to every time some lady is crying, right?
#
I tell her pari baat toh bol latah bangesh kar hai, toh upne saath, you'll have to be
#
careful about what you're saying.
#
But yeah, that sort of, people say, you keep listening to these stuff, you'll become that
#
But I've kept myself open and which is why sometimes I, I mean, not to sort of justify
#
I mean, I'm not one of those who have concluded that Hindi cinema, Hindi film music of 40s,
#
50s and 60s is great because I like it.
#
I mean, and then over a period of time, I've only gotten deeper into it and now I'm a,
#
you know, extremist about it and I don't listen to anybody else, you know, saying anything
#
And I have, you know, sampled reasonably well some of the other stuff and I like a lot of
#
I listen to a lot of that and after having done all of that, I still come back to this
#
because this is where I find the most comfort, this is where my heart is.
#
So, yes, I would say that it's not easy to, you become a person and you continue to be
#
It's very difficult to switch tracks.
#
But to the extent that I've appreciated that there is possibility that you might discover
#
something better, I have gone out and tried that and in some ways, in small little ways,
#
I think I've succeeded as well.
#
I mean, I like a few other genres of music as well.
#
I think what you said there also reminded me of that controversy about the film, Ae
#
Dil Hai Mushkil, where the Anushka character in the film at one point says something about
#
Mohammed Rafi sings such boring songs or whatever and then that, of course, led to a lot of
#
outrage from Rafi fans and so on because there was that confusion of what the film is saying
#
as opposed to what a character in the film is saying, which is a very standard thing.
#
But you know, everything you said, for me, I just think while there probably is such
#
a thing as a certain type of music or a certain type of film that you're naturally drawn
#
to, depending on things like your early conditioning, the things that you're exposed to early on
#
and so on also, but I think to a great degree, this is also just a function of how much time
#
you have and how much inclination or willingness you have to engage with many different things
#
and to begin that process of discovering something new, something that might lie outside your
#
comfort zone and then going with it for a while until it sort of, you know, it burrows
#
into your ears or whatever.
#
So speaking for myself, maybe this is just a function of the fact that I've spent disproportionately
#
a large amount of my time on movies and on cultural stuff, on movies, books, music compared
#
to a lot of other people.
#
So I tend to have a very, very diverse taste when it comes to music.
#
My personal playlist will have old Hindi film songs from the 40s, 50s, 60s, these beautiful
#
numbers, I was listening to Aarpaar songs on the way here a while earlier, Gita Dutt
#
and songs like that, but at the same time, I will also have Eminem or I'll also have
#
some heavy metal, which is stuff that, you know, when I was in my mid teens, you know,
#
15, 16 or so on, I started really listening to contemporary Western music for the first
#
time, became a big fan of all sorts of things from the Pet Shop Boys to Guns N' Roses,
#
you know, with U2 and REM in between and Stone Temple Pilots, everything, while at the same
#
time retaining my basic love for old Hindi film music as well.
#
I think it's largely, you actually hinted at this also in what you were saying, Subrata,
#
it's function of how much time you have for these things and how much you're willing to
#
just explore different types of things and then chances are you will find something that
#
you like in different genres, in different modes.
#
Also one other thing that, you know, since you raised the subject, Amit, one thing I've
#
always been a bit curious about, I haven't really quite figured it out for myself yet,
#
is that when it comes to the songs in the two main languages that I know, Hindi and
#
English, it's a strange thing, but when I first started listening to pop and rock in
#
English, not just with people like Dylan or Kohan, people who are known for their songwriting,
#
for the lyric writing, but even with bands like REM, U2, et cetera.
#
For some reason, once a song really embedded itself into my head, I knew the lyrics.
#
I just learned the lyrics very quickly.
#
So even today, there are songs, entire albums by some of my favorite artists who I first
#
heard 30, 35 years ago, and I just remember the whole thing, remember all the words.
#
But with Hindi film music, and I know there are a few others like me, I've always engaged
#
with songs at the level of music, primarily, and very often I just haven't registered
#
the lyrics of even iconic songs, unless there's something really simple and straightforward
#
like mera juta hai jabani or something like that, something like that.
#
So it's so relatively late in life that I've really started appreciating the nuances between
#
a Sahir Lodhyanvi or a Majroh Sultanpuri as lyricists.
#
It's always been engagement at the level of music.
#
So there could be something in the brain that just sort of prioritizes certain things, depending
#
on what language you're listening to.
#
I think that's something to think about as well.
#
In my case, it's just the opposite.
#
I mean, for me, the Hindi film songs is first about the lyrics.
#
I mean, in the sense that's really the core of what gets me into the song.
#
And that's again an obsession, just hearing it so many times.
#
I almost, I mean, there are a few of us, lots of us now actually.
#
It's almost like you can play any song at any time and we can just take the lyrics and
#
do that, I mean, some of the workplaces that I've been, I have this bit of a fun contest
#
that goes on that they can play 100 songs one after the other and I can tell them the
#
movie, the music director, lyricist, that I can sing the entire song, at least the lyrics.
#
So yeah, so the lyrics are my point of entry, but you're right, there is something maybe
#
about the brain and how we process it.
#
I've been scolded a lot by poet friends and by friends who are themselves lyricists or
#
who are very attached to the words of the great lyricists that we've had in Hindi cinema,
#
the fans of Sahir or someone else or Kefi, Kefi or whoever saying, how can you not engage
#
with the song at that level?
#
How can you just sort of have the tune of the song in your head and not really be engaging
#
But I think it works that way for some people.
#
Yeah, in some of them, like for instance, I mean, if you see Do Bigha Zameen, the fact
#
that now Balraj Sani has to leave the village and go to the city while he's given his land
#
is now with the landlord and as he's walking, you get the song, Apni Kahani Chhod Ja, Kus
#
To Nishani Chhod Ja, Kaun Kahe Kis Roz Phir Tu Aay Na Aay, Kis Hort Phir Tu Aay Na Aay.
#
I mean, if you listen to the lyrics and the fact that he's now walking and he's watching
#
the field for the last time, that whole experience just changes.
#
I mean, you know, you get goosebumps.
#
I mean, just Bimal Roy has just got everything together.
#
And Balraj Sani is just a fantastic actor.
#
So sometimes, and I realized that was without these lyrics, this scene would have been,
#
I mean, would have been nothing and just, and Shailendra just gets in many films that,
#
you know, just the right amount of pathos with the right kind of words, absolutely spot
#
I mean, and I mean, I can just go on with about 50 songs of Shailendra because more
#
than, say, Sahil and others who were great poets, Shailendra was just born to be a Hindi
#
I mean, he's of course written some of the great poems as well, he was that whole communist,
#
you know, song that's his.
#
But he just knew how to write for Hindi films and, you know, some of those lyrics just elevate
#
When you hear it, you know what he's saying.
#
And then, you know, then the story and everything just falls in place together.
#
So, Amit, the Dharati Ka Hai Pokar Ke is of course also an absolute favorite song of one
#
of your recent guests, Varun, Varun Grover.
#
And they used it to great effect in the opening scene of Sacred Games, episode one, you know,
#
in a completely different context, you know, the Ganesh Ka Gaitonde character played by
#
Nawazuddin Siddiqui and, you know, and the Dharati Ka Hai Pokar Ke is being used there.
#
And it just, you've taken something that's so much of its time, you know, belongs to
#
the Dho Bika Zameen situation, as Subrata was saying.
#
But you've transposed it here to a completely different, you know, aesthetic and a mode
#
of storytelling and it just works there as well.
#
Varun, I mean, he's a tremendous artist.
#
I think someone who has imbibed the best of the past and is just doing this, you know,
#
bringing it into the work that he does now, which is influenced by so many things.
#
So I confess, I had no idea of this and we didn't discuss this.
#
Well, you know, personally, where I come from, I'm much closer in terms of that music versus
#
lyrics sing to where Jaya is, where it's always a music, it's always a vibe with exceptions.
#
And the exceptions being the singer-songwriters like Springsteen and Dylan, where, you know,
#
you get into them for a specific reason and therefore you kind of remember the words.
#
But most of the time, my experience with music is essentially of not only not knowing the
#
words, but often misunderstanding them.
#
So like my catalogue of memories is full of what is called Mondagreens.
#
Like the recent one, which I just discovered yesterday that I had sort of misremembered,
#
it was a Bee Gees song, Tragedy.
#
I always thought the lyrics were Tragedy, it's a Vulcan sonic tragedy.
#
And obviously that's not what it is, I don't even know what it is, I've forgotten already.
#
But in my mind has always been that and I'm content with it being that because I don't
#
need anything more than that for, you know, to enjoy the song, though I don't even like
#
I mean, it's just one random example.
#
The great Hindi film Mondagreen is of course from Kurbani, an unknown song, aap jaisa koi
#
mere zindagi mein aaye to bap ban jaaye.
#
I wasn't aware of that one, but I know there are some people, some highly anglicised people
#
of my generation who listen to Ek Akela Sheher mein and wondered why Maul Palekar was always
#
So here's my next question, and it strikes at what both of you just mentioned.
#
Like Subrit, you mentioned about Tosca, ki Tosca aaya, hum toh kuchh nahi kar rahe hain,
#
And you spoke about how getting into something requires your devoting the time to get into
#
You can't just listen to something casually or whatever you actually, there's an investment
#
you're making of yourself.
#
Now my thought is, and I remember having this argument with my dad back in the 90s, where
#
he felt that so many channels wasn't such a great thing, like, which is, you know, the
#
very old Fabian socialist point of view.
#
My scene was ki yaar choice aagaya hai, you know, abhi like star movies had just come.
#
Star movies was heaven boss, poora din movies hote the usme, you know, where would we get
#
And in 94-95, they had that 100 years of cinema thing, which we went on for weeks and we just
#
Pagla gaye, khushi se bokla gaye.
#
So and my father's sort of romantic point was ki nahi ek channel jab tha, at least
#
you could look forward to things you knew they were there.
#
Today, 30-40 years later, I kind of understand where that's coming from, if I don't agree
#
In the sense ki Tosca dikhaya, bache hai, jinke paas kuch nahi hai, they're sitting
#
Today, what you have is number one, as Jonathan Haight has pointed out, most of the content
#
we are consuming was produced in the last three days.
#
We are not going any further back than that.
#
And if I may add to that, we are just scrolling or swiping.
#
Everything is scroll, swipe, scroll, swipe, aage chalo, piche chalo.
#
It's, you know, we are living in a world of 15-second experiences and that kind of immersive
#
thing where you're not scrolling, you're not swiping, you're just sitting, you're taking
#
You know, even if it's a three hour Amar Akbar Anthony, you're just sitting there for the
#
You know, I don't mean ki aapko bat ke Tarkovsky dekhna hai.
#
And I think that that's fundamental because everything that you consume in terms of art
#
is going to shape you, right?
#
So if all the time I'm watching 15-second things, you know, the rhythm of my thinking
#
just, you know, it's shallow.
#
I'm not really taking anything in.
#
The rabbit holes I enter will also be, will have this staccato rhythm to them.
#
Ki aacha theek hai, yeh aacha laga, Wikipedia dekha, yeh kya, wo kya, wo kya.
#
But that immersion is kind of not there.
#
So is this something you've observed?
#
Does it change society in a fundamental way when it happens?
#
Or would you say that this is not happening to everybody, that, you know, there were enough
#
sort of people back then, there were people who didn't watch anything or read anything,
#
Toh matlab utna farak nahi partha hai.
#
The handful of people who are still going to be drawn to fine art are still going to
#
be drawn to art, you know, pompous terms.
#
But so what's your sense of this?
#
At risk of sounding like a really conservative old fogie or whatever, I think, you know,
#
that there is a clearly a problem of attention deficit, which is something and I'm not saying
#
not necessarily saying this from a position of judgment.
#
I'd like to think of myself as someone who immerses in different things.
#
You know, what I was saying earlier about even today, it's very rare for me to watch,
#
you know, even on a day where I'm relatively free, it's very rare for me to watch more
#
than one film in a day because I need that time to, you know, if you're watching a 90
#
minute film or a two hour film to then reflect, think about it.
#
And I try to watch it at one go, minimum distractions, darkened room, even if I'm just watching
#
it on my laptop or whatever.
#
But even so, I know that that even I 70 80 percent of the time do find myself distracted
#
by something else, you know, I won't be able to sort of resist pausing the film for a while
#
and checking something.
#
You know, I mean, I might just go to the film's Wikipedia page to check something that I do
#
And then that might lead me to meet me to another rabbit hole because Gmail happens
#
to be open and there's there's one unread mail there and you go there.
#
That happens even to someone like me, who who to whom immersion comes quite quite easily
#
and who doesn't normally get normally get sucked into too many different things.
#
So I can imagine that that it does on some level, it is affecting the brains of many
#
of us and definitely younger people who have only ever known this sort of life who, you
#
know, who are just inundated with information all the time, information, the binging culture
#
You know, I'm sure it's not great for the for the eyes as well or for the for the years
#
if you're listening to listening to things or watching things with with your phones all
#
That's also the physiological side to it.
#
It's and I'm sure it does on the whole.
#
I don't want to make very sweeping statements, but on the whole, it must be affecting people's
#
See, I mean, again, my system, one one response is what Jay has mentioned, I feel that way.
#
I mean, it's all around us.
#
Like I said, I just turned 46.
#
It feels like they are missing out on so many things.
#
I just sit and watch 2001 Space Odyssey and wait for 30 minutes till the first word is
#
Listen to Strauss, see what is happening, look at what Kubrick is doing.
#
And then, you know, that there is also this system to thinking about this, which is how
#
was Mirza Ghalib, for instance, received in his what we might consider his peak?
#
I mean, I think the classicists and the purists of his time, including, you know, the ones
#
in the darbar and, you know, those of us who watched the great television serial Mirza Ghalib
#
by Gulzar in the late 80s.
#
He wasn't necessarily the, you know, the court poet or something.
#
He was there and thereabouts, but it was Zock and, you know, then there was Mirta Ki Mir
#
and so on and so forth.
#
Ghalib was often considered to be a bit of a people's poet, a bit of someone who was
#
pandering to popular tastes.
#
And if you recollect the series, there, you know, there was Neena Gupta who played, you
#
know, courtesan naashne wali.
#
And she would often get in radhi paper some of Ghalib's songs.
#
She got a few times and then she would be singing.
#
And Ghalib himself hears that tere wade pe jiye to ye jaan jhut jaana ki khushi se jee
#
na pate to ye aitbaar hota.
#
You know, the fact that it went to those people and they sort of sang it and therefore it
#
sort of continued and perpetuated.
#
And 100 years later, you know, Ghalib is high art, high culture, while it might not have
#
been during that point in time.
#
So some of this, you know, I would say that one has to look at history and pause and say
#
that it's maybe we should reserve a judgment.
#
Who knows that, you know, this two minute thing is possibly high art.
#
I mean, for instance, I mean, we can go back into just the painting stuff, right?
#
I mean, Liechtenstein, you know, he did that drowning girl, you know, that very famous,
#
almost comic book like art.
#
I mean, I'm sure nobody thought that to be anything great at that point in time.
#
I mean, you know, now looking back, you say, ye kya kiya hai?
#
Or even Jackson Pollock and, you know, all these abstract expressionist or, you know,
#
William Magriott and, you know, all those, you know, crazy stuff, Golconda and, you know,
#
they were all interesting stuff, but, you know, people would possibly compare that and
#
say that even impressionism and post-impressionist stuff was better than what are you putting
#
And then if you go back another 30 years, people were asking, yaar, Picasso kar kya
#
rahe ho, boss, ye kya hai, why is everything appearing like a cube?
#
And then, you know, go to impressionism and even when impressionism was happening, there
#
was then in UK this pre-Raphaelite brotherhood who said that, listen, all these guys have
#
gone crazy, let's go back, you know, completely.
#
So the likes of Rossetti and others, they just, you know, went all the way back and,
#
you know, so they would paint in Ophelia or something like that, which is very pre-Raphaelite.
#
So they almost leaped back 300 years.
#
So sometimes I'm like, you know, history should teach us ki hota rahe tha, yaar, is
#
And maybe 30 years later, you might find this very different and this might be high art.
#
And therefore one has to be somewhat, I mean, obviously in the present, you crib about it,
#
but who knows later, how will people see this?
#
See, the, my point isn't so much that a two-minute thing can't be good art, what I was really
#
talking about was more about how much there is competing for people's attention right
#
And how in that process, you know, even TikTok can be, can be good art.
#
And I mean, I think you've pointed that out as well in your, in things you've written
#
or spoken about, but if there's so much available competing for people's attention and people
#
then don't approach these things with some discernment, with some regard for the limits
#
of their own mind, what they can process in a single day, then of course, you know, you
#
just have stuff washing over you all the time.
#
And I think this also sort of this inevitably will lead to situations where people are not
#
really, where people are dabbling, you know, with, I see this a lot in my spheres of work,
#
work reviewers, the reading, reading novels or whatever, and writing reviews and there's,
#
and you can tell that the engagement has been very superficial.
#
It's just been, you know, that there hasn't been a real sort of effort to sort of get
#
It's been, you know, it's been, there's, there's, there's a skimming, skimming more
#
than anything else to sort of just, just get the easy takeaway from the thing, from what
#
might actually be quite a complex nuanced work, but you're looking for the takeaway,
#
you're looking for a single takeaway that happens with films, a lot of cultural criticism
#
these days, which we've talked about elsewhere, where, you know, you have, you have criticism
#
that's centered on ideology, or very often on blinkered ideology, is just sort of is
#
centered on looking at a film and saying, okay, ye film kya kya raha hai, iska message
#
kya hai, what is the filmmaker, what is the filmmaker's own politics, what is he trying
#
to say, what does this character represent, is he supporting this character in the film
#
or is he sort of judging the character, and you know, and these questions are presented
#
as if they, they will always have very easy straightforward answers, which they very often
#
won't, with a good film, with a good complex film, they won't have those answers.
#
And I think that that also is very often a function of just, you know, we have very finite
#
time to, you know, we just need to sort of watch this film, not think about it too much.
#
We just sort of, you know, just, just looking for that one easy takeaway from it.
#
I think that some of that is happening a lot.
#
I think part of that tendency is that we live in the age of the gocha moment, where you're
#
looking for someone, something to pass judgment on, because then if you, the act of passing
#
judgment on something means you're placing yourself above it, you're elevating yourself,
#
whether in terms of aesthetics or morality or whatever, and it's a toxic tendency and
#
I agree there with you, and we'll talk about politics and art later, but I'll just agree
#
with both of you here, in the sense that, yeah, I mean, you know, I briefly taught a
#
course, TikTok and Indian society, and the very month that it was banned.
#
But I thought there was some tremendous art happening there, a lot of great expression
#
from people who don't otherwise have platforms and who don't otherwise see art from people
#
And suddenly you just have to turn a phone at yourself and make something, and initially
#
you're doing lip syncs and memes and all of that, but later it was going beyond that.
#
It just made me so happy to kind of see that happening.
#
At the same time, Subrata, your point is great also that, you know, one, of course, how we,
#
you know, if you go through history, one should learn not to place things on a hierarchy and
#
say that this is good, this is bad.
#
But also, I don't think attention spans are necessarily declining as, you know, we're
#
having this conversation, people listen to the show, listen to the podcast for five hours,
#
and you know, one of you, I think Jay, you spoke about binging as well.
#
And binging also indicates that, I mean, I do see the addictive nature of binging and
#
you're just watching mindlessly through the night.
#
But at the same time, it shows that people have that kind of stamina to really get into
#
a story and just really get into it, right?
#
And the fact that somebody today can binge something like The Wire or something like
#
Decalogue is delightful to me.
#
And that brings me to my next question about a change in form itself.
#
Like, if you look at the history of cinema, all films are basically short stories.
#
If you look at the literature definition of it, ki ek hi matlab linear kind of narrative
#
hoga, side mein kuch hoga toh chota chota hoga, there's a certain amount of depth you
#
can get and not much more than that, and so on and so forth.
#
Whereas with the modern web series or OTT content, you can stretch out like a novel.
#
Like, what I loved about The Wire also was how slowly it unfolded, how there wasn't one
#
or two or three major protagonists, where there were 14, 15, 20 people who were painted
#
with such depth that you could care for them and remember those characters 20 years after
#
It's almost that long since I saw some of the things I remember.
#
And I think that's a beautiful progression in what is possible.
#
As much as the two minute form is possible, the 30 second form is possible, and all of
#
that is not necessarily a bad thing.
#
At the same time, now we can stretch out, you know, pehle impression tha ki ek gante
#
ka aapne interview kar liya deep dive hai.
#
You know, today it feels like micro content to me at least as a consumer.
#
Now we can stretch out.
#
Now we can bring that therav into our viewing experience.
#
And in a sense, what contradicts the question I ask or makes it moot in a certain sense
#
is that, you know, you have long form content kind of flourishing like this.
#
So what's your sense of it?
