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One of the things I have thought about a lot recently is how our work shapes who we become.
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There are professions that require you to be outward facing.
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For example, an investment banker is incentivized to study financial markets, survey banks work,
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the internal politics of the workplace etc etc.
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If their gaze goes inwards, it's only in their spare time.
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Ditto engineers, managers, doctors etc etc.
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But artists are often forced by the nature of their work to be more inward looking.
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Whenever an actor plays a character, the process of donning another skin gives her a better
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understanding of her own self.
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Actors, poets, writers, filmmakers all have to turn inwards to do meaningful work.
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The human condition is their own condition.
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Self-reflection is what makes us more than mere animals and some are naturally driven
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to it by the work they have to do.
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Like my guest today for example, we had a lovely conversation and one reason for that
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is that he is an artist.
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Someone who thinks deeply not just about his art and craft and these times we live in,
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but also about his own self.
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And as he peers into himself, you get to listen.
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Danish Hussein, who started his working life as a banker, but thank god
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Danish has run theatre, he has played a part in reviving the old art of Dasangoi, he has
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acted in films, he is a prolific poet, he runs a repertory company, he is a master of
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many languages and he is a man of great insight.
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In this conversation, he spoke about the troubled times we live in, the complex nature of identity,
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the art and craft of theatre, the algorithms of storytelling, how he learnt both storytelling
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In many of the life lessons he took from his rich journey as an artist.
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He also read out many of his favourite poems in both Rekta and English.
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This episode is a keeper.
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Before we get to it though, here's a quick commercial break.
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Hey, the music started and this sounds like a commercial, but it isn't.
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It's a plea from me to check out my latest Labour of Love, a YouTube show I am co-hosting
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with my good friend, the brilliant Ajay Shah.
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We've called it, Everything is Everything.
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Every week, we'll speak for about an hour on things we care about, from the profound
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to the profane, from the exalted to the everyday.
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We range widely across subjects and we bring multiple frames with which we try to understand
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Please join us on our journey and please support us by subscribing to our YouTube channel at
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youtube.com slash amitvarma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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The show is called Everything is Everything.
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Please do check it out.
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Dhanesh, welcome to the scene.
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It's a great privilege to have you on.
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I've kind of followed your work for a long time and we've been on the peripheries of
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each other's circles, I think.
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I want to, you know, before we talk about…
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Before you go ahead, I'll say you've become David Frost of podcasting, so it's a great
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privilege for me to be here.
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You know, I, Dhanesh, I've got to tell you, I read what you've written in your Twitter
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bio where you wrote, people often mistake my sarcasm for humility.
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If the kindness that comes from you can be looked upon with great suspicion.
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There is an incident which sparked that thing.
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I was performing in Delhi some years back and I performed and I got out, I think it
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was at Orleans Francis, I got out and there were these two youngsters, they approached
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me and they said, you're good, you're very good, you should try theater.
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So I kind of, you know, I look at them and I politely say, thank you so much, you know,
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I'll take up your advice and I'll really look up, you know, theater.
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And they were like, no, we're happy to help you.
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And then the kids walked off and the gentleman with me, like, he was like trying to hold
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And when they went away, he kind of burst out laughing.
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And from that incident, this thing came, this line came in my head, my sarcasm for humility.
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I do want to talk about your life and I do want to talk about your work.
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But before that, let's start by talking about a general question that I've asked some other
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guests and that I think about more and more and we are almost the same age, I think I'm
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two and a half years younger, so, you know, that's almost the same.
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That's almost the same.
#
When you're 20, it's not the same.
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When you're around 50, it is pretty much the same.
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And I actually want to ask you about that conception of time because I remember when
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I was 20, it seemed like 40 is old, you know, you used to romanticize all the early dyers.
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It was a club of 27, all the rock stars who ride at 27.
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There was another group at 33 and so on and so forth.
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And it seemed to stretch out forever.
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And something that was 30 years in the past seemed a long, long, long, long time ago.
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Now, today we are at a place where, you know, in a sense, we are as far from our birth as
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World War I was from our birth in a sense, that has kind of expanded.
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And it took me by surprise, like the decades just slip by so fast.
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One of my friends has a beautiful way of putting it where he says the days are long, but the
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years are short and time just kind of slips by.
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And that has, in certain ways, changed the way I look at time, changed the way I look
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at history, changed the way I look at my own life.