#
Does it change the kind of art that is being produced?
#
And does it also then in a positive way, change the kind of viewer because consumer so hai
#
Yeah, well, you know, I mean, I agree completely, and although this is what I'm saying is necessarily
#
going to be a little more theoretical than as opposed to sort of coming from first hand
#
understanding of it, because I haven't watched that many of these really long series myself.
#
I've seen enough of them to know that enough good ones to know that it's a very exciting
#
This, this, especially this concept of the multi the multi season series where, you know,
#
you have five, six seasons over five, six years.
#
And yet you know that that the showrunners or the script writers had a grand design in
#
mind right from the very beginning.
#
You know, so I keep hearing about this in the context of shows like Breaking Bad and
#
Better Call Saul, which I haven't seen myself, but I've heard enough about it from from
#
people whose whose judgment I respect, whose taste I respect to know that it's something
#
very special and that we really haven't had a precedent for this sort of thing done well
#
So yeah, so there is something to be said about that.
#
But but I also do, I think I'm just coming back repeatedly not to the question of quality,
#
whether it's something that's that's a 60 episode show or whether it's a two minute
#
TikTok video or whatever it is.
#
I'm just coming back to the way in which people engage, you know, whether it's it's something
#
that you know, I suppose it sort of depends on the sort of consumer you are that that
#
I still know even in today's day and age, I know I have friends, writers among them
#
who manage to just switch off all social media, their phones for hours on end when they have
#
to sit down and read a novel for work or or whatever or just for for pleasure or something
#
that they just just need to do on a particular day.
#
So I suppose that is still very much there.
#
But on the whole, I suppose what I'm just saying is that maybe it is a somewhat conservative
#
position that just sort of dates me in a way is that a lot of people I know, a lot of young
#
people in particular do seem to be taking on more than the minds can actually process
#
in a single day in terms of the volume of content that's out there.
#
And I see that when I see, for instance, on on Facebook, for instance, if I'm part of
#
a film club forum where discussions are had about films, it's very common for me to see
#
people who are clearly very serious film buffs and who are keen to really engage with things,
#
watch as many things as possible.
#
But who when they when they say something about a film, about a particular film, you
#
will find them saying something that just sort of that to my mind, at least just indicates
#
a very superficial takeaway, you know, where you've just perhaps engaged with it at the
#
You're saying something also that there's this tendency to and perhaps there's something
#
I'm becoming more aware of because I've been I'm in the process of teaching and I've been
#
doing that for a while and I'm going to be doing it in a more consolidated way from from
#
There seems to be this reluctance or inability to really research something.
#
So someone will someone who's clearly a very passionate film buff will watch a new film
#
that just come out and will not even after watching it will not even take the trouble
#
to to perhaps go to the Wikipedia page to sort of find out something about the antecedents
#
of the film, what it's based on, what it might have been inspired by.
#
So for instance, there might be a film that that is a remake of an earlier film.
#
And this person will not know that at all.
#
But will they write a long post on a film film discussion forum discussing the film
#
almost exclusively in terms of its plot and how it's so interesting, such a good film
#
because it's it's such a such an original story or whatever it is without even realizing
#
that that the plot is actually the least original thing about it.
#
It's it's a direct remake of something that that happened 30, 40 years ago.
#
And that to my mind is a very surface way of engaging with things.
#
I think I maybe I just come from an old school thing where I need a lot of context for things
#
and I need to sort of have that background, especially as a professional writer, when
#
one is one is actually putting your thoughts down about something you need to have a depth
#
or breadth of knowledge about about the background of the work that you're writing about.
#
So that's maybe maybe that's what I'm talking about.
#
I think maybe, you know, that distinction is not an intergenerational distinction, but
#
just exists in the sense some people will always want depth and context and some people
#
But the difference today is that the shallow buggers have megaphones also, right?
#
Because any you know, apne zamane mein nahi tha, toh waisa.
#
So now what is it to do?
#
And I love the way you're talking about, you know, you're saying the young generation,
#
It's almost like you're telling all young people everywhere, tumse naho payega.
#
You know, so if any of your students know that, that is, well, it's my bad to use a
#
to use a phrase that's much younger than I am.
#
It was, I think that, you know, you're right, of course, it shouldn't be an age specific
#
And we all know people of our own generation and older people older than us who have the
#
same unwillingness or inability to do those things.
#
I think I'm just thinking about it a lot more because I'm engaging with or going to be engaging
#
with students of a certain age who thought of who bristle at the idea that cinema existed
#
before Christopher Nolan made movies or or whoever.
#
So so yeah, actually, see, one, I mean, if you engage with it, like the way I mentioned
#
that, you know, understand the context, a little bit of the history, the more where
#
it is, you know, what were the antecedents of that particular film and the story.
#
Actually your what you get out of that piece of art, you know, increases tremendously.
#
So it's you will just like it if you are getting deeper into it.
#
So it's not about some kind of, you know, snobbery around just knowing more about it,
#
just improves your appreciation of art.
#
And the other way of coming at it, which is if you don't believe this, for instance, is
#
that almost everyone who whose art you like, who's creating good, you know, even these
#
long TV series and who's creating good cinema today, you will notice that they were deeply
#
steeped in the history of the kind of work that they are doing.
#
It's always it's, you know, Martin Scorsese knew every filmmaker of the fifties and watched
#
And, you know, Tarantino knew everything about, you know, whether it was French New Wave or,
#
you know, he knew everything.
#
And even today, if you including Nolan.
#
So if these guys appreciate what that was, right.
#
And you have to respect the fact that they appreciated all of that and therefore they
#
are creating this work, which you all are, you know, thoroughly enjoying and possibly
#
comparing more favorably with what has gone on in the past.
#
And you should respect that guys, you know, the person that you are really appreciating
#
their taste and maybe give that benefit of doubt that we should go back and understand
#
what was happening at that point in time because they seem to be coming off a particular chain.
#
And maybe there is something more to be done there.
#
In fact, that's how, at least in my case, you know, it's not, I mean, in some cases
#
it has been random, you know, jump into someone, but in many cases it's been this kind, you
#
know, you read somewhere some Coen brother interviews and mentions Preston Sturges and
#
you're like, yeah, I've seen one movie, but I mean, I love these guys.
#
I mean, these guys for me at a particular time in, you know, early 2000s and it was
#
like, I mean, Coen brother toh kuch bhi karega main, purana ap naya sab jaake dhunke deko.
#
So why are these guys talking about someone who was like 50 years before this time and
#
in such favorable terms?
#
And so then you go back to, you know, Sturges and then you say that, okay, by mistake maine
#
ek picture dekh liya tha, I don't even remember ball of fire or something I'd watched.
#
And then you figure out, you know, the lady Eve or what, and then you realize kya, I mean,
#
as a script writer kamaal tha, I mean, you know, the guy could do really great script,
#
I mean, he had a fairly short sort of, you know, real dramatic peak for five, six years.
#
He just wrote, you know, these next level screwball comedy stuff, you know, the banter,
#
So yeah, so then you discover that, then you discover it, I mean, then you find more, then
#
you get deeper into it, then you realize you've never fully appreciated Barbara Streinweg,
#
then you go down Barbara Streinweg path and you know, you get so much out of that stuff.
#
So you know, you will be richer from, you know, the deeper dive is my sense, I mean,
#
you'll be richer by much more than what you.
#
You know, I just want to say again as someone who, I think we may have discussed this before,
#
someone for whom it happened very randomly, my own journey into really old cinema, including
#
cinema that was made decades before I was born, just happened when I was an adolescent.
#
But through a series of events that even I can't completely make sense of, you know,
#
where you just sort of, you know, you just become interested, you have an aunt somewhere
#
who has some cassettes of 1950s films, you overhear a conversation between your mother
#
and one of her friends and, or you sort of see Laurence Olivier's obituary in the newspaper
#
in 1989, in July 1989, front page Times of India, become intrigued, you know, a non-Indian
#
actor on the front page of the Times of India or whatever it is.
#
There's so many things that can go into this process.
#
I have to clarify since I always sort of, you know, I get, you know, in my own circles,
#
I get pigeonholed as someone who's always insisting that you should see older stuff,
#
you should make these deep dives into all sorts of things, that I have all the sympathy
#
in the world for people, young people, people my own age, whatever, who simply cannot find
#
Because there's so much brilliant stuff as you pointed out just now, as we were talking
#
just now, that's happening in the here and now, the content that has been made in the
#
last three days or whatever it is, or the last five years.
#
I didn't mean to indicate it was brilliant, I meant to indicate it's addictive, but whatever.
#
Well, it can be both, you know, if you're talking about stuff like Breaking Bad or The
#
Wire or whatever also, maybe we're talking about those things as well.
#
So I have a lot of sympathy for people, including people who are, you know, trying to be professional
#
I know, you know, some of the finest film critics in the country right now, and I know
#
because I know some of them personally, are people who barely have any knowledge of pre-1970s
#
And they are aware of it and they feel a bit handicapped, but here they are with multiple
#
deadlines every week, you know, with multiple films to watch, new films to watch just for
#
Where does one find the time to go back and explore films of the 20s, 30s in a consolidated,
#
structured way, where you can really educate yourself in a meaningful way.
#
So that's why I get that completely.
#
It's just that I do, I do feel that that inevitably there will be a sense of loss.
#
If you don't have that, have some historical background, you are going to be missing out
#
You know, so, so for instance, I was just, just to just take one example.
#
And what you said, you know, is of course right, but I have to say that Martin Scorsese
#
is such an outlier when it comes to these things that he should never be used as an
#
He's the sort of guy who will, you know, you'll name any film to, you know, you're interviewing
#
him and you name any film made between 1910 and 1970 and he'll, he'll say, Oh, I've seen
#
that one 30 times or something.
#
Have you interviewed him?
#
If you interview him, you'll find, in my dreams, in my dreams, so I've, so, so, so he's, he's,
#
he's not the best example for this sort of thing.
#
I do know lots of contemporary Indian directors and scriptwriters who are steeped in, you
#
know, they are aware of stuff that has happened before, but many of them, a large percentage
#
of them, in my experience, seem to really have sort of seem to seem to feel like the
#
important stuff in film history really started in the 1970s with the, with the kids in, with
#
the kids with beards in the US with the Scorsese, Coppola generation, and they are definitely
#
lacking on the whole in knowledge about, about the period that you mentioned, the Preston
#
Sturges period, the period of the 1940s or the 50s in American cinema, for instance,
#
which I think is one of the great, great, great founts of, of everything.
#
And of course, the, what we call world cinema from the 1950s, there is that lacking to some
#
day, I know, I know lots of Indian scriptwriters, directors who are working on some very good
#
web series of films or have been in the last few years, who just, whose film education
#
It doesn't go back before that.
#
Although it's a, it's a great decade to still have your film education to start with.
#
Of course it is, it is, I mean, Coppola, Di Palma, it's a great decade, but then as Scorsese
#
who was a central figure in that decade keeps saying, you know, we, we stood on the shoulders
#
of giants, you know, and, and, and, and people, you know, the, if you're trying to appreciate
#
our work in a deep way, you have to sort of go further back and then then further back
#
That's definitely at least a lot of them just had such strong Hitchcockian hangover
#
So, you know, Subrata, we'll come back to your story after the break, because you actually,
#
you know, knew a lot of the protagonists in the Indian film scene.
#
You wanted to be a filmmaker yourself, but we'll come to that after the break.
#
One final big question before the break, which sort of takes off from what you were just
#
talking about, Howard Bloom has a book called How to Read and Why, right?
#
And, and I'm very curious about how you guys would answer the question of how to watch
#
a film and why, and I don't mean this in a prescriptive sense ki bachon ko batao ki,
#
you know, ye points hai, ye aapko likhna hai, ye karna hai, not like that.
#
But just in the sense of the first time we watch a film, we are as children, we are watching
#
the film as, you know, it's a linear narrative, it's a story you're interested, ye hua, iske
#
bad ye hua, so on and so forth.
#
But later layers begin to form, you begin to see more in the film, layers form in your
#
own head and of how you watch it and the different things that you look for and the different
#
connections that you make and so on.
#
And there are also other layers which you may or may not engage with, what the filmmaker
#
intended, where is he coming from, and even everything you just described, the giants
#
on whose shoulders, you know, she may stand.
#
So in terms of just that experience of watching a film, and not necessarily watching it to
#
write a review ki aap notes le rahe ho, ki yeh likhna hai, yeh likhna hai, yeh likhna hai.
#
But just you're watching a film for pleasure, you know, how has that changed over the years
#
in the sense that you guys look at cinema?
#
Again, it's difficult to really say, I think it probably works differently for different
#
You know, one of the reasons why I ended up becoming a professional film critic or someone
#
who was interested in recording his feelings about films from a very early age, going right
#
back to the age of nine or 10 when I was just scribbling things randomly on notepads about
#
my favorite Amitabh Bachchan films or whatever it is, giving them star ratings, which is
#
something that's pretty amusing because I'm so disdainful about star ratings and these
#
rankings like you were.
#
You were giving star ratings to stars, so they were star star ratings.
#
So nowhere else stars and their films.
#
So when you have that particular imperative, that's something very, just a few people have,
#
I mean, most people, bless their souls, because I feel very envious of them, are just content
#
to watch a film, you know, with enthusiasm without necessarily getting cerebral or even
#
putting down thoughts about it.
#
In fact, some of my friends who I'm most envious of in this regard are massive film buffs who
#
can have these incredibly informed and intelligent conversations about cinema, but who don't
#
have that writerly impulse at all, that they want to sit down and put it down.
#
And I've had that for as far back as I can remember.
#
So then someone like that, when you're watching a film, inevitably you are sort of trying
#
at some conscious level to pick up on certain things also, depending at what stage in your
#
development you are as a film watcher.
#
Of course, it's true, I think it's true for the vast majority of us, that our first point
#
of engagement with a film is purely at the level of what happens next, what happens at
#
the plot level, actors, stars, I think a majority of us as initial film buffs and maybe even
#
through a lifetime of film watching are most interested in the people on the screen and
#
developing certain sort of affinities with star personalities, projecting their own feelings
#
onto them, which is why we have the phenomenon of the big movie star, who may or may not
#
also be a very good actor.
#
Really, I don't think there can be any one size fits all answer to a question like this.
#
It just depends on what stage of your film development you're at.
#
Now today, if I were to watch a film, even if I'm not writing about it on a deadline,
#
chances are that my mind is sufficiently trained to, on the one hand, pay attention to what's
#
happening at the plot level, to follow what's happening and to be stimulated by that, assuming
#
that I don't already know much about the film beforehand, but also picking up on little
#
things at the level of cinematography, sound design, etc., or at least deriving some enjoyment
#
from how a well-made film is bringing all its elements together and putting them at
#
the service of creating the experience.
#
So just to give you one example of this very recent Malayalam film called Malayan Kunju,
#
which is a Fahad Fasil film, and he's already quite a big name, even among non-South Indian
#
viewers who are seeking out Malayalam and Tamil cinema.
#
It's a film about this character played by Fahad, who's bitter and he's resentful for
#
various reasons, he's not very happy inside, and then around midway through the film, he
#
finds himself caught in a landslide, and then it becomes a survival film.
#
And I was watching it, even though I watched it on a laptop screen, unfortunately, I wish
#
I could have seen it on the big screen, I missed it, I watched it on a laptop screen
#
with the full earphones plugged in, and while I was very engaged with the story, because
#
it is an engaging story, you want to know what's going to happen to him from one step
#
to the other, at one point I also found myself really reveling in the sound design of the
#
film, because he's a large part of the second half of the film, he's trapped underwater
#
or somewhere in a cave below where his house used to be, and there's a sound of a baby
#
wailing in the far distance, which is a pivotal plot point in the film, a child who he used
#
to feel very disturbed by, but who now becomes something for him to hold on to, an oral experience
#
for him to remember that there's a world out there that he has to try and get back to.
#
And I became really fascinated by the sound design of the film and aware, while I was
#
immersed in the film, I was also aware that this is what the sound designer and the director,
#
what they've done, what they've constructed to heighten the experience of the film.
#
Just one example, you can apply that to cinematography, you can apply that to editing, background
#
music, whatever, so really that's, it varies, it also varies depending on the type of film
#
it is, there are films that are not narrative films at all, they're anti-narrative films.
#
There's, if you watch a Godard film from the 60s, which is not about telling a story in
#
a linear way or even about telling any sort of story sometimes, you're looking at it and
#
trying to pick up on elements of the atmosphere created by the film, the perspective that
#
is being expressed, the little playful things he's doing at the level of, maybe it won't
#
be immersive for you as a viewer, it'll be more about actually sitting and being more
#
analytical throughout the thing, what is he doing, what camera angle has he chosen here,
#
why is he just sort of, why has he got a camera fixed on this person for five minutes or on
#
this coffee cup with the coffee swirling inside, standing for the cosmos or whatever it is.
#
You start thinking about those things, it depends on the type of film, it depends on
#
whether you're writing about it, whether you're watching it primarily for relaxation, so many
#
Yeah, I mean, see, I think one way to look at this, Hamid, is, you know, if you consume
#
something in fairly regular and large quantities, you start then figuring out what is good or
#
I mean, you know, I love biryani and over a period of time, since I've eaten so many
#
biryani, the first morsel is enough, you know, it's very difficult to explain, the minute
#
you eat the first morsel, but even if there are different types of biryani, within them,
#
I know the difference, I mean, the macro difference is aloo dalta, but the micro difference is
#
something very different and then you have it, you realize this Kolkata biryani is better
#
And so might be the case with the Mopla biryani or the, you know, the various kinds of rice
#
that they use in the talap katti biryani or the dindigul biryani.
#
So one is if you watch a lot of it, you automatically, something, you know, you get in your head
#
in terms of how you are able to appreciate that.
#
So that's definitely happened with me.
#
So in the absence of any formal sort of learning or anything of that kind, it happened.
#
And I'll tell you some very sort of simple things like, you know, you watch Mukkadar
#
ka Sikandar and many people watch it.
#
And sometimes I tell them that actually it is Devdas.
#
People completely find it, you know, as a revelation ki yeh Devdas ka story hai because,
#
you know, they've just watched it.
#
But when you just explain it to them that it's the same thing, there is one, you know,
#
Paro and then, you know, the Rekha's character is a dancer, is a courtesan, she's Chandramukhi
#
and it's exactly the same, there is Chunilal in the form of Inodkhanda, chalo Amjad Khan
#
aajata hai and so on and so forth and last mein mar jata hai.
#
And on the, you know, dies next to Rakhi and stuff.
#
That only happens if you, you know, after sort of while watching it, you have watched
#
so many films that you're not just watching it, you're just trying to make some sort of
#
a meta connect about, you know, what the story is and what does this sort of, you know, is
#
this similar to some other pattern or some other kind of similar story.
#
And that's at that level, forget like Jay was mentioning the soundscape and, you know,
#
the camera angles, et cetera, will come later, sometimes people just miss the very obvious
#
plot itself that it seems very, because you just watch and come out of it, right?
#
So that's one thing and I see this even in reading, right, I mean, you, all of us sort
#
of first started off with Halka Phulka reading, you know, you did the Woodhouse and the Agatha
#
Christie's and all that, and even there by the 10th Agatha Christie, you start appreciating
#
how firstly intricate it is, who's saying what, et cetera, et cetera, and by the time
#
you are in the 12th or 13th, you are trying to guess because you've now figured out how
#
she sort of leaves red airings and clues and things of that kind.
#
Same with Woodhouse, I mean, those plots might be farcical and silly, but very intricate,
#
I mean, and everything falls in place at the end, right, and in very sort of funny and
#
in a twisted sort of logical way, but you know, it falls in place.
#
So I think if you just consume more, you will find it and you might not be able to articulate
#
it, but often you'll find it.
#
So that's sort of one way of looking at it.
#
The second is then, you know, one of the things that came to me over a period of time is just
#
the way the director is showing you the film, right, not just you as a viewer watching it.
#
I mean, you know, he could have placed the camera here or he could have taken it up and
#
shown you a different view.
#
What does that do to your viewing experience?
#
You know, and same with, you know, the sound and I mean, you start realizing that, you
#
know, he's actually or she's actually, you know, playing God, I mean, they're actually
#
taking you through this, how they want you to experience that particular scene.
#
And that, I think, that was a moment of sort of, you know, revelation that I, I mean, I
#
with some directors, I started realizing that there is something at work here that you they
#
are in some sense manipulating or in some sense, they want you to watch the drama unfolding
#
And once you've seen that, then you can't unsee it.
#
I mean, in the sense you just, you know, next time you're watching a film, you're doing
#
it both as a viewer and sometimes also as how you are being, you know, you're being
#
And then of course, that plus the sort of, there is always a subtext or sometimes a subtext
#
or a meta narrative of in every film, I mean, even if the director sometimes is not fully
#
thinking about it, you as a viewer can appreciate and take away.
#
And often I've realized, even if it is Prakash Mehra in Mukkdharka Sikandar, boss, he's thinking
#
He's figured that it is Devdasi Banarao.
#
But he's also thinking at multiple levels, the way, the reason he names the character
#
Sikandar, who's technically means, you know, unconquered or whatever, cannot be defeated.
#
But then, you know, loses in love, kar raha hai boss, Prakash Mehra hai par wo pura dimak
#
laga raha hai, with including naming the character in a certain way and, you know, all of that.
#
And then of course, with better filmmakers and like one of the films among many rare
#
films, I just love Nayak.
#
One is, you know, it's just, it's in its own way, contained sort of environment film, right?
#
They're all in the, in the train, you know, in that single compartment.
#
There is Sharmila Tagore, who is not taken in by this guy's, you know, fandom or whatever,
#
the fact that he's a celebrity, the fact that she can, you know, critically ask him questions
#
that makes him go back and, you know, think and reflect about the journey that he's had.
#
You realize then that, you know, at a general level, it's a story of somebody sitting there
#
and she's there and you're seeing a little bit of chemistry, but she's also asking him
#
some questions, he's thinking about it.
#
But then after some time you realize that it's genuinely a deeper examination of, you
#
know, success, also of, you know, the fact that you are a celebrity and how do you personally,
#
you know, what do you have to deal with, you know, thinking about the compromises you have
#
made, so on and so forth.
#
And then you get a better appreciation of, you know, how the filmmaker has, you know,
#
put that thing together.
#
So I mean, like I said, you know, there are just these two, three things at least that
#
I can articulate that sort of opens your mind to it, you know, just the idea of is there
#
something more where you can connect the plot to the story to how the director wants you
#
to see it and, you know, and then once you figure that out, it's how the, you know, what
#
are the deeper questions or, you know, things that the director is asking.
#
And then after some time, you sometimes start overthinking it, maybe even the director is
#
not doing it, but you're like, why did he or she wear something there of that kind?
#
And you know, all of that, then why did they suddenly show, why was it raining at that
#
point in time and so on and so forth?
#
So then you build your own, you know, context and narrative, but again, it's fairly enriching.
#
And then if you start seeing a body of work of a director, you then find that there is,
#
then you see that there is even more a pattern because then that guy is doing something similar
#
I was about to come to that, that, you know, if you're talking about the process of watching
#
films, how does one watch films, then of course, another important factor is you watch multiple
#
films made by the same director or even featuring the same actor or the same cinematographer,
#
you know, music director who has a certain part to play in the, in the making of the
#
film, you start seeing patterns as well.
#
So those patterns might just be coming as, you know, from, from, from your, your own
#
projections and overthinking, over-reading or whatever you want to call it.
#
Though, as you know, I'm also a big fan of subtextual analysis taken as far as it can
#
They're just, we also wanted to just interject and this is the sort of thing that happens.
#
This is a serendipitous sort of thing that happens when movie buffs are just sitting
#
I was actually writing something about Mukadar Ka Sikandar as part of an essay about Prakash
#
And I just wanted to add to what you said, you know, yeah, you know, it's not just, is
#
it, is it very much a Devdas film?
#
It's also one of the most interesting Devdas films we've had, because it may be the only
#
one where across the many Indian cultures, where the man is not laying this heavy guilt
#
trip on the woman who, you know, who doesn't reciprocate his, you know, so one of the moving
#
things about that film for me is the relationship, the fact that the Bachchan character, even
#
though Rakhi, the Rakhi character, if you want to call her the Paro, Paro-like figure,
#
she doesn't, you know, it's unrequited love, she doesn't reciprocate.
#
He never stops feeling grateful to her and beholden to her, in a sense, because of, at
#
a purely platonic level, what she did for him when he was a child.
#
And that devotion is always there, that acknowledgement is there.
#
It doesn't really, it doesn't devolve into, you know, I'm the angsty male who's been rebuffed
#
and I'm going to put this major guilt trip on the woman, it doesn't turn into that.
#
So it's quite an unusual Devdas in that sense.
#
Prakash Mehra, by the way, along with Kadar Khan, he used to make a Bachchan film only
#
to put some dialogues, I think.
#
I mean, there's this film called Lavares, I mean, all of us, you know, mere angne mein
#
Lavares toh sometimes I think is just a vehicle for Kadar Khan to, you know, just take a,
#
you know, just dalo yaar, dialogues dalo.
#
You know, Amitabh is standing in a queue.
#
This is like the daily wage labourer kind of guy, you go there, the Munimji, always
#
you news per ways, there isn't character, he's sitting there, right?
#
And when Amitabh reaches there, that guy asks the naam, so Amitabh says, hira.
#
And that guy says, bap ka naam, Amitabh says, kaam main karunga hai mera bap?
#
There's the other one, where he says, there's some, you know, reference to, you won't,
#
you sudar jao or something, he says, right, there's this Ranjeet character to Amitabh.
#
So he says, apan wo kutte ka pooj ki tarah hai, bara saal ek nadhi mein dalo, nadhi
#
teda ho jayega, but pooj sida nahi ho gaya.
#
On that note, let's go in for a quick break, but before we do so, a question for my listeners
#
and you'll get the answer on the other side of the break, which is that there is a certain
#
subset of films starring Amitabh Bachchan and Pran, in which the character plays by
#
Pran dies, but the character plays by Amitabh does not.
#
So you know, what phrase would you use for that subset of films?
#
We'll see you after a short break.
#
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and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
#
Welcome back to the scene in the unseen.
#
I'm sitting, I'm chatting with Jai Arjun Singh and Subrata Mohanty and the answer to the question
#
of that subset of films where the character plays by Pran dies with the character plays
#
by Amitabhji doesn't die is Pran Jai Par Bachanna Jai.
#
Having got that out of the way, there are two, there are a couple of films that I can think
#
of from the top of my mind.
#
Well, one I think is Dawn.
#
The other one is a movie called Majboor where Amitabh has this brain tumor.
#
But she doesn't, but he goes to the jail because he has to do something, whatever Farida Jalal
#
But there also, I think Pran is there and eventually Pran dies, Bachanna doesn't.
#
And in Dawn, one Bachanna dies, but the other one doesn't.
#
So Pran Jai, Ek Bachanna Rahe, Ek Bachanna Jai.
#
That's too complicated.
#
Yeah, it reminds me of that, you know, Sushant Singh Rajput and quantum theory.
#
You guys know about that, right?
#
You don't know about this.
#
Jai doesn't know about this.
#
So I don't know about anything that happened post 1940.
#
By the way, we are a free country.
#
But do you still have a Maibab state?
#
I mean, I don't know if you're a free country.
#
So basically one of the conspiracy theories around Sushant Singh Rajput's death was that
#
he was into quantum mechanics apparently.
#
And he once tweeted about some phenomenon in quantum mechanics where an atom is split
#
Two versions of the same atom, some shit like that.
#
So the theory was that he had used that Sushant to split himself into two.
#
And the one who died was a duplicate Sushant Singh Rajput.
#
And the real one was still alive.
#
And then there are different versions of this theory.
#
But the one I remember is that he was in hiding because Adityanath was looking for him because
#
he had invented the treatment for COVID or some shit like that.
#
It's, I'll just link it.
#
So if it sounds plausible, I hope his fans start a giant movement to address this.
#
Kronenberg ko bolo yare, banayega kuch.
#
Kronenberg banayega kuch.
#
So my next question comes from that, you know, interesting point you raised, Subrata, about,
#
you know, that when you're watching a film, it's not just what you are bringing to it,
#
but you're also thinking about the director's intentionality.
#
Now I had this conversation with Varun in my episode with him, which you haven't heard
#
because it's not released, but it will be released well before yours, of course, where
#
I asked him about the ending of Masaan, right?
#
And the film, of course, and I, since I've already given the spoiler away in my episode
#
with Varun, I can just do it again.
#
But essentially there are these two parallel tracks of these two people who have loved
#
and lost in different ways.
#
And at the end they are on the steps at the ghats of the river.
#
And that's the first time you see them in one frame.
#
And it's a beautiful moment.
#
And I would have ended the film there.
#
Now how a typical Bollywood treatment of the film would have been is that you show them
#
talking, coming together, all kinds of things happen, they get married happily ever after.
#
Basically you spell everything out.
#
The way Neeraj and Varun treated it is that they talk to each other briefly and they get
#
on a boat and then the boat sails away.
#
And then there's a song where the first two lines of the lyric indicates something to
#
the effect of life not ending, the world continuing, which spells it out a little more than I would
#
have, but in an allusive way.
#
And it's not as the Bollywood kind of thing.
#
And I, of course, as you know, Jay, we discussed it last time, I sort of have a bias towards
#
being allowed to think for myself and not being spoon-fed in the typical Bollywood way
#
would be spoon-fed you in every way, show you everything that happens, put background
#
music that forces you to feel in a particular way, all of that.
#
And I remember, Jay, you pointed out that one of my favorite films, Moonlight, actually
#
does have a lot of interesting background music happening, which therefore seems to
#
go against what I'm saying.
#
So I'm wondering if it is simply a question of taste or is it the case that as you watch
#
more and more movies, you sort of, you know, sometimes you might be in the state of mind
#
where you're completely passive.
#
But I mean, there seems to be a continuum along complete passivity where you're not
#
thinking for yourself and a little bit of involvement where you are using your own imagination
#
and putting two and two together.
#
And it seems to me that, and perhaps as my bias speaking, but that the more powerful
#
kind of art is where you allow the reader or the viewer to be a participant in the sense
#
of that and, you know, not kind of spoon-feed them.
#
And that changes the nature of the art that plays to what the viewer might be wanting
#
What are your feelings about this?
#
I feel like there are different ways of being a participant.
#
If you remember the film, how would you have ended it by the way?
#
I was fine with the way it ended.
#
But I thought just I would have pulled it back just a little bit even more.
#
But I mean, it's a great film.
#
I was fine with the way.
#
I mean, I actually watched it when it came out and didn't remember it very clearly.
#
But then you described this quite vividly just now.
#
I sort of agree that that for that film, for given what the film had already been for this
#
entire duration, it would have been a big misstep to turn it into a Bollywoodized, as
#
you put it, spoon-feeding sort of ending.
#
That would have been a that wouldn't have worked for me at all for this film, for this
#
I don't know what you suggested, what you proposed.
#
I suppose that could work also.
#
It would obviously be be even more subtle and spare could have worked.
#
The thing is that I don't actually sort of remember the experience of Masaan very clearly
#
But I think I think definitely not the hyper Bollywoodized version that that would definitely
#
not have worked for that film.
#
What I was saying was that there are different ways of being a participant also right now.
#
You know, when I get your point about spoon-feeding or about, you know, an insistent music score
#
underlining things seeming to play your emotions, seeming to sort of tell you what to feel.
#
But and again, I suppose this maybe this is different for different types of viewers.
#
The point about moonlighting, moonlight, by the way, was that that I felt like like it
#
had a lovely, lush music score.
#
It could entirely I haven't gone back to see the film a second time.
#
It could entirely be that that that maybe when I was watching it, for some reason, for
#
whatever reason, the score just sort of, you know, just imposed itself on me or I paid
#
extra attention to it, whereas objectively speaking, it may not even have been a very
#
It was just the right score for that film.
#
But I liked it so much that it that that it played a part, especially in the dialogue
#
less portions of the film, such as the swimming pool scene, things like that.
#
It affected me and and maybe you watched it and the music didn't even sort of feel insistent
#
So so it's two different people responding to it.
#
To come back to what I was saying, I think even a film that that might seem to you to
#
be a case of a lot of spoon feeding the viewer, just making the viewer passive, as you say,
#
and you know, and just the film constantly telling you what to do.
#
There is a part of participative process in that as well.
#
Now, you know, if you look at if I look at some of my favorite masala Hindi films of
#
a past era, including the big brassy musical numbers and things, I feel like I'm participating
#
If I if I see a lovely song sequence that I'm really enjoying with a big star or three
#
big stars, all on the screen, I feel like I like I am, you know, just just by virtue
#
of enjoying the way it's done, the the the stars on the screen, my own projections of
#
all these people are Bachchan, Vinod Khanna, Rishi Kapoor, Rishi Kapoor, whatever.
#
I feel like I am there.
#
Some part of me, some, you know, some closet extroverted boisterous part of me is up there
#
with them, you know, perhaps performing with them, you know, just defeating the villains
#
through the power of song or whatever.
#
So that is a different sort of participation as well.
#
It's not just like to me, at least it's not like I'm just sitting back in the seat and,
#
you know, and Manmohan Desai is just sort of feeding me mishti doi or whatever.
#
And then I'm just sort of just gulping it down without without thinking about it, which
#
is one of the reasons why I get a little defensive when people use words like mindless, mindless
#
entertainment for for mainstream films.
#
Because to me or when they say, oh, you know, by the default assumption is that with a Manmohan
#
Desai film, you know, you just sort of you're just it's it doesn't require you can sort
#
of watch it leaving your brains at home or whatever.
#
I need my brain for everything.
#
I mean, I'd be very afraid of misplacing it and I need to have it in here for every sort
#
of experience, whether it's the Tarkovsky experience or the Manmohan Desai experience.
#
There are different forms of engagement.
#
And I don't really I've never seen myself as a passive viewer with any film that I've
#
truly enjoyed, no matter what category of film it is.
#
Image of Manmohan Desai spoon feeding you is won't leave my mind for a while.
#
It would be the Sarah Lack in 1978.
#
I don't know what Manmohan Ji would have made of that.
#
But but by your point, I mean, in a sense, everything is spoon feeding to an extent because
#
every choice has been made for a reason.
#
Whether it's here or not, that itself has been made for a reason.
#
And I guess it's a question of degrees and quibbling and, you know, all of that.
#
Subrata, what's your take on it?
#
Because you watch the because you are a lover of both the most overstated Bollywood films
#
as well as the most understated and quote unquote realistic international films.
#
How do like do you have to mode shift from one to the other to appreciate them as they're
#
meant to be appreciated or how does it work?
#
Yeah, so I think, you know, just picking on picking up from where Jay left, one of the
#
things that should be there is just the within the film itself, it should have, you know,
#
So that it should not be uneven within the film, because that's then you know that you
#
are in for this experience and the director is giving you all of that.
#
And he's not, you know, thematically not, you know, sort of going in different directions
#
And I think that's very important because then you can enjoy it, you know, just as a
#
So like Jay mentioned on Masaan, you were watching a certain sensibility right through
#
the film and therefore the ending could not have been a different one and maybe you could
#
quibble about, could they have pulled back a little bit more?
#
I think where they left it was in some sense still consistent with the overall sensibility
#
And then therefore Manmohan Desai is completely consistent, right?
#
And therefore not mindless at all.
#
I mean, you know, people don't appreciate, there was a time in 76, four Manmohan Desai
#
films were running at the same time.
#
I don't know when the guy made those four films to get, I think there was Chacha Bhatija,
#
Parvarezh, Amaragbharanthi and Dharambir.
#
So it was at that time, it would have been 77.
#
So all four films and you know, it was like a combination of characters, I mean, it was
#
same, there was Amitabh, there was Vinod Khanna, somewhere there was Dharmendra, somewhere
#
there was Randhir Kapoor and Dharmendra, Chacha Bhatija.
#
So I had all different films.
#
I remember watching these films at different times in my life, you know, mostly mid to
#
late 80s and much later I realized the guy was making all these four films simultaneously.
#
And all great entertaining films, I mean, I mean, Parvarezh is all these, you know,
#
one, it's like nature nurture, one brother, other brother, all those kinds of stuff happening.
#
Chacha Bhatija is complete sort of, you know, two tricksters and things of that kind.
#
So and in within themselves, they are fully consistent.
#
The other point is there is some, there is some cultural context to, you know, where
#
the film is being made and who's watching it.
#
And I sometimes think that while there is a lot of universal sort of thing about watching
#
a good film, good cinema everywhere, I mean, a good cinema being good cinema everywhere.
#
So a good example of this is this, you know, this Man, Woman and Child, this Eric Segal's
#
book, and then that was made into a film and Shekhar Kapoor made it into Masoom.
#
Had he kept that ending of Man, Woman and Child in India, it would have been, you know,
#
it was not a mega box office hit, but it was a very well received popular film.
#
But I mean, again, this is 40 years back, so no spoilers here.
#
So, you know, in the original book, the Jugal Hansraj character doesn't stay back.
#
He is sent off to the, you know, the boarding school, although the mother, you know, accepts
#
the fact that he's there, but he goes back.
#
Whereas in the, in Masoom, they accept Jugal Hansraj and he stays back as part of the family
#
and I think, you know, that you could not have done that.
#
And maybe in the US, Indian ending would have felt ki yeh kuch zyada kar diya, yaar aisa
#
Whereas in India, we needed that at the end, that emotional sort of closure, I mean, I
#
would not have accepted that film if they would have sent him back.
#
But you would have thought about it more after it was over.
#
Maybe, but I would have been so disgusted with the idea that they sent him back.
#
Because I mean, you know, at different times in that film, you're so invested in the, in
#
that boy and you know, his story and everything.
#
You didn't want anything bad to happen.
#
I mean, I remember that film, even I think I watched it five, six years back, not the
#
whole film, there was something was happening and just watching it.
#
There is a particular scene at the later part, in the later part of the film where this young
#
juggal actually, you know, cuts his hand with a knife.
#
And he winces in pain and immediately runs.
#
But he knows that he's not having, you know, Shabana's sympathy in any case.
#
And Shabana looks at him.
#
He wants to tell her, but then he knows that he will get no sympathy.
#
So he just puts his hand behind and doesn't tell that he's actually cut his hand.
#
I mean, it really broke my heart even after so many years while watching that.
#
Uske baad agar usko bhej doge, I would have never accepted the film.
#
So I think there are certain choices which some of the directors will have to offer based
#
on just what they think is right for themselves because they are part of a particular milieu.
#
They have grown up in a particular cultural context and they know their audience.
#
And in some of them, I think we will be different.
#
And therefore, there is some merit in saying that Indian films will be of a certain kind.
#
I mean, some of us, maybe you, Amit, might not otherwise have that Indian sensibility
#
in general because of the, you know, some of your, you know, past, et cetera, but logon
#
Well, I think there's also within India, there are just so many cultures and subcultures
#
You know, I mean, it's, it also depends on the type of film we're talking about.
#
Masoom is actually a somewhat difficult to classify film in some ways, but broadly speaking,
#
it is from a tradition of the dramatic, the emotion soaked film, even though it's got
#
Nasir and Shabana in it, and it was made in, made in that period.
#
But around the same time, the stuff that Shyam Venugul was making or Govind Nalani was making
#
was, of course, from representative over different Indian aesthetic or sensibility.
#
And of course, that's without even getting into the, all the, the many non-Indian, the
#
many non-Hindi films from around the country.
#
So of course, that's, that's, and today, of course, as you know, there's, there's so many
#
different types of Indian films or web series or whatever, from the 200 crore blockbusters
#
that we, that we think of as sort of catering to the lowest common denominator or whatever,
#
to the, the Indy film, to the, the South Indian films, the whatever, it's just, there's just
#
So, so I'm not sure there really is such a thing as an Indian film in the, in that sense
#
I mean, see the, like, for instance, some of our early, whatever you call it, this parallel
#
cinema movement guys, right, Mani Kaul, Kumar Sahani kind of characters, greatly influenced
#
by, especially by Bresson, I have also seen Pickpocket, you know, Gadhe Ka Kahani, that
#
Ohazad Balthazar was a damn good film, I'm very offended, but anyway, chalo, theek.
#
And baby donkeys are pretty much the cutest animals there are.
#
I have no experience with baby donkeys, but it's okay, okay, okay.
#
But then Mani Kaul comes back and makes, you know, Uski Roti or Ashaan.
#
Can I quickly disturb you, sorry, to tell you this great story by a former guest on
#
So Naren Shanoi has a story that around the time Mani Kaul Ki Uski Roti came out, they
#
had got a TV in the house or antenna upar tha, but kabhi-kabhi there would be a storm
#
and then people would have to go and they would have to mess around with the antenna
#
So Mani Kaul Ki Uski Roti TV pe aayi, I assume it was one of these Tosca things, that ki
#
ke film aayi abhi toh dekhne hai, and so they sat down, they're watching the film and suddenly
#
Toh a few seconds pass, the screen is frozen, toh immediately boy is dispatched upstairs,
#
uncle is leaning out of the window, the boy is moving the antenna here and there and shouting,
#
theek hua ki nahi hai and uncle is saying, nahi thora left try karo, thora right try
#
After half an hour they discover antenna ka fault nahi tha, TV ka fault nahi tha, it
#
So ki Mani Kaul ki uski banayi, and all I remember of Uski Roti is that the sound was
#
out of sync at one point and I asked my father what's going on because I must have been watching
#
it with him back then and he was like, no, no, this is a film, you're supposed to appreciate
#
You shouldn't have called the antenna guy, you should have called Kaul, better call Kaul.