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And I'm guessing that for you, that sense of time expanding, of being distant things,
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not being so distant anymore, must be even more acute because a lot of the work you've
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done with Dastang Goi and the sort of theatre work you've done stretches even further back
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And, you know, somewhere in one of your interviews, and I'll link them all from the show notes,
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you said a sentence which struck me as so beautiful, and you said that India was never
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a fixed point, there was never a golden age, or there was a fixed point, ki aisa tha, we
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were always a river, we were always kind of flowing, right, and I found that very kind
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So, you know, tell me a little bit about how your notion of time has changed over time
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and how that has sort of affected the way you look at your work, the way you look at
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the world, the way you've kind of redefined what you do.
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The other day, I mean, it's very interesting that you bring it up.
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Just like three, four days back, I was having a conversation with some friend of mine, and
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I said that I realized that when my father was my age, I was possibly mid-twenties at
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And when I looked at my father from that vantage point of mid-twenties, and he being 53, and
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my father looked like a very solid, mature man who's kind of reached his station in
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his life, and it seemed as if he's got everything sorted in his life.
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And I said, no, I'm not like that at all, I mean, so somewhere maybe was my father also
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like me? Was he also having doubts?
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Was he also having aspirations?
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Was he also feeling that, you know, he's been under power in terms of what he's achieved?
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Did he also have these kind of notions where, though you are a certain age, but you don't
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And I thought possibly yes, you know, I mean, what we were thinking of our parents, what
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I thought of my father when I was 25 and he was 53.
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Perhaps my father was not that man.
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Perhaps my father was closer to what I am today.
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So that notion made my father very human and vulnerable to me.
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I immediately started looking at my father with a different pair of eyes.
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In terms of, you know, time, it's strange that now that we've lived five decades and
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I look back at my life, I do not see it as a continuum.
#
I see it as epochs, eras, you know, there is a burst, you know, there's an age, there
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is an era, and I'm there and then there's a blip, and then I move into another era,
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and then there's a blip, and I move into another era.
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That's quite fascinating.
#
And I think it also perhaps is the conception of what history is for us, is that that's
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how, you know, from a very personal, if you move to a very universal history, that's possibly
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we kind of look at, you know, we look at history as these sets of eras, and then there's a
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blip and then there's an era.
#
And that got me to the question as to what is happening in blip?
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You know, where was I in the blip?
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What was I doing in the blip?
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And I realized that the blip was actually the manthan, the churning period, which kind
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of embarked me on the next set of journey.
#
And so that gave me the understanding that when you go through a blip, when you go through
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this little dip in your life, it's possibly an opportunity where you pause, you assess,
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you gather yourself, and you kind of start chalking out a strategy or some kind of idea
#
in your head as to how you want to move ahead.
#
I won't say strategy, strategy is a wrong word, because most of the time we really are
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not thinking that clearly.
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We just have vague notions in our head.
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And with those vague notions, we basically, it's like, it's like, it's like, you know,
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it's something like that.
#
And the other thing is that there is a disconnect between how the world views you and how you
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We do not think ourselves to be of our age.
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Somewhere in my head, I'm still in 40s right now, early 40s or something.
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But also the other thing which has come is that the ability to be quieter, the ability
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to absorb more, and of course morbidity also sets in.
#
So you know you have a limited shelf life.
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And in that limited shelf life, you don't want to waste your breath over telling things
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I want to take in more.
#
So I think the gaze becomes more outward.
#
And in some sense, the more outward the gaze is, it is also reflective and it's also inward.
#
You're also looking at yourself.
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But you're realizing that there is so much outside to absorb that that obsession with
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the self kind of starts dwindling away.
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And yeah, sorry, I'm rambling now, I think.
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No, no, it's beautiful.
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That's a whole idea of this show to go down on all these bilanes.
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And everything you said was really resonant.
#
And I'm going to start by, I'm going to start with your point about, you know, thinking
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of your dad as once as old as you are.
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You know, I came across some pictures of my, like I was clearing out my dad's house after
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he died a couple of years ago.
#
And I came across a lot of old photographs and in many of them, he's in his twenties
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and some of them he's like in his forties.
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And I remember in one of them looking at that picture in the forties and saying, haan mujhe
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yaad hai yeh picture kab liya tha.
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And for me, in my mind, he is an old man, but in the photograph he's 42 years old.
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And have you, you must have read this beautiful poem by A.K. Ramanujan called Self-Portrait.
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I'll read it out for my listeners and I'll encourage you anytime you, when something
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comes to mind, you feel like reading it out, please do.
#
One loves reading it every time one encounters it.
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Self-Portrait by A.K. Ramanujan.
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I resemble everyone but myself and sometimes see in shop windows, despite the well-known
#
laws of optics, the portrait of a stranger, date unknown, often signed in a corner by
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I recall when my father was alive and I was in college, I had this very vivid dream.
#
It's one of those vivid dreams that have stuck with me.
#
And in that dream, so, you know, in college we were a bunch of four or five friends and
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one of my friends used to stay in this locality called Kamnagar, which is right behind Karudi
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And his flat was such that it was a corner, first floor flat from his living room window.
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You could see the main street of Kamnagar, which was going in.
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So in my dream, I see that I'm living in his house, my friend's house, and it's my house.
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And I'm standing at the window and I'm looking at the main street of Kamnagar and it's a
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marketplace, people going around, walking, doing shopping, you know, vendors, hawkers.
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And then in the dream, I go off to sleep.
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In the dream, I'm sleeping, I'm having a siesta.
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And then there's a loud bang and I wake up, oh, sorry, I've gone a little ahead.
#
So I'm standing at the window and I'm looking at this main street of the market.
#
And in the dream, I'm a painter.
#
So I take the canvas and I paint this view that I have of the main street.
#
After I finish the painting, I feel that this is too, you know, too staid and there's nothing
#
There needs to be a little drama in the painting.
#
So I kind of put a car accident in the middle of the street and two cars are rammed into
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There is a crowd standing there and there is a body lying on the pavement with a white
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And after I finished the painting, I'm satisfied that now it's a dramatic painting.
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There is something, you know, happening in it.
#
And I go off to sleep, I go into a siesta in the dream and there's a loud bang.
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And I wake up and I see exactly the same view on the street, which is there in my painting.
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So I'm not able to figure out, wow, I mean, this is premonition, what, how have I been
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able to see there, you know, paint something which was about to happen.
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But then something then, you know, reality kind of strikes in and I like, I need to go
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down and figure out what has happened.
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And I go running down there and I keep asking people what happened, what happened.
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People are giving me vague answers.
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This car came, this car came.
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And then I step towards the body and I lift the shroud and it's my father.
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It was one of the most vivid Freudian dreams that you can think of that I had.
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And that was when my father was alive.
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He was very much alive.
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You know, I was 20, 19, 20 at that time.
#
My father would have been like 48 or something.
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My father died at the age of 68.
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So he lived two decades after that.
#
But that dream kind of very acutely made me aware that there would be a point in my life
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and I would lose my parents.
#
And that did something to me in the sense that that thing that you mentioned about being
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in a river is that somewhere I would reach that point in the river where I will have
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to say goodbye to the station.
#
Before I go to the next question, I'll read out another poem.
#
See what you're doing to me.
#
You're supposed to be doing this, not me.
#
But just to kind of go with the flow.
#
This one is by Mark Strand, one of my absolute favorite poets.
#
And it's called The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter.
#
It had been a long day at work and a long ride back to the small apartment where I lived.
#
When I got there, I flicked on the light and saw on the table an envelope with my name on it.
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Where was the calendar?
#
The handwriting was my father's, but he had been dead for 40 years.
#
As one might, I began to think that maybe, just maybe, he was alive,
#
living a secret life somewhere nearby.
#
How else to explain the envelope?
#
To steady myself, I sat down, opened it, and pulled out the letter.
#
Dear son was the way it began.
#
Dear son, and then nothing.
#
So this was from Mark Strand's last collection of poems, Almost Invisible.
#
I think he was over 70 when he wrote this, and he died shortly after.
#
I want to go back to something that you also said about your life,
#
that when you look back on it, you can divide it neatly into periods,
#
and there are epochs and all of that.
#
And it strikes me that we can all do that,
#
but I wonder if that is post-facto, that after it has happened,
#
then from the way that it went, you kind of, you know, build a narrative.
#
Because at least when I look at my life and many of my guests,
#
when I talk to them, it's like things just happened.
#
Now you can look back and tell a story, and you can make that story romantic,
#
you can make that story sad, you can make it whatever,
#
but at the time, there was no story.
#
It just kind of unfolded.
#
And I think what happens is that some of us reach a stage
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where you kind of think about taking control of that story,
#
where for a certain part of your life, you're just kind of going through the motions.
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You are in currents that you can't control.
#
You don't know yourself yet.
#
And then at some point, you sort of get more intentional about the things.
#
And intentionality is also something that I think about,
#
that are we intentional about our friendships,
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about our relationships, about the things that we do?