#
No, but very quickly, sorry, we are just going on interrupting you Subrath, but that reminds
#
me of watching Godav's Pere Le Fu at Plaza Cinema in Delhi back in the 90s and very poor
#
projection generally the International Film Festival of India was going on.
#
But because this is a Godav film and we were all primed for, we had seen Godav films, at
#
one point the screen sort of just goes completely out of whack, it becomes like a split screen
#
with part of it going down and the bottom half going to the top half, etc.
#
And we sat there for two minutes, sort of around 80% sure it was deliberate.
#
It was part of the film, just sitting with this sort of this hallowed sort of expression
#
It's the reverse Narayan Shanoi story.
#
And then of course it got corrected and then it became became a very sort of very standard
#
In Godav there was himself watching that and thinking, hmm, that's what I should have done.
#
This would have been better.
#
This would have been better.
#
Anyway, I mean, the point is, oh, you watch Kumar Shani's Maya Darpan or Uski Roti Aashadka
#
or whatever, I mean, it's difficult to have that in the Indian context.
#
I think there was something happening then in France, maybe that kind of stuff was even
#
I mean, you could watch it and you knew maybe there is something happening here, but you
#
know, whatever Shyam Benegal was doing and even what Minal Sen was doing, they were doing
#
I mean, the early seventies, you know, Benegal just was starting off and Minal Sen had possibly
#
the Calcutta trilogy at that time.
#
I mean, you didn't have to do what Bresma was doing in India with this.
#
You could still make good films.
#
I mean, I never understood that phase, for instance.
#
I can watch an interview of Minal Sen or whatever, Calcutta 71, I mean, but, you know, watching
#
Uski Roti again is very tough, I mean, not very tough, I'll never watch it again.
#
So I think there is some, something is there, I mean, I don't know, there is some aspect
#
of storytelling, et cetera, that appeals to us.
#
No, no, I have to also say, you know, much as I like to, it's like a confession time
#
in a way, much as I like to, and I also take pride in the fact that I love many different
#
types of films, you know, across a very wide spectrum.
#
There are certain filmmakers that I find very difficult even today, and I mean, I find Tarkovsky
#
difficult and I wish I didn't because I really sort of feel like, you know, there's a part
#
of me that, you know, with a couple of his films, there's a part of me that does manage
#
to click into the admire the film without quite liking it mode.
#
But that's not a mode I like to be in, because I feel like it's a bit pretentious then, you
#
know, and it comes back to what you said that, you know, you need to sort of, to some degree
#
trust your initial, you know, experience of something and let it wash over, you know,
#
so, you know, what would I do if I were asked to sit and write a piece about Ivan's childhood
#
I mean, honestly, if I sort of, you know, in some very detached cerebral way, I appreciated
#
the film, appreciated that here is a serious artist doing, you know, realizing his vision,
#
but at an emotional level, it really didn't work for me.
#
I was sort of befuddled by it, a little bored by it.
#
How do I write about it?
#
It is a question that even today, you know, after more than 20 years of being a professional
#
writer, I don't really know the answer to.
#
So, these things are, you know, you can spend a lifetime watching films, thinking about
#
them, engaging with them, but there are always questions that will be unanswered about the
#
watching experience and the sort of viewer that you are and how to deal with a particular
#
I think on Tarkovsky, I mean, the only film that, I mean, I've gone through the same
#
Tell us a legend has reached to you that you have to appreciate this, so you have not organically
#
So, I think the only thing that, the only film where I could sort of get in fully was
#
Because there was a, you know, story to it and I think a large part of that credit is
#
to that Stanislavski Lem, I think that was the writer who wrote the original science
#
So, you could figure that thing out, right?
#
After that, you know, Andrew Rublev or Mirror or something, I mean, ho raha hai, kuch mahan
#
kaam dikh raha hai, but ho kya ho raha hai, chhoda fight hai, Mughle Azam dekhte hai.
#
So, jaha pe every dialogue is like, if I could say in three words, why not 30?
#
Zeenat Aman's father, by the way, script writer.
#
Zeenat Aman's father, Aman.
#
One of the scriptwriters.
#
I thought he was saying Stanislavski Lem was the father of Zeenat Aman.
#
That would have been quite a connection.
#
Nah, same, Mughle Azam, where three words would do, 30 would be used.
#
So, Subrath, let's, with a nod to linearity, if that's how you pronounce it, let's get
#
back to your sort of story where eventually, you know, you were one of the driving forces
#
behind passion for cinema at one point in time, you got in with the filmmaking crowd
#
of that time and you wanted to make movies yourself.
#
So, tell me a little bit about that, tell us a little bit about that.
#
Just to set the record straight, driving force would be a huge exaggeration of what I was
#
I mean, they were, I mean, just to go back to some of the origin story of that, and for
#
those who came in late, passion for cinema was a blogging site where a lot of people
#
came in and wrote about cinema with somewhat of a laissez-faire sort of attitude to quality
#
So, initially we were like, okay, no, we'll be a bit, you know, the original plan of course
#
for any of this is Kaheya's do such cinema, ye hi banaye ki hai, phir wahan se wo mayapuri
#
But, I mean, the initial thing was, you know, there was a guy who was writing on cinema
#
sitting in the US, went by the sort of name Oz, and then a few other people started sort
#
of, you know, commenting on his blog and then, you know, things came together and then, you
#
know, the idea was we'll do something called passion for cinema.
#
And I think, you know, both of you, I used to follow both of your blogs at that time.
#
It was a moment for blogging in India, right, with everyone doing something interesting
#
in that, I think the two of you, there was Sepia Mutiny and we used to follow all of
#
So, we, seven, eight of us initially started writing and everyone had a particular niche.
#
My kind of niche was sort of humorous take on sort of social issues through the lens
#
of some old Hindi film or song or something and then do random connections in between
#
Pyaasa and some other, you know, film and then I used to have this sort of a, you know,
#
character called Professor, you know, who would answer questions of people and so somebody
#
would ask a question on what is noir and the professor, I mean, it would all be sort of
#
laced with some kind of humor and, you know, that kind of stuff.
#
But, you know, seven, eight of us would write and then what happened was just because that
#
there was that kind of a platform, that platform was gaining salience, some people started
#
coming in and writing and one of the big names, not big then, but clearly someone who had
#
a point of view at that point in time was Anurag Kashyap who came in and started writing.
#
So, he had his own corner and, you know, he came and wrote firstly about the making of
#
Black Friday and just the fact that it wasn't released for a long period of time and he
#
wrote it really well, I mean, just the, you could feel the angst of a person who has made
#
something good but was not getting a release and if you sort of combine it with the fact
#
that Panch was not released as well before that, I think it touched a sort of, you know,
#
chord with a whole lot of people.
#
So, you know, just started getting a large number of people reading it and then since
#
all of us were also writing stuff, you know, people started engaging with other content
#
and then it just took off, I mean, you know, by the sort of 6th or the 7th month, we were
#
getting more than a million page views and stuff, I mean, we would then sort of write
#
in started, at least I am always ready to play to the gallery, start writing stuff so
#
that you could get 100 comments and you know, those became metrics ki kyaise likhe hain
#
taaki 100 comments mila hai, complete Manmohun Desai at heart, so I started, so it was great
#
fun and then, you know, because of Anurag, others started coming in, you know, gradually
#
you had, you know, Navdeep, Sudhir Mishra, you know, and then, you know, people would
#
write about some of their iconic work and how that got made, so it just started becoming
#
a bit of, you know, history, process of filmmaking and we started running a one minute short
#
festival, people would upload their short films and someone, Anurag and others would
#
judge it, some of the guys who won that then would get an internship with Anurag and some
#
of them became big, you know, and so that whole thing between 2007 to 2009 was just
#
phenomenally, you know, energizing, I mean, and there was just so much of talent coming
#
in and maybe it was always the case that Bombay was attracting some kind of talent, but you
#
know, just that platform made it somewhat more democratic than what it was in the past,
#
in the past, you would stand outside famous studio, Mabub studio, RK studio, bribe the
#
watchman and then go in and have a cup of tea and try and, you know, get an audience,
#
but here, you know, somebody could come in, do something, write a good, I mean, there
#
have been cases of that kind, right, people would come, write something good, write two-three
#
times and something and then Anurag would say, let's have a Bombay meetup and then
#
people would land up there and some two other filmmakers or young filmmakers would come
#
and then two of them would click and this guy would start assisting him, which is exactly
#
what happened with Neeraj, for instance, it's exactly how Varun possibly wrote a few things
#
and got in and a lot of other cases, I mean, the early, in the early days, Chaitanya Tamhane,
#
all these people were there, Rajkumar, what's Rajkumar's full name, not the guy who made
#
no one kill Jessica, I forget the name, I'm getting a bullet in my head, Rajkumar Gupta,
#
but you know, you know, my taste, Rajkumar Kohli, very sad, very sad, Rajkumar Kohli,
#
by the way, Amit, if you have, have you seen the Rajkumar Kohli Canon, any movie of that
#
Name the movies, I may not have seen, I've seen Nagin for sure, Nagin was with Sridevi
#
Rina Roy, Rina Roy, Rina Roy, lots of people, but I think I might have seen it also, it's
#
not Nigahe, which was the one in which Sridevi was a snake, Nagina, that was Nagina, Nagina
#
is a slightly, I mean, Shani Dushman with Sanjeev Kumar as a werewolf, spoiler, spoiler, I haven't
#
seen that, but Sanjeev Kumar as a werewolf, I mean, quite a chilled out werewolf, Sanjeev
#
Kumar as a werewolf, only preying on young Dulhans, yaar iski method acting kaisa garte
#
honge log, how do you prepare for this?
#
You don't ask when American werewolf in whatever, after this conversation Amit is going to go
#
and cleanse himself by watching Decalogue, the whole Kislaviske, three colours, red, blue,
#
white, double life of Ben and Nick, sab dekh raha hai, maza kurao, maza kurao, aur kurao,
#
so haan, so you were saying, so yeah, so then, you know, we used to have meetups and there
#
was, you know, this whole sort of, I mean, there was a certain, you know, what the French
#
call free song in the air, I mean, ho raha tha toh kuch, maza aara tha, people were bouncing
#
off ideas with one another, you know, people were getting breaks and stuff of that kind,
#
so I mean, my general sort of role in all of this was, like I've always seen myself
#
as a consumer than creator, but I sort of fancied that I could write a little bit reasonably
#
well and since others were doing stuff, so sometimes, yeah, the thought did cross my
#
mind ke kuch karte hain aisa, but you know, you should have a good, strong enough pull,
#
all my interest that I had in films and everything, I just never was pulled strongly enough.
#
The pull you mean your internal desire?
#
My internal desire, because I mean, whatever work I was doing, I could see a lot of people
#
were not, they used to be deeply unsatisfied with just the regular work that they were
#
doing, which for whatever reason never happened to me, so could never go down that path eventually,
#
but I got to know a lot of these people, peripherally, sometimes directly, and a lot of them in the
#
course of the next three, four years after that, and then, you know, the passion for
#
cinema had to shut down because like most good things, creative people together, then
#
they started fighting, the whole idea was at the core of it, should we be controlling
#
for quality on what comes on the site or not, and which way should we go down, should we
#
start raising funds and funding our own independent cinema, all of these things happened, including
#
pitch books were made, some of my background in that was useful to raise funds to say that
#
we'll make our kinds of film and all of that, could have happened, something could have
#
happened if we went down that path, because there was just reasonably talented people
#
in the mix, but you know, there was always, I mean, whatever, ego battles and stuff, so
#
after three years or so, it shut down, four years almost, but those four years were very
#
good, I mean, quite exhilarating, and I think in some ways, in whatever small way, I think
#
it contributed a fair amount to Indian films, at least I can name 15 or 20 people today
#
who have come out of passion for cinema, who actually are directly involved in the Indie
#
cinema, whatever in Bollywood, and doing fairly good work, so, and a lot of film critics also,
#
some of their early work was there, I remember, I mean, I don't want to name them, but a lot
#
of them started writing first on the PFC site, so that was my brush with the Varsova crowd,
#
I kept in touch, I still am in touch, although it's becoming more and more distant, many
#
of them have done so well that it's difficult to sometimes find time, you know, I've also
#
kind of moved and, you know, in my career, so it's tough.
#
Looking back, I think, you know, there was a, it would have shut down on its own, blogging
#
was a certain point in time kind of a thing, phenomena, and Twitter was already there and
#
it was starting to disrupt this, but maybe if we had transitioned onto something as a
#
platform with funding and stuff of that kind, we could have had, we could have done something,
#
we could have been contenders.
#
But for me, that was a lot of my, you know, bachpan ka all the sapna and everything of
#
being on a film set, you know, meeting people who actually do make films, I think, I mean,
#
I could never imagine that this was possible, although I must tell you that in the first
#
year or so, when I came to Bombay, the Kida was so strong that I did all the stuff.
#
I went and met Babbar Subhash, B. Subhash, who directed movies like Disco Dancer Tarzan,
#
I mean, I just love the guy, I'm just, so I went and met him, I have like all kinds
#
of stories of meeting him, I somehow found my way into catching up with Bappi Lahari,
#
I mean, there's dance, dance, kasam paida karne wale ki, and these are like, you know,
#
people later, I mean, it sort of became like, you should like them, because it's one kind,
#
I genuinely watched these films with full interest.
#
I have to say, Dance Dance was actually one of the films of my childhood.
#
I don't think I've ever said this in public before, or written about it, but it was, yeah,
#
no, no, just, I think it's just lots of memories attached to it during a summer spent in Bombay
#
when I was pretty unwell for a large part of this vacation.
#
But listening to, listening to songs and dialogues from it on radio, which kept playing for some
#
reason in Bombay, before I actually came back to Delhi and watched the film and I enjoyed
#
it and it felt like I already knew it.
#
So, I mean, I think I've mentioned this to a lot of my friends, et cetera, so Dance Dance
#
has my sort of a single line, which is my life's philosophy.
#
So there is this, early in the film, I mean, this is, Dance Dance is a story of Mithun,
#
you know, as a child, I mean, their parents are sort of killed off by Amrish Puri.
#
And because they go to Amrish Puri's mansion and they start, and they are like dancers
#
and singers and Amrish Puri takes fancy to the woman and then he knocks off both of them
#
And so Mithun and his sister, who turns out to be Smitha Patil later, they are left on
#
their own in Bombay and so then they have to sort of make a living.
#
So they start dancing in Chowpatty, Mithun starts dancing and, you know, people put money
#
and stuff and then there is a Halwawala who comes in and then the Halwawala gives them
#
I've never seen on a Bombay Chowpatty Halwawala ever, but you know, it's tribute to Babbar
#
Subhash that he could think of Halwawala.
#
Not just that he thought of Halwawala, he even decided that he will put a Halwawala
#
song in it and that became the iconic song called Aagaya Aagaya Halwawala Aagaya.
#
And somewhere in that film, just at that early stage, this Smitha Patil older sister character
#
tells Mithun that, agar tujhe halwa khaana hai, to tujhe naajna hoga, dance, dance.
#
And that's when the thing comes on screen, dance, dance.
#
And I'm like, yeah, this makes sense ki agar tujhe halwa khaana hain.
#
It's as good a life philosophy as anything, dance, dance was also that the rare heartwarming
#
film of the eighties where Shakti Kapoor finds redemption at the end.
#
Yeah, because Shakti Kapoor and Mithun are part of a dancing troupe and like the first
#
20-30 minutes after they grow up, I think Babbar Subhash, I have a feeling he had just
#
watched Saturday Night Fever and Grease.
#
So these guys were doing that stuff.
#
So Shakti Kapoor was doing that because Shakti Kapoor was part of the dancing troupe.
#
So yeah, so that was that.
#
I mean, including Babbar Subhash in Tarzan.
#
So Tarzan is this Kimi Katkar debut and initially there is this group who's going into some
#
African jungle because they know that there is a Tarzan there and they want to catch him
#
because they want to put him in a circus and make money off him.
#
So how do they know that there is a Tarzan?
#
In the initial part of the movie, it's established that they're watching some Doordarshan news
#
and the news reader says, yeh wo jungle hai, aur yahan pe aaye din Tarzan paya jaata hain.
#
Ek Tarzan paya jaata hain.
#
Anyway, so I had to meet him, but anyway, going back.
#
What was meeting him like?
#
I mean, what did you want?
#
I just said, I've grown up watching a film and everything and he was very, they don't
#
get irony and not that I was coming at it that way.
#
And they, I mean, many of these guys I've met, they immediately start talking about
#
how they did it and what were the challenges.
#
And he was going in Goa one day, he was stopped at the signal and he saw a girl and a boy
#
and then he thought, what if these people, Michael Jackson had become very famous, he
#
says, agar ek Michael Jackson ban jaa hai to.
#
So one of the things I learned there is that for them, it is as much a passion, craft,
#
everything as it is for some otter or whatever you might call them.
#
Because he's seeing it that way.
#
In fact, you realize he's not seeing it as you think very commercially as well.
#
I mean, that was my sort of moment of understanding that, I mean, yeah, I mean, it should be commercially
#
successful, but I think he's as commercially inclined as somebody else who's possibly
#
making a film because it's great art.
#
At a certain level, I sense that.
#
I mean, it's not a cynical exercise.
#
It's not a cynical exercise, deeply invested, thinking ki aisa karo to kaisa hoga, isko
#
So, I mean, at one level, you can laugh at disco dancer that, you know, that guy Pinchu
#
Kapoor and Karan Razdan find some guy in London, yeh duniya ka sabse achha disco dancer killer
#
Isne chaar disco dancer ko maara hai.
#
That's like, you know, I can imagine that LinkedIn profile.
#
Well, around the same time that this film was being made, Jaane Bhi Do Yaro had this
#
disco killer, played by the young Anupam Kher, which of course never sort of made it to the
#
But that again was a fairly similar concept, this is a short sighted character who goes
#
around with a Sony Walkman in his ears and shoots people while listening to music and
#
Mai yeh soch raha hai ki, if your future profession is going to be disco dancer killer, what are
#
Like, are you like hand breaker of breakdown, sir, or, you know, anyway, sorry to continue
#
No, anyway, so the broader point Amit is, I mean, before that, before coming into the
#
passion for cinema kind of circle and meeting these people, I mean, I had paid my homage
#
to a lot of these things by being at those places where these famous films, you know,
#
You know, I don't know, maybe you folks who've lived in Bombay long or who were in Bombay
#
before, I mean, you know, just going down that marine drive the first time.
#
And if you're a film fan or you've watched films, you know, it's a different feeling.
#
I mean, pehli baar, you've seen this so many times, you've seen this in leke pehla pehla
#
pyaar, bharke aakho mein kawaar, from then Devanand walking down marine drive, to Amitabh
#
rote huye aate hain sab, to in Rajni Gandha, kai baar yun hi dekha hai, jo mann ki seema
#
rekha hai, to you know, Rimjhim Gireya Sawant, I mean, there are, it's like, the first time
#
I came into Bombay, and the first time I went to Nariman Point, in fact, my office was at
#
Express Tars, and I, you know, before reaching office itself, I was like, you know, I was
#
overwhelmed, because there are just so many scenes that, you know, you have seen the same
#
But I did all of that, and I went to different places, RK studios and stuff like that, but
#
passion for cinema became a medium where I could actually directly interact with people,
#
see the shoots and everything.
#
So, I mean, somehow, it also took away something, once you demystify the thing, it becomes somewhat
#
less- The making of the sausage.
#
It somewhat becomes less magical.
#
In fact, there is a thing that from 2012, 2013, 2014, the intensity with which I would
#
follow cinema, etc., started, you know, ebbing.
#
Maybe that was also because of other things in life, you know, having a family and things
#
of that kind, but, and now it is definitely, it's not at the level that it was 10, 12 years
#
back, and sometimes I regret that I've lost something by not being so deeply passionate
#
But to what extent do you think you're deciding that no, I don't want to be a filmmaker?
#
One you've pointed out, the pull was not so strong, but also the push would not have been
#
strong because you were doing well in your career, and beyond a point, it obviously didn't
#
make sense to give this up for that.
#
And how much of a factor is that trade-off?
#
Because I imagine anybody who wants to be a filmmaker, there's, both of these matter.
#
One the pull can be so intensely strong that you are like, I can't do anything else in
#
But if the pull is not strong, the push could still be strong in the sense that your job
#
could suck so bad, or you're so fed up in your family business, or you're so fucking
#
useless at other things that you have no job, that you're saying, okay, I'll do this.
#
And the opportunity cost is not that high, as it were.
#
So how much of a factor do you think that was, and do you sometimes go back to that
#
where there's a fork in the road and think of the road not taken?
#
I mean, there are, firstly, I know people who, had they not come into films, would have
#
almost possibly died, in the sense that they would have just not been able to do anything
#
That was never the case with me.
#
And therefore, that itself solves for the problem.
#
The second is, of course, how badly you feel trapped in whatever you're doing.
#
And some of that, how badly you feel trapped in what you're doing is a matter of pull also.
#
But sometimes, like you said, the opportunity cost is nothing.
#
You feel so terrible in what you're doing, and maybe what you're doing, you're also
#
bad at it, that you go down that path.
#
I mean, I've never thought of that fork that often.
#
I mean, there are some other, sometimes I do feel writing something, maybe even just
#
a script or writing a book or something, I feel that if one had given some time to that,
#
I might have, I don't know whether I might have been good at it, but I think I would
#
have done something well, something good as part of doing that, getting into that.
#
All filmmaking, I don't know.
#
I think that phase has gone.
#
I don't regret or I don't have any what if kind of thinking in my mind.
#
At that point in time, for a period of time, it was there, but now it's gone, it's gone.
#
I think the writing thing is definitely going to come back.
#
Filmmaking, I don't know.
#
Like I said, the intensity with which I feel for cinema now is much lower than what it
#
So that's one of the things that I think is permanent almost now.
#
I don't think I will recover it.
#
That said, there are many, I mean, history is littered with examples of late bloomers
#
who did great work pretty late in their lives and perhaps the diminishing of intensity
#
may also come with a calmness of vision and a terror of that could also lead to something.
#
So I'll ask you another question and this in a sense is for both of you and partly because
#
you know many of the people that I'll ask about personally, but really to both of you
#
because you've also seen Indian cinema evolve.
#
You mentioned how passion for cinema at the start wanted to be like a Kayi-Yadu cinema.
#
So there's a great Andrew Cyrus quote about Andrei Bazin, who was one of the founders
#
of Kayi-Yadu cinema, and Cyrus wrote quote, Bazin was the antithesis of Russian film theorist
#
and director Sergei Eisenstein, who posited that film didn't become film until it was
#
sliced up and served montage style.
#
Eisenstein advocated for the collision of images and conflict of classes in films.
#
Bazin believed that film should be smooth and needn't be so socially weighty.
#
He felt that film should have a realism to them.
#
He focused on mise en scene as opposed to montage, stop quote.
#
And the sort of the progress that this indicates is, I think, also a way in which young filmmakers
#
would mature in the sense that when you first want to make a film, you're very conscious
#
of it being slick and maybe you're influenced by, you know, maybe Nolan as Jesse's today's
#
kids are or before that Tarantino and so on, and your style matters a lot for its own sake.
#
And at the same time, you want big ideas, you want weighty films, but I would imagine
#
that as time goes by and you mature, you don't necessarily want to do that anymore.
#
You just want to let stories tell themselves and, you know, you kind of move to a different
#
So you know, with the filmmakers you've known, for example, and you've known guys who've,
#
you know, made a journey and evolved a lot in their own way.
#
You know, for example, I love Chaitanya Tamane's work, I think he's just mind-blowingly good.
#
Must be one of the best first films ever made.
#
And equally, I think there was a phase where a lot of young directors would possibly have
#
been in the thrall of stylists and trying to, you know, make films in a particular kind
#
And, you know, maybe they would have grown, maybe they did grow, maybe the ecosystem changed
#
So what's your kind of sense of the journey that, you know, these filmmakers have made
#
and that films themselves have made in India?
#
I don't know about, I mean, of the recent sort of filmmakers, I don't know if I can
#
point to a particular filmmaker and their evolution, forget if, whether I know them
#
I mean, it is difficult, I can't immediately think of it.
#
In fact, the somewhat, some people have gone the other way, I mean, like, Deepakar.
#
Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking of.
#
For instance, was very good in his first couple of films, I mean, Ghosla Ka Ghosla was actually
#
a very smooth, full sort of a film and Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, which I think was a fantastic
#
film and, you know, much deeper than many things that came out and then...
#
But you know, if I can just interact for a bit, I think even between Ghosla Ka Ghosla
#
and Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, there's a vast, you know, difference in terms of the stylistic
#
binary that Amit was talking about just now.
#
Oye Lucky Lucky Oye is a much more fast paced film that draws attention to the nuts and
#
bolts of its construction.
#
Ghosla Ka Ghosla is more in the tradition of the Rishi Keshmukha Ji, Basu Chatterjee
#
middle cinema, where everything is at the service of storytelling.
#
And to my mind, I mean, I love Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, I like it better than Ghosla Ka Ghosla
#
and I think even something like LST, where Deepakar sort of then allowed himself to sort
#
of just get experimental and sort of bordering on avant-garde, you know, by the standards
#
But like you said, it represents a movement in the opposite direction from what Amit suggested
#
But again, I don't think it's, you know, it was to his detriment as a filmmaker, it
#
just meant that he was doing, he was trying different things out.
#
And I also wanted to just point out, I mean, I'll just let you get back to this since you
#
were talking, but I just want to point out that that that Bazen court is also was also
#
very sort of explicitly directed at these ideas that the Russians Eisenstein in particular
#
had about montage and the idea that that film acquires meaning only when different unrelated
#
images are placed next to each other, like the like the lions in the in the Odessa step
#
sequence and stuff like that.
#
Whereas what Bazen was doing, and this is still very early, relatively early in the
#
1940s or 50s, but Bazen was pointing to filmmakers like Renoir, etc, who were who didn't need
#
to use montage in that way, who very often had gliding cameras, long takes, but still
#
It was still very much cinema because because the camera was still choosing what what to
#
So a lot of editing and a lot of cuts was not required, but it was still a different
#
And I think, you know, the two, if you sort of, you know, the moving that binary to the
#
current day, 70 years later, I think it's it can sort of lead us down some, you know,
#
some to some very sweeping generalized statements about directors and their trajectories.
#
I think the Barker I'm glad that example came up because he really is, you know, in addition
#
to being a filmmaker of a certain certain quality, even even in his lesser work or whatever
#
we might agree his lesser work might be.
#
He's just done all sorts of things and he's and he hasn't his career in terms of what
#
he's done stylistically, his stylistic or formal choices has not followed any, you know,
#
clearly observable trajectory in either direction.
#
He's just sort of he just seems to sort of just just pick his subjects, subjects, his
#
his mode of storytelling and then go with it.
#
You know, so it's also a ghost like a ghost that can be followed by LSD, which can then
#
be followed by, again, a relatively straightforward narrative film like Shanghai and then something
#
like Byomkesh Bakshi, again, irrespective of what we think the quality of the films
#
is just talking about the the way they are filmed, the style of it.
#
So again, I think it's just, you know, if a filmmaker makes an honest decision based
#
on the subject that he has and how he feels he given his own sensibility, how he feels
#
that subject is best tackled, then I don't think one should sort of, you know, the really
#
really get judgmental in either direction about, you know, either the the Eisenstein
#
principle or the or the Bazian principle.
#
I guess what I was I agree with you.
#
I mean, like, for example, I think both Kurosawa and Ozu are just great, great filmmakers and
#
they are exactly the opposite approaches, Kurosawa choreographs everything and I mean,
#
I love Ozu a bit more, but I can see why they are great, great filmmakers.
#
But what I kind of meant was that when you initially become an artist of any sort, and
#
I see this with young writers also, that, you know, you'll get carried away by what
#
you can do with words so much that the style takes over the substance instead of being
#
Whereas in Kurosawa's case, of course, everything serves a film and what he's doing and there
#
is great style, but everything serves sort of the substance.
#
But before we get back to Subrata, I have a question for you, Jai, which is, is pronounced
#
Because Andre Bazian, so I thought I was being damn sophisticated, I'm saying Bazian
#
No, I just, I just go to the opposite sort of extreme of the inverse knob thing of pronouncing
#
a word as I see it, if I'm not, if I'm not sure.
#
Like a Punjabi, ascetic.
#
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
#
I'm sorry, let's hand the mic back to you.
#
I mean, I think I was actually going to come to the Ozu, Kurosawa, you know, in some sense,
#
you know, the difference.
#
And you know, you watch an Ozu film, actually, there is, it is, it is like that, it's like
#
a smooth film with, you know, lots of emotions.
#
And if you watch a Tokyo story, sometimes you're not like, it's not showy at all.
#
I mean, you watch your ashram and you know that there is something happening here, right?
#
But just as a viewer myself, over the years, I have started liking that, I mean, I, I like
#
the, I don't think I've watched it, but every, I mean, I'm sure this year, this time also
#
finally the results, Tokyo story, one, two, three, or something like that will be there.
#
Tell the listeners what you're talking about, results of what?
#
I think there is this, every 10 years, I think the last was 2012 and then so on and so forth,
#
they've gone back and this is 2022.
#
There's a UK magazine called Sight and Sound, where they poll film critics around the world
#
as well as directors around the world for their top 10 films, 10.
#
And then based on the votes, they come out with the top hundred.
#
And our man Jai is one of the critics.
#
I am very proud to announce that I have an Ozu on the list, but it is not Tokyo story.
#
And it's, it's, it's the second film in the so-called Noriko trilogy, early summer, which
#
I have a very special fondness for, partly because I really love the film and partly
#
one reason why Tokyo story is just sort of for just a, just an aside really, I tend not
#
to, you know, rate Tokyo story as highly as most people do is simply because I'm a huge
#
fan of a 1937 Hollywood film called Make Way for Tomorrow, which is a film that influenced
#
Ozu when he was making Tokyo story.
#
And it's arguably the first major film that deals with the subject of, of elderly parents
#
being neglected by their children and sort of, and looking forward to a life of, of neglect
#
and just, just being alone by themselves.
#
So it's a lovely, very atypical film directed by Liu Makare from 1937 and Tokyo story owes
#
So because of my special fondness for that film, I just sort of feel like, you know,
#
there are other Ozus that I prefer personally, but, but yeah, back to what you were saying.
#
I think, I mean, maybe we should talk about early summer.
#
I seem to, I think I have watched that, I mean, Tokyo story just for the listeners often
#
gets in that ranking often ends up at number two or number three.
#
Citizen Kane topped it for decades, for many decades.
#
And then I think last time, 2012 was the first time when Vertigo and that also reflects on
#
who are the people who are voting because I think I wouldn't be surprised if there's
#
a, there's a quite summary change in the list this time in terms of the position of all
#
these, you know, the films we mentioned, Tokyo story, Citizen Kane, Vertigo, I think that
#
there could be a pretty major change this time.
#
So far, I mean, and Tokyo story at the, you know, it's a very, I think the Indian audience
#
can relate to what the story is.
#
It's about a old couple coming into Tokyo to live with their, with their kids, you know,
#
and the older kid and his wife, they have no time for this couple.
#
And they are also somewhat, you know, disoriented in Tokyo, Tokyo was just about sort of becoming
#
a large metropolis then.
#
And then they have a, they also had a second son who has passed away in the war and the
#
widow of that son is someone who spends time with these old, this old couple.
#
It's really nicely done.
#
And this is part of the, you know, the trilogy that Ozu had.
#
So and, you know, this, it's a very, it's a very different sort of a treatment than
#
some of the more celebrated, you know, Kurosawa kind of films, but Jai, maybe a little bit
#
on what draws you to early summer.
#
Well, early summer is just, I just, it's hard to say, I think, you know, beyond the point
#
how do you articulate why you feel a very strong emotional connection with a film.
#
But it's a film with the same great actress, Setsuko Hara, who played, plays Noriko, the
#
character's name Noriko across three films for Ozu, though it's not the same Noriko.
#
So, and she passed away just a few years ago, I think just three, four years back.
#
But she's, she plays this young woman, maybe a 27, 28 year old woman, which means that
#
she's passed, she's well past the age where a young woman of that society needs to get
#
And the whole family, you know, the joint family, everybody's very concerned about this
#
daughter of the family, who's also a working woman, the need for her to get married.
#
And she's quite stoical about everything.
#
And you know, there's just all the speculation about who the right groom for her will be
#
meeting people and so on.
#
And I don't know, I think there's just something very spare.
#
This is true of all of Ozu's work, I suppose, but it's very spare, very to the point about
#
the way this, you know, that, that typical tatami mat angle of Ozu, you know, with the
#
camera belly moving or moving maybe two or three times in the whole film, is just used
#
to just observe this society with these shifting equations within a family with, and maybe
#
because I'm sort of, I'm Indian myself, there's things about it that I could relate to, the
#
whole joint family set up, some of the themes that emerge in Hindi cinema, when it comes
#
to these subjects, arranged marriages, things like that.
#
Yet it was sufficiently from a different sort of culture with a different aesthetic, very
#
I think, I think she makes an unconventional choice, right?
#
Yes, but it's, but it's again, so the film really doesn't, it's not like it's underlined
#
It just sort of happens.
#
And it's all sort of organically there.
#
And everybody accepts there is no drama, you know, little things, well, Ozu is full of
#
those little moments, right?
#
Tokyo story, the famous moment where the Noriko character is just asked, someone rhetorically
#
says to her, isn't life disappointing?
#
And Setsuko Hara with the most dazzling and beautiful and warm smile in film history just
#
says yes, you know, and it's just a moment like that.
#
There's so much of that.
#
Yeah, you know, so when you have things like that, that, you know, at film appreciation,
#
you know, you're appreciating a film on those terms, then, then of course, you're looking
#
at a film that has completely different strengths from a film made by a Godard or a felony,
#
which are, which are, which are, or Kurosawa films that are, that are much more cinematic
#
in, in that, that specific way that we describe cinema as something very visual, dynamic kind
#
But then, you know, you have Ozu, you have Bresson, you have people like that, just again,
#
through the sheer honesty of their work and being able to convey that honesty in filmmaking
#
using a very spare aesthetic, they are just as great filmmakers in a different way.
#
I mean, sometimes some, I mean, that this, some of the Basu Chatterjee films, like for
#
instance, Sara Akash, the first Basu Chatterjee film was a very...
#
It's a very striking film, right from that opening sequence, whether through the streets
#
of Agra, with that, with that music, the classical music, little glimpses of the Taj Mahal in
#
It's a very, and then of course, he subsequently, he went on to make much more, like Rishikesh
#
Mukherjee in the 70s and 80s, films that are, that had the visual look, you know, the aesthetic
#
of the TV serial, basically, nothing very exciting going on at a visual level.
#
So, it's interesting that, so that's another example of someone who, closer to what Amit
#
was saying, someone who started off in 1969 with Sara Akash, making this very dynamic
#
And of course, it's a film that also has money, money call and a small role in it.
#
1969 is quite a year for the, you know, the proto New Wave, before Bhuvan Shom, Sara Akash,
#
Uski Roti, all coming out in the same, all shot by the great KK Mahajan, the cameraman
#
Maybe if that film had proved to be something that persuaded money call to stay on in filmmaking,
#
then you could have said the film didn't make money, but it made money.
#
Leaving that aside, sorry for that.
#
So in modern times, do you think that there is a greater scope for young filmmakers to
#
develop in unusual directions, which may not depend on what their peers or the people they
#
are working with are doing?
#
For example, we come to Ozu.
#
And earlier I mentioned Tamhane's Court, and you know, Court has a lot of Ozu-like characteristics
#
of the still camera and things are just unfolding and all of that.
#
And I can't imagine how a film like that could have come to, could have been made in the
#
1990s in India, for example.
#
And today, I think something like that might even be more possible in the sense that the
#
means of production have become so incredibly cheap that really anybody can make a film.
#
Like one film that I saw in Mami, which I loved, is the Japanese film One Cut of the
#
Dead, great horror film, which by Shinichiro Ueda, which was made for the equivalent of
#
20 lakh rupees, and it ended up grossing more than 200 crores, you know, and obviously an
#
But in the sense that today the means of production have become much cheaper, it's much easier
#
for someone who wants to do audiovisual storytelling to say, ki main YouTube main kuch karunga,
#
main pehle vlog karunga, experiment karunga, ye karunga, wo karunga.
#
So the big bottleneck, as far as I see in the film industry, in my naive understanding
#
is really distribution more than anything else.
#
You know, the filmmaking part and also because, you know, you learn something by doing it
#
and it's so much easier to do something.
#
And two, there is also the matter that now influences from everywhere are pouring in.
#
You no longer need to be, say, in a particular theatre in Calcutta at a particular point
#
in time to be exposed to good cinema.
#
Good cinema is all around you.
#
In fact, just leaving the term cinema aside, good audiovisual content is all around you.
#
You can get inspired by anywhere.
#
So do you think that, you know, that one should therefore be hopeful about a greater diversity
#
of influences and therefore styles and growth in young Indian filmmakers today?
#
I think we already have that, right?
#
Don't we already have, I mean, I just feel like, you know, when people engage in a certain
#
form of golden ageism and you know, I'm a big fan of old cinema from various decades
#
and very defensive about it in some ways also.
#
But what I always sort of find myself disagreeing when, you know, there's a certain sort of
#
nostalgic talk on social media about how, you know, like films used to be made before,
#
films are not made now.
#
And I feel like we're living in an age where pretty much any sort of film can get made
#
and is getting made to some degree or the other.
#
Now, of course, like you also pointed out, it's a distribution or the right sort of publicity
#
There'll be, there'll obviously be with the amount of material there is and the amount
#
of content there is now, there will always be films that many people won't even notice
#
or won't realize are available out there.
#
I'm regularly sort of, you know, I'll see someone mention something on Facebook about
#
a film that's on Amazon Prime, that's on Prime or Netflix or whatever, which I didn't even
#
realize was there or existing, despite the fact that this is partly my job to know about
#
But I think already we are in the situation where all sorts of films are being made, all
#
sorts of, there's probably a greater variety of approaches, you know, currently than there
#
has been at any time in the past, you know, in terms of the different, different aesthetics,
#
different, you know, approaches to form and content, everything.
#
So I think that's already happening.
#
And of course, in terms of the means available, you know, you have internationally, I suppose
#
in India also, but internationally, you have a filmmaker of the stature of Stephen Soderbergh
#
shooting a film on a phone and a good film, you know, a film with an A-list star like
#
I'm talking about this film called UnSane, which was shot on an iPhone, directed by Stephen
#
Soderbergh starring Claire Foy and solid feature film that just sort of works as a very immersive
#
You know, you have someone like that.
#
So then, of course, younger filmmakers will also have all sorts of tools available to
#
I think, you know, the production is democratized, the challenge really is both the distribution
#
You know, the fact that, you know, Jai can't find a film while it's his professional sort
#
So, so it's impossible for others to find it, right?
#
I mean, so and that really is that you don't know whether you are actually getting and,
#
you know, then who are you, I mean, who's promoting you in the sense somebody, you know,
#
I don't know whether those kinds of things will happen ever again, you know, that some
#
koi hai John Dahl or koi and Ebert finds him and starts doing that and that guy makes
#
rounders or something, you know, I mean, and it's like that.
#
I don't know whether that's possible or is going to happen.
#
But I agree with you that, I mean, there are all kinds of talent, I mean, you know, there's
#
this movie called Promising Young Woman, I don't know if you've seen that.
#
This lady, Fennel, Emerald Fennel, who also is, was the show runner for Killing Eve and
#
who also played, who played Camilla in The Crown.
#
So, I mean, just sometimes you're like boss yeh kivna talent hai yaar.
#
It's a very, very fine film, Promising Young Woman is one of my favorite films of the last
#
So there's this Carrie Mulligan film and she's very good.
#
So when you see and then you realize that she's made the film, then she's the show
#
runner for Killing Eve and then she herself acted in that and you're like boss, one has
#
I mean, these guys will do things, right?
#
So I think that, I mean, the talent sort of, you know, coming through of all kinds, making
#
different kinds of films, etc., I think that will continue and it'll only become easier,
#
The discovery is what I sometimes worry about, you know, who's going to find, who's going
#
to champion, will the enough people get to know or by the time you champion, it's an
#
avalanche, you know, you're buried under another 20.
#
Yeah, that's and that's again a function of the sheer volume of things that's available
#
Everyone does feel sorry for a lot of potentially, you know, upcoming directors, scriptwriters,
#
etc., who might have very good stuff, you know, with them, but might just get buried
#
under everything that's already available and not quite get the opportunities.
#
It is a problem of plenty in that sense when it comes to the distribution thing or whatever.
#
In fact, just thinking aloud, maybe the focus and the importance will shift from producers
#
and studios to filters because we discover content typically through, you know, we have
#
different kinds of filters.
#
Maybe it is a film blogger, maybe it is a particular YouTube channel, which is talking
#
about films or whatever.
#
And I think there's a lot there to happen.
#
We were talking about Andrew Saris earlier and Andrew Saris, of course, you know, came
#
to fame or notoriety as it then was when he did this review of Hitchcock Psycho, which
#
I know you're also a fan of Hitchcock, where he praised it to the skies and he said it's
#
such a great film and all that.
#
And at that time, Hitchcock wasn't particularly taken seriously and Saris was attacked for
#
it and so on and so forth, which pretty much anyone who wrote anything good about Psycho
#
I mean, Robin Ward, who's one of my favorite writers, semi academic writer, who wrote this
#
great book called Hitchcock's Films Revisited.
#
He submitted a review of Psycho when he wasn't a film, a professional film critic to Sight
#
and Sound run by Penelope Huston at the time and a very detailed, wonderful piece, which
#
of course made it to his book eventually.
#
But she rejected it politely saying, you know, you fail to grasp that Hitchcock did not intend
#
this film to be taken seriously.
#
So yeah, so that, that of course, but yeah, sorry, go on.
#
So my question here is that that's a way of looking at what, you know, Subrata also said
#
earlier about history being fickle, about you can regard something as highly at one
#
point and not think of it a hundred years later and vice versa.
#
And today, of course, Hitchcock is, you know, right there at the top of everybody's mind,
#
including the Sight and Sound poll last time with Vertigo and so on and so forth.
#
If you had to out of, you know, your personal favorites, urge that someone be taken more
#
seriously, that, I mean, obviously not comparing anyone to Hitchcock, but in the sense that
#
this person is not taken seriously enough, you know, what would kind of come to your
#
mind either in terms of filmmakers or films or really anything at all?
#
What a question to ask.
#
Are we here for another five hours or something?
#
I mean, it's, I'm not, I'm not kicking you out.
#
I mean, my, my sort of, again, system one answer, and I guess, you know, a few days
#
back on another WhatsApp group, we sort of touched on this.
#
My system one answer would be Peter Weiss.
#
That would be my immediate answer.
#
He was taken very seriously.
#
They were entering very subjective territory, you know, once we start talking about underappreciated
#
films or filmmakers, then, then everything that, you know, I was going to, it sounds
#
funny now, but Buster Keaton, okay, who, you know, most knowledgeable film viewers today
#
or, you know, people who know anything about film history actually regard him quite rightly
#
in my view as one of the most important figures in film history.
#
There's revisionist thinking now that places him above Chaplin, which, which I don't quite
#
agree with, but, but I see the, see the point because Keaton was known for his deadpan expressions
#
and his, his, his lack of emotion, expressiveness, his, his athleticism, whereas Chaplin was
#
more about the pathos and so on.
#
And when we're living in a time where, where, where that sort of drama, melodrama is out
#
of fashion as mentioned.
#
So it's easy to see why Keaton is so highly regarded, but he was an absolute great, who
#
was neglected for several decades.
#
And yet, you know, if you were to ask me about some of my favorite under, underappreciated
#
films, I might actually mention Keaton for, for no better reason than because so many
#
people, and I'm not just talking about the young people,
#
The snappers who don't even know who Chaplin is because he was before Nolan.
#
So there's so many people have, have no idea about Keaton and his importance and, you know,
#
so, so, so I would probably, I might even name one of his films as, you know, an under,
#
underappreciated film, the underappreciated film that needs to be rediscovered.
#
So that's a subjective thing.
#
So if you, you know, if you were to ask something like that, Peter Weier is actually a pretty
#
good name, I think, because he's, he's really not.
#
I mean, I think he, I mean, of course he was big, but you know, he's sort of, I mean, even,
#
you know, decently aware people today about films will struggle, I mean, on who he is
#
But they'll kind of have a sense of what his films are, like Witness, Dead Birds Society,
#
But again, I think it's been, I mean, I mean, I would still sort of put him under the underappreciated
#
I mean, if you take, I think with Ade, we were sort of just, we just alluded to the,
#
the, the, you know, the, what was that, the Hanging Rock film.
#
It's like a, I mean, the way it's done, plus, you know, just the meta point around these
#
white men not, or white people not understanding that the land that they are in has this other
#
mysterious stuff that happens, et cetera.
#
And he did it really well.
#
I mean, that, that film really holds, I would say, I think I watched it again some seven,
#
eight years back, it really holds and that other one, the Mel Gibson, Gallipoli, about
#
Gibson is just amazing.
#
Nobody considers Gibson amazing these days.
#
Politically wrong statement.
#
Well, you've pretty much put an end to my plan of naming John Ford as one of the underappreciated
#
But, but the, the reason I say that, of course, he's, you know, in his time and again for
#
knowledgeable people, one of the most iconic directors of all time.
#
But Ford, well, well also, but that's, that's the least sort of interesting thing about
#
But, but today, you know, he's, he's so out of fashion because there's this, in my view,
#
very unfair, you know, and I had a long, long chat once with, with a mutual friend, Girish,
#
about this, Girish Anand, he's, he's, Ford just is out of favor in so many liberal quote
#
unquote liberal circles because many people, including people who should know better, people
#
like Quentin Tarantino have just had, got him pigeonholed as someone who just made these
#
racist films about cowboys killing Indians and Indians reserving it.
#
And you, you, you go back and actually look at, look at his filmography, look at it closely,
#
you see much more nuance than that.
#
In addition to, you know, him just being, being a very important filmmaker who influenced
#
people like Orson Welles and Kurosawa, et cetera.
#
But, you know, so, so on one level, it would be laughable to refer to John Ford as an underappreciated
#
filmmaker because he's one of the, the, the, the most well-known directors of all time
#
in most film circles, knowledgeable film circles.
#
But in this context that I'm discussing, you could probably sort of, you know, name even
#
someone like him, but, but to give perhaps a more satisfactory answer to your question
#
looking at someone contemporary, there's one filmmaker, as you know, you know, one of the
#
most revitalizing things for me personally has been getting into contemporary Malayalam
#
cinema and to a slightly lesser degree Tamil cinema in the last few years, you know, in
#
your forties to suddenly discover a completely new filmic culture and to sort of start engaging
#
with it the same way that I was engaging with Kurosawa, et cetera, as an adolescent.
#
That's very empowering.
#
And, you know, it sort of makes you feel alive again as a film buff, but even within Malayalam
#
cinema, which is, which tends to be somewhat rooted, grounded compared to the mainstream
#
There's a filmmaker named Don, Don Palathara, who I have a lot of regard for.
#
He's even within the world of Malayalam cinema, he's someone who's a bit of an outlier.
#
You know, he's, he works outside even the, what might be called the mainstream of Malayalam
#
He's made five films so far I've watched all, but one of them.
#
And he just has this very distinct sensibility where, you know, you just sort of watch his
#
films and you get a sense of honesty, that, you know, here's someone who's just being
#
true to what he sort of wants to do without any sort of frails or without being influenced
#
Most of his films are in black and white, by the way, very, very arresting black and
#
One film of his that I really, really liked, even though it's a sort of film that some
#
people might find pretentious or problematic in terms of, you know, if you look at it in
#
a very superficial sense, you know, from the gender lens, it's a film called Everything
#
is Cinema, which both in terms of the title and in terms of the treatment of the film
#
could easily be a 1960s Godard film.
#
It's just a story about a documentary filmmaker whose face we never see and who was voiced
#
So it's got this meta quality.
#
He's in Calcutta to shoot a documentary along the lines of Louis Marle's Calcutta film,
#
and he's there with his wife, and then the lockdown happens in 2020.
#
So they are basically stuck.
#
They can't go out and do their research, etc.
#
They are stuck in one room together in one little flat together.
#
And then, you know, the whole film basically just takes the form of this guy whose face
#
We only heard his voiceover pointing his camera repeatedly at his wife, you know, he's getting
#
They sort of cloistered together and, you know, saying these extremely chauvinistic
#
things about her, criticizing her, you know, just saying things like that.
#
And it's such an interesting film in terms of what it, you know, this perspective it
#
provides of the nastiest aspects of the male gaze or whatever it is, plus it's got this
#
experimental side to it because of the very nature of the filmmaking, the handheld camera,
#
So it's very interesting.
#
It was along with all of Palathara's films.
#
I don't know if it still is, it might be, but that's one example of someone who even
#
within the world of Malayalam cinema, I feel it's he's someone who's just so interesting
#
and should get a wider audience at some point.
#
I was just curious, we just we were getting into that conversation before we started recording.
#
Who else do you have on that list?
#
Well, from filmmakers of an earlier time, like I said just now with Keaton and John
#
Ford, I mean, my interpretation of someone who's underappreciated might be very different
#
from what Amit had in mind.
#
I meant the sight and sound list.
#
I'm not sure that I should speak about that at the moment.
#
When does the sight and sound list come out?
#
This episode could come after that, so then it would be fine.
#
Should be sometime in the next two or three months.
#
Okay, I mean, I don't know when this will come out, but I'm not, I'm not sure exactly.
#
So I'll just sort of be prudent.
#
But you did mention about in general about your Brian De Palma.
#
Yeah, well, there is a De Palma film there.
#
I don't know if you've seen this, this very early De Palma film called, well, no, not
#
very early, but it's called Hi Mom, 1970 film, it's very, very interesting.
#
It's sort of, it just sort of points among other things that I see it as pointing the
#
way forward to Travis Bickle six years later.
#
But it's just, it's got this, is this film that just has this film within a film called
#
The theater stuff, right?
#
Which to my mind is one of the most interesting, you know, films of that period that's actually
#
providing a commentary on bleeding heart liberals who sort of, who just want to empathize, empathize,
#
empathize with the underprivileged, but do it from a safe distance and sort of, and from
#
a position of some comfort, which is all of us, basically.
#
But I find the, like, there'll be a tactical element to making your list and sending it
#
The two films that at least so far you've named from the list, which you've put in,
#
the Ozu film and the De Palma film.
#
Very different, very different types of films.
#
Are different types of films and not films anybody else would name.
#
So they're not going to be in the top hundred, whereas a tactical way of doing it would be
#
to think that what are the films I really like that are also likely to be named by other
#
So let me at least make sure they get a little higher up.
#
So that wasn't a consideration for me at all.
#
I mean, you just said I'll name my best 10, nahi aayega toh nahi aayega.
#
I'll name the 10 films that come to my mind at this moment as opposed to 10 minutes later,
#
because then the list would be different 10 minutes later.
#
But is there any standard choice in that list?
#
No, yeah, there are three that now again, am I going to start naming all the films?
#
I think Shubhrat and I were sinisterly thinking that theek hai nikaal le jay sir.
#
No, there are also of the 10, there are three films that would be broadly, also when I looked
#
at the last, the 2012 list, I think all three of these films figure in the top 50 or 60.
#
So then with them there is the, you know, the possibility that my vote might actually
#
make a difference to the pecking order.
#
But with none of the others, the others are all films that are really not going to make
#
it to the top 100 or whatever.
#
There is someone who will go from 51 to 49 and he won't even know that J. Arjun Singh
#
There will be all the lists on the website.
#
Aapke list aate hain kya?
#
So your list will also be there and you're not telling us, not now, when it publishes.
#
And if it's published before the episode, I'll just put it in the show notes as well.
#
Okay, so you guys have been kind enough to spend a lot of time.
#
Is there anything else you'd like before, I'll end of course by asking you to recommend
#
films, books, music, whatever for the listeners, especially ones that you feel are underappreciated.
#
But before that, is there anything else you'd like to talk about with, you know, that I
#
There's plenty that I'm sure both of us would like to talk about.
#
But again, you know, it's just a matter of call us again tomorrow or whatever, you know,
#
you already you're busy tomorrow.
#
I'm recording 11 episodes in 11 days.
#
You guys are number four, which is why I still have some energy.
#
Okay, so let's let's go with recommendations, which I did warn you about before.
#
Well, I've already given one, which is the Pallathara, the Don Pallathara film.
#
Can you just name all his films because I really want you to pronounce them.
#
These are not difficult films to pronounce, actually, there's 1956 Central Travancore,
#
Oh, well, there's one that's very difficult to pronounce, which I won't even try.
#
But the English title is Joyful Mystery, which is a very interesting film also.
#
It's his only colour film.
#
It's an 84 minute film that's shot in a single take, which is entirely from the front of
#
a car where two people are on their way to drop off a report to sort of find out if the
#
woman is pregnant and the conversation that goes on.
#
So it's just a single take film, the English title of which is Joyful Mystery.
#
And well, there's the one I mentioned, Everything is Cinema, 1956 Central Travancore, Shavam,
#
The Corpse, there's With, which is The Seed, I think.
#
So you have four more to name, because you're going to name a total of five.
#
And one of them was Pallathara, which you named, so what are the others?
#
Yeah, that was a cluster.
#
Like when I say Decalogue, I can't say I said names of 10 films.
#
Are you asking for underappreciated films?
#
No, I'm actually now I'm asking for just what you'd like to recommend that people watch.
#
But obviously, there's no point naming a mainstream thing that everyone has seen, like a Nolan
#
While I refresh my memory by looking at my films watched notes in recent films watched
#
That's what you're pretending you're doing.
#
You're probably checking your Twitter.
#
I mean, I've been, I mean, I don't know whether, I mean, there's just so many of them.
#
I mean, just to sort of go down the memory lane and, you know, suggesting some films,
#
but I'll just keep throwing films, right?
#
So I mean, we did speak about this screwball comedy sort of, you know, time.
#
So I think the Lady Eve would be one.
#
I think the Noah films of that time, whether it's the postman rings twice or I remember
#
once, I think the first time we met in person, you gave a 40 minute lecture to an enraptured
#
group of people on noir and the different kinds of noir and whatever, but we can handle
#
Are you also a fan of noir?
#
Yeah, well, I've actually hosted a lot of online film discussions about film noir of
#
And in fact, the next discussion will actually be looking at some films that are technically
#
genres like westerns, but which are very much 1940s noir as well, Treasure of the Sierra
#
Madre and films like that, but yeah, so I could easily make up a list of noir films
#
The next time we meet, we should talk only about noir and I have a title for the episode
#
because if you're talking about the history of noir from beginning to end, noir's arc.
#
I used that as a title of a blog post once and now you're preempting my jokes.
#
It's like we're becoming a married couple or something here.
#
So yeah, so I mean, I mean, of the 40s, yeah, I mean, postman rings twice, Key Largo, that's
#
the Florida noir, it's sunshine noir, waha pe andhera nahi hai, although they're a little
#
There's a film from that period, sorry, which since we're talking like this and we're doing
#
the jugalbandi and definitely an under scene film compared to a lot of major noir films
#
It's a B movie, generally regarded as a B movie called Gun Crazy, which is interesting
#
in particular because it's nearly 20 years before Bonnie and Clyde and it's very much
#
it's one of the prototypes of the couple on the run film, the couple sort of operating
#
outside the law on the run and it does some very interesting things with location for
#
a film made in 1949, it does some very interesting things with location shooting, with long takes.
#
There's one shot, coincidentally, I mentioned the Palathara film just now, which is a single
#
take shot from the front of a car, Gun Crazy has a bank heist, which is shot exclusively
#
from the back of the car that the couple are sort of, you know, they park outside the bank
#
and then he goes in and so on.
#
It's a very unusual long take for that period.
#
So that's that would be one on my list as well.
#
You mentioned Lady Eve, now if you're talking about Preston Sturges, I'm a huge fan of Sullivan's
#
Travel, which of course is the film that the Coen brothers referenced in O Brother Veradha
#
because that title appears in Sullivan's Travel for the first time.
#
There's so many others, there are the westerns of, you know, I know there's very strong Hollywood
#
film bias going on here over a certain period, but the westerns made by Anthony Mann in the
#
early 50s with Jimmy Stewart, films like Winchester 73 and Bend of the River, which were just
#
such interesting films, you know, psychological westerns as you'd call them, which where the
#
accent is a little less on action and shoot outs and a little more on characters and their
#
Yeah, no, I mean, I'll continue, I mean, you'll get more than five, I mean, it's now.
#
Please go ahead, please go ahead, the more the better.
#
I mean, just to sort of…
#
I mean, my listeners don't have a life, what are they going to do, man?
#
Paach gante ka episode sunaya toh kuch movie bhi dekh lenge chaath ho.
#
The 40s, I mean, the 40s, even in the Hindi films, I think, I mean, some of the early
#
Dilip Kumar I think is quite good, you know, Shaheed for instance, I like it, the Prince
#
might be poor, so you have to figure out if you're able to get good prints.
#
Andaz of Mehboob Khan is lovely, I mean, it's a love triangle, Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar,
#
Nargis, great songs, Naushad and Majroo.
#
And in Andaz, just to go down this general rabbit hole, I mean, actually in Andaz, Rafee
#
was singing for Raj Kapoor and Mukesh was singing for Dilip Kumar.
#
And that was how it was for some time, you know, Dilip Kumar found Rafee as his voice
#
a little later, although in Shaheed, Watan Ke Vaaste Watan Ke Naujavaas Shaheed Ho was
#
a Rafee song, but Talat was singing quite often for Dilip Kumar, in fact, almost a voice
#
of Dilip Kumar in the early 50s.
#
And in Andaz, you know, Jhum Jhum Ke Nacho Aaj Tu Kahe Agar, etc., were all Mukesh songs,
#
which was picturized on Dilip Kumar.
#
Some of those early V. Shantaram films also of 1940s are quite, quite good, for the 30s
#
even, the Duniya Na Maane and Aurat, not Aurat, what is that other one?
#
The one that had Sai Branchpe's mother.
#
But anyway, so these couple of those films, which from Hindi of the 40s, you know, 50s
#
and 60s, there are, you know, there are, I mean, I'm generally a Billy Wilder fan.
#
I love, I mean, the guy just had range.
#
So I mean, again, I mean, if people, I mean, these are very famous films of those times,
#
but if people have not watched it, I would suggest, I mean, some like it, Hot is just
#
I think during the last conversation, Amit, I actually mentioned Ace in the Hole, Billy
#
Wilder's Ace in the Hole, as one of the somewhat under the radar films that...
#
I think Ace in the Hole is just a fantastic film.
#
This is Kirk Douglas movie, Billy Wilder movie.
#
This is almost like this people live kind of, you know, copied it.
#
70 years ago, with this whole media circus.
#
So Kirk Douglas is a sort of, he's been fired from his job in New York or somewhere and
#
he goes somewhere down to Colorado or somewhere looking for a job.
#
He's just a sort of a, you know, investigative journalist or whatever, he's just a guy who's
#
looking for stories to again redeem himself and finds a story of a guy who while drilling
#
something has gone into a, you know, a hole inside.
#
And then the story is that this guy wants to prolong the story for as long as possible
#
with some disastrous consequences eventually.
#
Does that sound familiar?
#
And this is, so this is like Wilder simultaneously was doing all kinds of things here.
#
I mean, he's just amazing and a whole lot of them who came from Austria, Germany, I
#
mean, these are not actually English speaking people.
#
They brought a very particular sensibility from there, you know, that Lubez came first
#
and then Wilder assisted him, you know, that's the whole bunch of them just played a big
#
part in fashioning the Hollywood of that time also.
#
In fact, there's this movie called Sweet Smell of Success, but Lancaster film.
#
Just absolutely a, you know, great film.
#
Very hard hitting film again about partly about the media and what it can do.
#
There's a cinematographer, there's a Chinese origin cinematographer, right?
#
Who's the cinematographer here?
#
It's a beautiful looking film.
#
I have one of the films that I had.
#
In fact, I think I may have mentioned it to Subrata before we started, that I watched
#
and one of the reasons it strikes me is because both because I really enjoyed watching it.
#
I think watching it for the first time properly as an adult, also because there's an excellent
#
print of it available online, Gulzaaz Mere Apne, which is a 1971 film.
#
And of course, we were talking about Haal Chaal Theek Tha Ke Hai sometime back that
#
that's the name of the song in Mere Apne, which is a very hard hitting commentary on
#
various things, various problems that the country was facing at that time in 1970-71.
#
And as is so often the case, you know, when we're living in the present moment, there's
#
this tendency to sort of, you know, the recency bias or whatever to think that the problems
#
you're facing today are exclusively of today.
#
And very often it's quite surprising to go back and look at a film made 50 or 60 or 70
#
years ago and see the same things being talked about.
#
I don't know if I don't remember now if I have in our previous talk, if I mentioned
#
this this wonderful 1953 film called 1952 film called Mere, called Mr. Sampat, which
#
was a Moti Lal, yeah, it's made it's based very loosely on an Arkenarayan novel, but
#
the film is very and it's a remake of the Tamil film Miss Malini.
#
But it's here's a film made less than five years into independence, you know, a time
#
that we sort of, you know, the persistent narrative is that it's a time of Nehruvian
#
It's like biting into a sour lemon and, you know, it's got it's got a very sarcastic
#
song called Achche Dhen Aare Hura, where the song lyrics are about how Achche Dhen are
#
never actually going to come.
#
But, you know, it's this ironical thing going on in 1952, Padmini and Moti Lal, the agent
#
Yeah, it's a very, you know, I always refer to that film, you know, when I often get people
#
telling me with great authority, Jaan Hai Bhi Do Yaro is the first black comedy satire
#
in Indian cinema and I say Hindi cinema me bhi nahi hain, you know, please, hold my drink.
#
Yeah, so this is also this is another coming back to what we discussed earlier, people
#
just, you know, when you don't have a sense of deeper history, which is fine, most of
#
us, it's not like we can know everything or be fully formed or something.
#
But then it would be nice not to make big statements saying that this film is the first
#
example when you don't know what has gone before.
#
So Mr. Sampat is one example, Mere Apne of course is not a hard hitting satire in the
#
same way, but it's got that song and it's got a few scenes about unemployed youth in
#
the India of that time, very disgruntled by the situation that they're in, but finding
#
some sucker through an old woman played by Meena Kumari who becomes like a nani figure
#
to all of them, lovely print online.
#
Some sucker, yeah, for a moment I heard it as the other sucker, so I was thinking.
#
But 50s again, I mean, so for instance, sticking to some of the Hindi films of the 50s, I would
#
still for those who haven't seen Bimal Roy films, and you know, Jay, when I attended
#
one of his film appreciation classes where you took us through the Diyasong of Parak.
#
Oh, Parak, yeah, yeah, yeah, lovely photography.
#
So Parak is a very good film, I mean, this is, I mean, the plot is like, you know, there
#
is a village and there is like the whole village ecosystem, panchayat, but there is a particular
#
event that triggers chaos there, you know, which is, and it's a nicely done thing, everybody
#
then starts suspecting that people are jockeying for things.
#
Great songs, of course, O Sajna Barkha Baha Rai, suddenly in peak form, but that's a good
#
There's a movie called Uche Log, again I recommend that, there's a movie made by a very old sort
#
of director of the 30s who was still working then called Fani Majumdar, and Uche Log is
#
a copy of a Tamil, you know, play called Major Chandrakant, Balachandra had written that,
#
Ashok Kumar and Feroz Khan, Feroz Khan in one of his early films, dekhna chahi hai, it's
#
like a good story, has one great rafi song, Jaag Dile Diwana.
#
Otherwise, I would have asked you to sing a little bit of it.
#
I mean, it's just, it's Chitragupt, the father of Anand Melend, there, his music and Majrooz
#
lyrics, but the film is great, I mean, if you just, you know, if you can't watch it,
#
just read the plot somewhere, I mean, on IMDB or something, it's a great plot, I mean, to
#
have made that film in the 60s, Fani Majumdar, by the way, I mean, just to go back into time,
#
in the 30s, Calcutta was a big hub of Indian with new theatres, right, so there was this
#
guy called B N Sarkar, B N Sarkar was a sort of, you know, sort of aristocratic feudal
#
sort of a guy with a lot of land and everything, he had gone to London, studied in wherever
#
And he was very fascinated by films.
#
So he came back to India and he set up this new theatre and then he just decided that
#
all good talent should come here.
#
So, and the fact that there was generally this whole Bengali renaissance etc.
#
So there were people who were writing, listening to music and all that.
#
So some of the earliest playback stuff, music and all of that was done in Calcutta with
#
So there was this three guys, Rai Chand Boral, R C Boral, Timer Baran.
#
So these couple of people came in and they started playing, I mean, they started actually
#
And till then, the classical Indian music has no concept of harmony, you know, there
#
is no guitar in the sense, right, it's like monotone, it's a single instrument or two
#
So in that sense, R C Boral was actually almost the pioneer of bringing the notion of music
#
in that sense of having harmony and different instruments and, you know, getting organ and
#
Oh, from Fani Majupdar, okay.
#
And then he got some of the best directors, one of the big directors then who he sort
#
of nurtured was P C Barua, who made the first Devdas.
#
And the first Devdas, again, if you look at the title credits there, the editor was or
#
whatever the assistant was Rishikesh or Bimal Roy, and then Bimal Roy's editor was Rishikesh.
#
And then he got K L Saigal.
#
And it's very difficult, I mean, now we sort of caricature that particular singing style
#
I mean, there was no such phenomena that people have seen after, you know, in the sense of
#
how popular he was and just the quality of his voice and all of that.
#
And so, Devdas, first Devdas had K L Saigal, it was great songs.
#
And then the new theaters made some great K L Saigal films.
#
One of them was called President, which had that Bangla Bane Nyara, hugely popular song.
#
And that was, so that film was made by this guy called Nitin Bose, who later goes to Bombay
#
and makes Ganga Jamuna and all that, although critics believe that they have made the film.
#
And then there was a movie called Street Singer, which had the greatest pairing possible of
#
them, right, which is K L Saigal and Kanan Devi.
#
And then K L Saigal has that song called Babul Mora Nair Chhutana, which is actually the
#
song written by Wajid Ali Shah, and it's a fantastic thing, right?
#
So Wajid Ali Shah is being driven out of Awadh.
#
And Wajid Ali Shah, if you remember, he was not necessarily interested in all the statecraft,
#
warfare, etc., loses Awadh.
#
And he's famously that guy whose portraits always have him exposing his left nipple.
#
So then they exile him to Calcutta.
#
And then while going, he writes this Babul Mora Nair Chhutana, meaning, I'm leaving this.
#
And of course, going back to the biryani story, Wajid Ali Shah is the reason why Calcutta
#
biryani has the potato, because they came in here, he was living off a British pension.
#
So they wanted to add substance as the story goes, nobody knows this for a fact.
#
So they wanted to add a little bit of weight to the biryani, they didn't have enough meat,
#
so they added, started adding potatoes.
#
So Wajid Ali Shah came to Calcutta, started living in a particular place, brought in two
#
iconic Calcutta dishes, the Calcutta biryani, and there is something, if you go to Calcutta,
#
there is something called the Rezala.
#
Rezala is a particular kind of chicken or mutton dish, both were brought in by Wajid
#
Why are we at Wajid Ali Shah?
#
This is the best kind of conversation.
#
So while we were on Wajid Ali Shah, one of the things that the really interesting discoveries
#
I made fairly recently was that when Satyajit Ray was making Shatranj Ke Khiladi, his first
#
choice for Wajid Ali Shah was Asrani.
#
He wanted Asrani, which might have been quite interesting, actually, maybe not the perfect
#
physical fit, you know, in terms of, but that might have been interesting.
#
But Amjad was a good fit.
#
He was a very good fit.
#
So it worked very well eventually, but this came from the letters that Ray and Suresh
#
Jindal exchanged, which are collected in this new book on Shatranj Ke Khiladi, where Suresh
#
Jindal reproduces one of the early letters, where Ray is saying, I'd like to sort of,
#
you know, just meet Asrani to talk about this.
#
Maybe Asrani refused to expose his left nipple.
#
Anyway, sorry, carry on.
#
I think Asrani being an FTIA graduate said, I'll do the rest of it, but I won't show
#
Anyway, so street singer had that Babul Mora Nair Chutana, first time with Wajid Ali Shah,
#
And then Kanan Devi was there.
#
Kanan Devi also used to sing some of the great songs, but the Kanan Devi is known for that
#
She also moved to Bombay because eventually things started shutting down in Kolkata, largely
#
because the partition meant that almost 60% of the audience went away.
#
So the commercially films became difficult.
#
But Kanan Devi, there is this very famous song called Tufaan Mel, Yeh Jeevan Hai Tufaan
#
Mel, huge hit of the early 40s.
#
Anyway, but if anybody is interested ever to, if you have the time and the inclination,
#
dive a bit deeper into KL Segal, you'll not be disappointed if you are keeping an open
#
What I'm going to ask both of you to do is I'm going to ask both of you to make a Spotify
#
playlist or maybe multiple Spotify playlists of music that you love from that era or whatever,
#
categorize it as you want, which is why I said maybe multiple ones and I'll link them
#
So if you can do that for me, that'll be quite fun.
#
I have some Spotify playlist of the episodes that we did of HALCHAAL done by people who
#
liked that episode so much that every little snippet of song or something that we would
#
do, they would note it down and then they would have the...
#
So I'm now outsourcing that to you, though I know you're very busy.
#
We were in sixties, right?
#
Seventies, I think I would say that there are a bunch of films of, I mean, the whole
#
parallel cinema movement, for instance, I mean, late sixties, seventies, I would definitely
#
again recommend SARA AKASH.
#
I think people have watched RAJNIGANDA enough, but so that's a good movie.
#
I think the, see, during that time, even SARA AKASH, these are all stories of this NAYI
#
KAHANI movement that was happening in India, in Hindi literature.
#
So SARA AKASH also is a story from the NAYI KAHANI movement.
#
RAJNIGANDA, which was written by, the original story was by a lady called Munnu Bhandari,
#
who passed away just during the pandemic.
#
He was married to Rajendra Yadav, who wrote SARA AKASH.
#
So to bring that connection.
#
And so her story was called IYE SACH HAI.
#
It starts off beautifully.
#
I mean, you know, the way she starts, IYE SACH HAI.
#
So yeah, those two Bhuvan Shom as well, I mean, SUHASINI MULAYE and BALDAT and sort
#
of interesting kind of a film, which people can watch and in Hollywood again, I think
#
we've never come back to the Brian De Palma conversation, but I mean, I was saying that
#
earlier people have watched KAPOLA and GOD FATHER and everything, but you know, there
#
is a KAPOLA movie called THE CONVERSATIONS, that's a thing that I would suggest.
#
There's an actor called JOHN KAZAL, I don't know if people know enough about it.
#
A volunteer hunter also.
#
So JOHN KAZAL is a guy who only acted in five films and all were nominated for two one best
#
And he was dying during DEAR HUNTER.
#
DEAR HUNTER and GOD FATHER too.
#
GOD FATHER and GOD FATHER.
#
And then he was there in CONVERSATIONS.
#
And he was Meryl Streep's boyfriend at the time.
#
Meryl Streep, in fact, JOHN KAZAL and PACHINO were best of buddies because they were in
#
the theatre scene and they would act in a lot of Broadway plays and stuff.
#
And then KAZAL came in through PACHINO.
#
And then by the time DEAR HUNTER was almost completing shooting, he had contracted cancer.
#
And Meryl Streep, at the same, it's like that Katharine Hepburn story.
#
She absolutely cared for him till the end and therefore, anyway, that's a different
#
So conversation, but I mean, maybe Jai will pipe in on Brandy Palmer, a guy who possibly
#
has again, the later work possibly has not held up.
#
But his, during that time, he used to make some quite interesting films.
#
I mean, there is a movie called SISTERS, I don't know if you...
#
Well, to me, I mean, obviously, no disrespect to any of the others because they all, I mean,
#
the GOD FATHER and the GOD FATHER part two are just, you know, just stunningly great
#
films and what's cause easy, etc.
#
But to me, personally, DE PARMA is the most interesting of all of them in terms of, you
#
know, what is his understanding of cinema and, you know, just his ability to just take
#
enormous risks and just, you know, make films that were incredibly uneven in places, but,
#
you know, just put everything that he needed to put into them.
#
So BLOWOUT is one, the TREVOLTA.
#
So BLOWOUT and CONVERSATION are the two films that I had actually sort of did a session
#
about jointly last year.
#
Where at the end, he mixes the sound and the video together and then realises what's happened
#
is very different from what he was thinking.
#
It's also a part tribute to BLOWUP and ANTONIO ANNI's BLOWUP.
#
And SISTERS is again...
#
SISTERS is an absolute favourite of mine.
#
Again, people who are... and of course, again, if people have not watched ALTMAN, you know,
#
one is an ALTMAN NOA called The Long Goodbye, which has Elliot Gould who...
#
Best known to people of my generation as Ross and Monica's dad in FRIENDS.
#
Not at all known to people of the generation after mine because FRIENDS is cancelled.
#
FRIENDS is also cancelled.
#
No, I mean, also apparently full of jokes that trigger people.
#
Yeah, if you look closely enough, everything is cancelled.
#
So ALTMAN had LONG GOODBYE, ALTMAN had NASHVILLE.
#
NASHVILLE is like, how can you make a film where there are some 25 characters all speaking
#
simultaneously and there is all kinds of music.
#
I think Jai might remember it.
#
NASHVILLE must have been in one of my top 10 lists, which I used to give in my callow
#
And then you still haven't given me your top 10 list from your non-callow days.
#
I'll have to recommend five at the end of this.
#
So five BANSALI's and what else?
#
I mean, we could actually...
#
You can't include KHAAMOSHI because KHAAMOSHI is the BANSALI.
#
Everybody says that's my favorite BANSALI because, you know, it's the most understated.
#
You have to talk about...
#
That is the only tolerable BANSALI, but I didn't like even that actually.
#
But anyway, I'll come to my list at the end.
#
First, let us take our journey through the decades.
#
Because like in a sense, the journey of SUBRAT from what we understand it today is really
#
you could write a book and call it From BANSALI to BEYONCE because he's confessed to liking
#
So, I mean, I think, yeah, so again, I think people must watch some of them, for instance,
#
And I guess one of the things, I mean, just the four or five of them that came up at the
#
Scorsese, Capola, Brandy Palmer, who am I missing?
#
Lucas around that time.
#
Lucas, Kubrick, Altman.
#
So, I mean, Prakash Mehra.
#
But, you know, it's funny that I think Spielberg also at the time, so it's funny that Spielberg
#
and Scorsese, who, I mean, Spielberg always knew some kind of a thing about the pulse
#
And I think he was very good at that and not too sort of taken in by vision, etc. and very
#
sort of that kind of a guy.
#
And I think Scorsese, because his films were in some sense very sort of internal, they're
#
always biopic like with story of a person, I mean, everything, including some of his
#
names of his films are also very sort of, yeh hai, taxi driver, king of comedy, rating
#
pool, aviator, so on and so forth.
#
So I think that's why they kind of, whereas the two guys, whereas Capola was big theme
#
guy, you know, it's bada theme and I think once the time went, those themes didn't resonate
#
and then, and the other guy was, I think, Palmer, who was very style sort of driven
#
I think then the style went, I think wo thoda dated ho gaya and they could not keep up with
#
So those times, those guys just did fantastic work.
#
Well, from the same generation, there's also, you know, a little before them, there was
#
Arthur Penn, who also, you know, and one of the things, one of the conversations I'm hoping
#
to have sometime soon with my online group is some of the really under the radar films
#
of the 70s that belong broadly to this group of directors.
#
So one of the films, for instance, is The Missouri Breaks, which has Marlon Brando and
#
Jack Nicholson, which is directed by Arthur Penn, which is a quite interesting film.
#
It's not, not, not really a major work in that sense, but it's interesting that there's
#
also Scarecrow with Gene Hackman and the very young Al Pacino, which is, which is interesting
#
that some of these that are worth looking at when Coppola was sort of, when he was being
#
set up as the leader of this group of, of directors, Peter Bogdanovich was right up
#
there with it, except that Bogdanovich, of course, he made two or three very acclaimed
#
films and then he sort of faded.
#
The Last Picture Show is just fantastic, Paper Moon, even Bogdanovich is the Noah.
#
Even Targets, which was with Boris Karlovich, which is an interesting meta film.
#
But of course, Bogdanovich eventually sort of, I think, went more in the direction of
#
being a film historian and writer.
#
Talking about book recommendations, Bogdanovich's Book of Conversations with Orson Welles.
#
This is Orson Welles is one of the most interesting.
#
It's easily up there with the Hitchcock True Four book, which, which always gets so much
#
Actually, Bogdanovich did a, did a screwball comedy for the 70s, updated on, What's Up
#
Dog with Barbara Streisberg.
#
A tribute to Bringing Our Baby, because he was a huge fan of Howard Hawks.
#
So Bogdanovich was also one of the great champions of Howard Hawks, who, did we mention Hawks
#
We have not mentioned Hawks, but yeah.
#
We've mentioned him now.
#
Yeah, so along with Preston Sturges, the other guy was Howard Hawks, who's, who had this,
#
I mean, this whole idea of something called an Hawksian woman or the Hawksian heroine,
#
So who, like the Barbara Steinwigs and Bringing Our Baby, the front page ka film kya bana
#
So he also is another director.
#
And this is something I've experienced firsthand, you know, through an somewhat acrimonious
#
exchange online, the sort of director that you just sort of end up having to defend,
#
because you know, he was very much in some ways, in some superficially interpreted ways,
#
he was very much a male director, you know, he had a masculine, he was a man's man, you
#
know, from, from a certain period.
#
And, and some of that gets reflected in his films, though, for my money, his best films
#
have have fascinating women characters, who are always retorting, but of course, you know,
#
so this, of course, ties into the ways in which, you know, you know, one has different
#
ideological lenses while watching films, His Girl Friday, which to my mind is such an empowering
#
film from, and of course, I'm speaking as a guy also, from the gender parity point of
#
view, especially because it was a remake of a play and a film where Hawks and his writers
#
took took a male character and turned that male character into a woman with a lot of,
#
you know, power within the story, but I had a bit of an online argument once with someone
#
who said, His Girl Friday is a chauvinistic film, because this woman, it ends with this
#
woman following Carrie Grant out of the room.
#
I think their lives are so sad, because they're not watching, they're not taking in art for
#
its own sake, for the beauty and the joy that is in art.
#
What can I get offended by to show how virtuous I am?
#
Well, you know, we should keep in mind that we are after all three men talking about this
#
So maybe we should be a bit circumspect.
#
But it's not just art for art's sake.
#
It's also that, you know, once my problem with this sort of ideological interpretation
#
of a certain sort is that once you have those blinkers on, you sometimes just, you know,
#
prevent yourself from seeing the entirety of the work.
#
You just sort of you see only what you need to see.
#
And again, coming back to what we said earlier that, you know, you need a single takeaway
#
Is this film, is it a liberal film or a progressive film, is it progressive or aggressive?
#
Is it liberal or conservative and you're looking for, or you're asking reductive questions
#
like that, you will only, you know, get reductive answers, which you will supply yourself.
#
Whereas a lot of the sorts of films we are talking about are much more complex in terms
#
of their entirety, in terms of what they're doing.
#
And I'm not even saying that that somebody who makes this point about a Howard Hawks
#
film or a John Ford film is wrong.
#
I'm not saying that, but it is one point, it is one way of looking at something.
#
And there are other, there are the counterpoints to it within the same work.
#
So yeah, so, but yeah, so Hawks is, I mean, Hawks also, Hawks directed The Big Sleep,
#
the original Philip Marlowe, which is one of the most incomprehensible, great films
#
ever made at the plot level because, because even, even Raymond Chandler had no idea who
#
the murderer was, who one of the murderers was.
#
And then he also, did he do To Have and Have Not?
#
So he did To Have and Have Not.
#
Here's a trivia quiz question, Falkner, Hemingway, Has he spoiled the question?
#
He spoiled the question.
#
Why did he spoil the question?
#
Oh, it was an actual question.
#
The only film which has a screenplay that's done by two Nobel Prize winners.
#
Anyway, so we went to Hawks because we were on Bogdanovich and...
#
So Bogdanovich ye kya kar raha tha, WhatsApp dog, you know, last picture show, Paper Moon.
#
I think after that he disappeared.
#
So in the 70s, if you take Hindi, I think some of the masala, you know, Vijayanand Goldie,
#
which is Johnny Mera Naam and Jyotir.
#
There's also this little film which I realized that no one, no young person, quote unquote,
#
in any of the classes I've taught has seen, many of them have heard of it, Sholay, 1975.
#
You know, I was having this discussion about Sanjeev Kumar the other day, you know, as
#
you know, he passed away at a young age in the 1980s and therefore is sort of completely
#
under the radar of many people who were not around when those films were coming out.
#
So there are people who sort of vaguely know who Sanjeev Kumar is because they've seen
#
him in a poster of Sholay with a shawl.
#
So they sort of figure that that's the person.
#
So these are people who know Sholay by name.
#
Some of them know the Godfather by name.
#
But watching these films is out of the question.
#
I mean, they should be, they should, like if there's a serial killer in Delhi who is
#
going around killing young people who don't appreciate cinema adequately, the needle of
#
suspicion has to go to, you know.
#
Does it have to be the grandson of the disco killer killer, the disco dancer killer?
#
We don't know your antecedents too well.
#
All right, back to Subrata for the 800th time.
#
80s is only back to the future and Mr. India.
#
And Amit's favourite Sridevi film, Nagina.
#
I thought you were going to say John Huston's dead, but never mind.
#
Ongli mein anguthi, anguthi mein Nagina.
#
Harmesh Malhotra was the guy who used to make these Nagina films.
#
Nigaahe, Nagina, Harmesh Malhotra.
#
I mean, you don't need to know him for any other reason except this.
#
But are you recommending these films?
#
I see, I think if I remember right, Jai had recommended Rahul Ravel, who I can't recommend
#
I mean, he was great fun.
#
Then I will recommend a few JP Dutta films of the 80s.
#
JP Dutta, Mukul Anand to some degree also.
#
These are directors who had some sort of the visual sensibility at a time when there wasn't
#
that much of it happening in the Hindi mainstream, when Hathiyar, Gulami.
#
And then, of course, Rajiv Rai.
#
I mean, maybe it was my time and whatever the time and context in which I saw, Tridev
#
toh matlab, I mean, if you want to watch an 80s film, if India, you know, watch Tridev.
#
Tridev is the ultimate 80s masala film.
#
There are three big heroes, there is Amresh Puri.
#
And every single guy that you see in 80s movie Peeche as one of the henchmen is there.
#
In fact, all of them are there together in one song, Raat bha jaam se jaam tak rahaega,
#
where they are trying to disrobe Sangeeta Bijlani, you know, through the song one after
#
No, the much bigger villains gallery though was in Naseeb.
#
But you know, I have personal liking for Dan Dhanova, Mahesh Anand, these sidey guys.
#
Underappreciated sidekicks.
#
Dan Dhanova, Mahesh Anand, Dalip Tahil is there.
#
That Sapru, Tej Sapru, Seema Sapru's brother, Seema Sapru was the person who was there in
#
every Ramseh brother, Ramseh films.
#
In fact, 80s or Ramseh films bhi dekhne chahiye hai.
#
We haven't even come to Ramseh, I mean, Shyamodas Gupta's book, my friend Shyamodas Gupta, which
#
I wrote an introduction for.
#
Doga Samin Ke Nichye was the early 70s film, which was the film that established Ramseh.
#
This Imtiaz, the brother of Hamjad Khan is the character, is the sort of the bad guy there.
#
But 80s Ramseh really took off with one movie called Vee Rana and Purana Mandir, which unofficially
#
though it's not there on any records apparently because of the way records were maintained
#
or not maintained for smaller towns, but apparently it was the second biggest hit of the year
#
Manish Behl's debut and it has some good songs also.
#
Mujhe lag raha hai ki show notes banate banate iss episode le main pagal ho jaunga.
#
And you'll have to, just in the interest of research, you'll have to watch all these films.
#
Bad chance of me doing that, but yeah, just putting the show notes only will like take
#
So yeah, so I mean people should watch Vee Rana, people should watch some of those early
#
Govinda films and of course Babbar Subhash, Babbar Subhash we've already spoken about,
#
but some of these early Govinda films, the guy was so happy.
#
He was a force of nature, you know, even before the David Dhawan phases.
#
Before that I'm saying.
#
I remember having a sense though, I think I was already, you know, getting phased out
#
of the world of Hindi cinema around that time.
#
My mother would end up being a big Govinda fan in the nineties, but I remember just having
#
a sense that here is someone who's very unusual, who's just this, this presence.
#
So far you've made predictions about two young Bollywood stars.
#
One is Govinda, one is Ranveer Singh.
#
That's a good track record.
#
About Govinda, yeah, yeah, even on Govinda, he felt that there is something, even before
#
He felt that there is something and it turned out that there was.
#
I mean all the, I'm a street dancer and, I'm here for you, I mean, just great, Govinda
#
was good fun, even before David Dhawan.
#
So that is, I think in Hollywood, like I said, you can do some of this Peter Weir watching
#
and you can do, I haven't even really, really got into world cinema or what we call world
#
Anyway, but I think, you know, we started off with Amit asking us for five recommendations
#
We've basically gone through all of film history and you need to come and help me teach this
#
class that I'm starting from next month, especially with all the PC Barua and KL Sehgal context
#
So, I mean, they can't cancel PC Barua.
#
We have not done world cinema, but 80s was a good time for some of that also, I mean.
#
So Amit, you have to now, now give us your list of.
#
90s then of course there are, I think I did mention John Dahl, I think there are of course
#
Tarantino came, Roberto Rodriguez, there are some smaller films of these guys.
#
I mean, for instance, Jackie Brown, I think is a better Tarantino film than most, I don't
#
know what you think about.
#
Well, my favorite is actually Pulp Fiction, which is a very boring thing to say, but.
#
But yeah, I mean, we've missed one of his strengths as I discovered when I was just talking
#
to him before this, I mean, the whole Wes Craven and John Carpenter stuff Halloween and Nightmare
#
on M3, which I just absolutely enjoyed a lot, Scream.
#
Scream had some of the early stars, I mean, all kinds of the first Scream, they were all
#
The early 90s also, I just remembered because I was discussing this with someone recently,
#
has one of the great, I mean, to my mind, action films, Terminator 2.
#
I saw it just two months back.
#
And you know, I just find myself appreciating that film more and more because I feel again
#
at risk of sounding like this old person who can't take too much of the new, but that isn't
#
it because there's another much more recent film that I love is Mad Max Fury Road, which
#
I think is just a wonderful film, just a no qualification at all that it's a wonderful
#
But you know, jokes about Christopher Nolan aside, because obviously the guy has a lot
#
One of the problems I have with his Batman films is that the action sequences in them
#
are so cluttered, I very often just can't make sense of them.
#
I can't make sense of them at the level of, you know, where is one character in relation
#
to the other character?
#
There's such a thing as doing chaos deliberately, which is a different thing.
#
But with some of the action sequences in Christopher Nolan's films, including the Dark Knight and
#
so on, I just get the impression that it's that it's just messy because he hasn't been
#
And then when I look at something like Mad Max Fury Road, or the Terminator 2, you know,
#
those are examples to my mind of really clean action films where you're getting the thrill
#
and the adrenaline and there's a lot going on at the same time.
#
But you know exactly what's happening at all the time, you know, you just, you know, and...
#
I rewatched it two months back because I was showing it to my 13 year old.
#
So you are right, the first that motorbike chase, this guy goes above that, you know,
#
it's just, especially you are there, right?
#
I mean, a lot of broader Avengers and this Marvel Universe stuff, sometimes spatially
#
I can't make out what is happening because it's all three dimensional stuff that's happening.
#
Here it's clear, it's coming from here, it's going from there.
#
So I think that's something that you can't, you know, you just have to acknowledge that
#
I don't know what you think of Mad Max Fury Road if you've seen it or something, but...
#
I intended to see it, but I haven't seen it yet.
#
But what I did read about it was somebody saying something to the effect of if you watch
#
it at double speed, everything still makes sense.
#
I don't know what that means.
#
I don't watch films at double speed, by the way.
#
No, but I don't think you should do that with this one.
#
Or there was some meta comment on it's so well constructed that it, you know, whatever,
#
Jarvis Theron is good in that.
#
Actually the great part about 90s and 2000s that I have enjoyed.
#
And now again, it has also started becoming a bit of a thing, which it's fine.
#
I mean, it's like my early fascination for Mithun and Govinda.
#
And then later I realized that that itself has become sort of everybody.
#
I have always been a fan of Nicolas Cage and Keanu Reeves.
#
And I'm so glad that today there is one separate cult of Keanu Reeves and Nicolas Cage.
#
So much so that there is a separate film about Nicolas Cage being Nicolas Cage, which was
#
about two months back, one month back that has come out.
#
First time I saw Nicolas Cage was in Wild at Heart.
#
I think it won the golden farm at Cannes.
#
No, Nicolas Cage is there in a, there is a John Dahl movie in which Nicolas Cage is there.
#
I think it's called, what is it called, The Last Seduction or something.
#
Of course, the other guy was Edward Norton, who I used to love in those late 90s films.
#
His anti-virus was also very well made.
#
American violence, whatever, American History X and I mean, Rounders as well.
#
You must like Rounders.
#
You must like Rounders.
#
I mean, all poker films get poker completely wrong, including this one, but Rounders is
#
I mean, it doesn't commit sacrilegious.
#
I mean, it simplifies as Hollywood must, but it's a good movie.
#
But 90s again on the Hindi and actually 80s, there is a movie called New Delhi Times.
#
This is this Shashi Kapoor and Anand Sharma, Ramesh Sharma, great film, Gulzar script.
#
But 90s again, I think one of the, of course, Satya and other things changed, but the Dhruv
#
Kaal of Nilani, I had enjoyed at that time.
#
There were some classic masala stuff of 90s also, which is not bad.
#
Gupt for instance, again, coming back to Rajiv Rai and Mohra both, wow, total.
#
And this millennium, you're not talking about at all because we need to get to Amit's list.
#
You know, what I'm thinking is that, you know, or kuih sune na sune is episode ko, Rajiv
#
I mean, I'm more than Rajiv Rai, I hope Sonam listens to it, Sonam is his wife, a big fan.
#
She might send you fan email.
#
Not Sonam Kapoor, but Sonam the original.
#
All three of us are old enough to get that.
#
By the way, whose original name was Bhakti R Khan, but anyway, I mean, I'll not bore
#
with 2000s and 2010s, but that's a whole list of stuff that people can watch.
#
I think a lot of it is not very obscure.
#
Amit, your 15 favorite Hindi masala films of the 2000s.
#
Yeah, so when I sent you guys this email saying, paanch paanch film aap name karo, underappreciated.
#
Then I thought that, shit, why did I volunteer myself for this?
#
And I didn't really feel like choosing five and also I keep talking about films.
#
So I don't want to go through the same ones, ki deco log achcha hai, yeh achcha hai, wo
#
I don't want to talk about films.
#
So I decided to narrow the focus down so sharply that it becomes easy to choose.
#
So I narrowed the focus to films that I watched at MAMI over the last three, four years.
#
World Cinema that I discovered there.
#
So very quickly, these are the films I'd recommend.
#
There's a very fine film called Wild, directed by Nicolette Krebitz.
#
So it's a lovely film about this woman who's, it's a German film, who's in the city and
#
she's got a bad job and her boss is an asshole and she's kind of fed up.
#
And once in a while she'll go out into the woods, into the forest and all of that.
#
And through a mysterious turn of events, she kidnaps a wolf and she gets a wolf back in
#
her apartment with her.
#
And I think the wolf, if I remember correctly, is kind of serrated when she manages to bring
#
it back, but obviously snaps out of that state.
#
And now there's a lot of work.
#
She's got to feed the wolf.
#
She's got to build a relationship with the wolf.
#
She's got to make sure the wolf doesn't kill her.
#
And it's very interesting how it develops.
#
It's a very interior psychological kind of film.
#
I'm assuming this is a real wolf, it's not a wolf played by anti-circus or anything.
#
No, no, it's a real wolf and it's a lovely film.
#
Sexual overtones and all that.
#
And it's a very, it's a very, you know, a different kind of film just to have the courage
#
to conceive of it and then make it so well, kind of really impressed me.
#
Another film is actually a mainstream Hollywood film that didn't get any Oscar nominations,
#
didn't make waves, which is very sad.
#
It's by a director called Trey Edward Schultz.
#
And I thought it's an absolute masterpiece when I saw it and it did get some rave reviews
#
from some people I respect, but made absolutely no mark either in the box office or at the
#
And it's a lovely film, which has two sort of rhythms to it.
#
And like, like if you enjoy listening to, if you enjoy the part that music can play
#
in a film really well, you know, you kind of get it here where the first half of the
#
film about this young man who's, you know, pumped up and adrenaline and all of that.
#
The first half of the film is, it's like the music is driving it forward.
#
There is this relentless propulsion that is happening till giving nothing away.
#
And then the rest of the film follows his sister and how she copes with it.
#
And it's very quiet, slow, a lot of therav.
#
It's a sudden change in rhythm and yet it's so beautiful and these halves fit together
#
It was a masterpiece, but just went unnoticed by almost everyone.
#
The third film, perhaps controversial is Gaspar No's film Climax, which is about a bunch of
#
people at a party and somebody mixes psychedelic stuff in their drinks, I think LSD.
#
And it just, it just goes nuts.
#
And it's a film that doesn't have a logical plot from a point of view of things happening
#
beyond what I just told you.
#
It's kind of hard to describe, but they kind of like, they kind of go mad.
#
Everything goes crazy and it's just so visceral.
#
It's like you're sitting in a movie hall and everything about it, you know, and it's a
#
very choreographed film in the sense there's a lot of movement, you know, the way everything
#
I thought that was very visceral.
#
Gaspar No's film about people not being intoxicated would be quite visceral anyway.
#
Yeah, and yeah, so and the film is oddly described as a psychological horror, but I don't even
#
I don't know if any category really fits.
#
And another film described a psychological horror, which I think is again a phosphate
#
is Darren Aronofsky's Mother, which again, similar visceral experience, a plot makes
#
And half the people I was with in the hall when we saw it were just like, what the fuck
#
And the other half is just reeling like I was at the sheer force of the film.
#
And again, it's one of those things where you just have to kind of sit back and experience
#
it and leave your brain out of it.
#
So if you misplace your brain, as you were saying you'll never do, you should probably
#
And finally, a film I mentioned earlier, in this episode, One Cut of the Dead by Shinichiri
#
Ueda, Japanese horror film, and it's like a film within a film.
#
It's about a bunch of guys trying to make a single cut film and it's a horror film and
#
And it is no other film that I have ever seen has communicated the joy of cinema better
#
I mean, at the surface level, it's a bunch of guys trying to make a film and taking joy
#
But the joy I got from sitting in the audience was kind of incredible.
#
So I narrowed my gaze down to films I've seen at MAMI in the last five years.
#
And these five would be among the ones that really hit me hard and move me.
#
So yeah, that's my list.
#
So you'll have that on the show notes as well, right?
#
I'll have these on the show notes.
#
I don't even know how many of these will be available.
#
Like there's another great film called Echo by Dren Jerka, which I didn't mention because
#
I've spoken about it before on the show and I couldn't even find a link to that.
#
I think My Mother is there on one of the OTTs, but I don't know about the others.
#
I don't know about Wild.
#
But so a couple of final questions before we shout out at the end.
#
And a question for you, Subrata, what happened to that, why aren't you doing it?
#
That was a very fine podcast that you used to run with your friend.
#
Well, Pawan and I ran it.
#
Not finding enough time.
#
Pawan normally has many other things that he keeps dabbling with.
#
I have sort of the pandemic gave us some spare time.
#
We did 10 episodes, each episode running over three hours.
#
So that's good quality content, including one episode where we spoke at length on Mr.
#
You'll have to go through a lot of draws before you reach that.
#
But immense modesty and calling it draws, these beautiful conversations about films
#
from two people who are clearly so passionate about it.
#
It's films and books and I mean, every time there is a theme, so it's about like we take
#
a theme of train and then we talk about films on train and books on train and with Indian
#
context mostly, very, very little outside of India thing.
#
But anyway, so hopefully again, we'll get it started.
#
I mean, there is enough and more material to speak about, but yeah, I mean, we thoroughly
#
enjoyed the 10 episodes over three hours and both of us have sort of the same kind of experiences
#
and we do remember quite a bit like the jingles and the opening credits of all the dhara vahegs,
#
But we have a lot of Hindi literature recommendations there because Pawan reads a lot as well, especially
#
Are you ever going to resume the podcast?
#
I mean, we've always been thinking, so we'll have to just one day decide and take the time
#
It used to take a fair amount of production work, quite honestly, because we used to do
#
it during the pandemic.
#
It was at home and I was doing many much of that.
#
So maybe if we get a studio, we just come together and start and finish within three
#
hours and that gets done.
#
Again, I think, I mean, there are some book recommendations, I mean, I like to read a
#
You know, people can...
#
Okay, you mean, there are book recommendations in that?
#
I mean, general book recommendations, of course, I mean, there are, I mean, that I have all
#
the time, you know, people can, I mean, I've, of late again, I've gone back into some of
#
I mean, I've reread Thomas Mann, yeah, the Magic Mountain, Death in Venice, I mean, I
#
You read it again, you find there is so much there.
#
Calvino, again, I mean, Invisible Cities and...
#
My favorite Calvino is Cosmic Comics.
#
Cosmic Comics, yeah, I mean, Calvino, during, again, during pandemic, it was good to read
#
I mean, it's so intricate, you know, the plot has all kinds of things there.
#
If on a winter's night, a traveler and all of that.
#
So read Calvino, people read, for me, read Rushdie as well.
#
I'm a great Rushdie fan, I'm really sorry for what's happened to him.
#
I've been rereading A House for Mr. Biswas recently, really enjoying it very much.
#
I think, same, I mean, yeah, in Nepal, I mean, Bend in the River House for Mr. Biswas, fantastic.
#
Middlemarch is one that I read again after a long time, well-deserved sort of thing where
#
people say that it holds even after so many years.
#
Again, read, I had not read Mrs. Dalloway.
#
I read that during the pandemic, I'd read To the Lighthouse, but I'd not read this one.
#
So yeah, I mean, there are, I mean, of course, we didn't talk about some of the, actually,
#
we didn't talk at all about English films.
#
We didn't talk, and also, I wanted a Bollywood appreciation course, but we didn't, you didn't,
#
you guys, I forgot to ask about that.
#
So maybe next episode, you can give me a Bollywood appreciation course.
#
We didn't do English films, but I mean, I'm just, I'm a huge fan of that whole, you know,
#
Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh era, you know, Waugh was just such a fantastic writer, The
#
Decline and the Fall, Scoop, and just so much of satire, such gentle comedy.
#
And of course, Greene, I mean, Brighton Rock is one of my favorite books of all times.
#
And the film, I mean, with Attenborough, Attenborough's Pinky, yeah, Attenborough's Pinky, I mean,
#
it's just visceral film, and, you know, people don't realize how good an actor also Attenborough
#
Greene also did some very interesting film reviews in the thirties, including that notorious
#
one about Shirley Temple, where he sort of just pointed out that many people, many men
#
watching her would have, would not exactly be seeing her as a sweet little girl.
#
And of course, he got lacerated for it, because how dare you even bring up that possibility.
#
Yeah, it's, you know, it clearly exists only in your mind, but it can't exist anywhere
#
But again, I mean, I love that era, I like Kingsley Amis, I like, of course, his son
#
as well, but Kingsley Amis, again, great, fantastic writing.
#
Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur, The Empire Trilogy, again, fantastic books, people should
#
Kingsley Amis, you know, joined this gymnasium near his house to work out.
#
And they were big fans of his, and they just felt so fortunate that he's joined them.
#
So then renamed themselves Lucky Gym.
#
Yeah, so, and even those, like I said, those late sixties, early seventies Brit films,
#
some of it, they were carrying over the kitchen sink, you know, sensibilities of the theater
#
of that time into the films.
#
And you know, Michael Caine in the early seventies and all, again, he was a different kind of
#
If you watch Alfie Get Shottie, Get Carter, where he goes back.
#
And I think people of our age would fondly remember Blame It on Rio, which was actually
#
released in India, but for different reasons and cinematic merit perhaps.
#
That was much later, 280s.
#
Yeah, so anyway, books, I mean, that's pretty much it, I mean, I think I've thrown the kitchen
#
sink at the whole question that you had.
#
Yeah, you know, one of those people whose kitchen sink is full of books.
#
So question for Jai, and the final question for you, which is, is there something you'd
#
like to plug on the show in terms of courses you teach and all of that, since you, you
#
know, have film appreciation courses?
#
Well, I've been for the last two years since the pandemic and since I discovered this,
#
the existence of this lovely thing called Zoom.
#
I have been hosting these, I taught a few courses as well, but what I really preferred
#
doing is, is hosting these online conversations, which are completely informal things.
#
And I've built up quite a, quite a bank of people who have, whose email IDs are on this
#
And it's been fairly American cinema centric so far and kind of the 30s, 40s, 50s, different
#
So I'm open to all sorts of conversations and once a month or so, I try to have a solid
#
So if anyone wants to just follow me on, on either Facebook or Twitter or whatever, you'll
#
get the information there.
#
I usually put it up on my blog as well, Jabberwock, which is searchable if you just search with
#
But yeah, so, so though there, anyone who's really interested in conversations about films,
#
very informal, free flowing conversations where everybody can participate, just show
#
up there or just get in touch and all, all, all I need to do is put your mail ID on the
#
I'm on the mailing list.
#
I took his one of the early, I think the first course that he did, I haven't attended any
#
But I've been a bit remiss in attending the bat tugs.
#
No, that's okay, but most people, usually not more than 20, 25 people show up.
#
I would completely, I mean, thoroughly enjoy it.
#
I don't know why, for some reason, I only get to know the day later that, oh, it's done
#
yesterday, so on and so forth.
#
So maybe I just need to sort of put it on my calendar.
#
I mean, I'll, but you have been getting the mail.
#
Yeah, I have been getting the mails very much, but I think for the next few weeks, I certainly
#
can't attend one because I'll be making the show notes for this episode.
#
So finally, all three of us have to make a shout out.
#
I'll start shout out to Daddu.
#
Shout out to Daddu, the founder of Versova Mumblecore and a guy who has tried to delete
#
his, you know, digital footprint.
#
But I have that photograph of his in green shirt and with not a single strand of hair
#
I have the address of the cave in Yemen where he currently resides.
#
And I have none of this information, but shout out to Daddu nonetheless.
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It's been, you've been very patient and this is longer than the longest Bollywood film,
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And hopefully much more worth it.
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So not Gangs of Basapur, not Tamas also, Tamas was eight hours.
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I lose, but thank you so much for coming.
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Thank you for having us.
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If you enjoyed listening to this, check out the show notes.
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You can spend the next 10 years watching every film in there.
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You can follow Jay on Twitter at jayarjun, Subrit is inactive on social media, but you
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can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
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Thank you for listening.
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Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen?
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If so, would you like to support the production of the show?
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You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep
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this podcast alive and kicking.