#
Like one of the most beautiful quotes I've read is by Annie Dillard,
#
where she says, the way we live our days is the way we live our lives.
#
And it strikes me there that then it is important for us to be intentional
#
about how we spend this day, how we spend tomorrow.
#
What am I doing tomorrow is the big question, not having a grand plan for life.
#
And I think by the time you get to sort of our age,
#
hopefully you kind of figure that out.
#
And when you're younger, you often don't.
#
So looking back, one, is that story a post-facto story
#
that you come up with after the fact and it's in hindsight?
#
How much of it was intentional?
#
And how much intentionality is there sort of in your life right now?
#
Of course, it is post-facto.
#
The sense that one of the capabilities of us as species
#
is inference drawing and pattern recognition.
#
And of course, the whole reason that we have a civilization right now
#
is that we have the capacity to tell stories.
#
We invented language and we have the capacity to tell stories.
#
Otherwise, it's a story that's putting you and me together in this room right now,
#
because of which we're doing this podcast.
#
Otherwise, there is no connection between us.
#
So I'm saying that I would not say that things just like that happen.
#
There are a set of circumstances which lead you to a certain point in your life.
#
Now, when you reach that point in the life, you always have a choice.
#
It depends upon how you view that choice, but it's not that you don't have a choice.
#
I'm going back to Victor Frankl's thing that even when you are in the most hopeless situation,
#
you always have a choice that I will not let this hopelessness get the better of me.
#
That is your choice that you make in that situation.
#
So you always have a choice and you take a choice, you make a choice,
#
you go for a certain choice and that results in your life panning out in a certain way.
#
Now, once your life has panned out in a certain way, we all try to find,
#
kind of try to give meaning to it and we all try to redeem ourselves.
#
And that's where the narratives start coming in, because now you want to redeem yourself.
#
Now you want to justify why you've taken that choice.
#
Now you want to at least absolve yourself in your own eyes, if not everybody else.
#
So you need to give this narrative to yourself that convinces you that you made a right choice.
#
And that's when the stories start coming out.
#
That's when you have a narrative that comes out about you and your life.
#
So that happens with me also.
#
I'm no exception in that case.
#
But I would say that in my life, I can see there are these nodal points in my life,
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but I can clearly see that there was a choice in front of me.
#
And when I was making the choice, I knew there would be repercussions.
#
I knew life would be altered.
#
I knew I would go on a different path from now on.
#
And I did not know completely.
#
I may not have comprehended completely as to what will be these repercussions,
#
but I was aware, if not completely cognizant of what will all happen to me.
#
And I took that choice and I said, chin up, let's move.
#
Let's see where it's going.
#
So I'm saying that we always have a choice.
#
And yes, we all will give the narrative.
#
And yes, it's like when you have a high school reunion
#
and you have a certain memory of that, of your time at school.
#
And all these years, 20 years, you kept believing that this is how the event happened.
#
When you go to the high school reunion, you have five people completely contradicting you.
#
No, it didn't happen like this.
#
And suddenly you are in doubt because for you, for 20 years,
#
you've been believing the event happened like this.
#
And now suddenly you've run into five people who were present in that event
#
and who view that event differently and are now even contradicting you
#
and saying, no, it didn't happen like this.
#
So your memory kind of plays tricks on you.
#
And that's when people become famous or when they become important.
#
That's where the willingness to control the narrative becomes stronger.
#
Because even if you were to say that this is my life story,
#
somebody else would sit up and say it would not be like this or it wasn't like this.
#
And that's where the problem starts coming in.
#
So when you are like nobody, obviously,
#
then nobody really cares about you and nobody really thinks what your story is.
#
And even if they contradict you, it's not really going to cost you anything.
#
But as people become more and more important
#
and they start capturing the public imagination,
#
the narratives start becoming important.
#
And that's why the whole exercise of history writing, rewriting.
#
That's why the whole exercise of who to promote as the hero
#
and who to promote as the villain and who to blame for whatever is happening.
#
Because this is all narrative controlling.
#
I had done an episode with the film critic Uday Bhatia.
#
He had written a book on Satya.
#
And he told me during the episode that there was one particular incident
#
which everyone remembered differently.
#
Ramu remembers it one way.
#
Anurag remembers it one way.
#
Manoj Bajpayee remembers it one way.
#
And they are all absolutely convinced that their version is the correct one.
#
Which just sort of tells us about the unreliability of memory.
#
And I'm also struck that you remembered that childhood dream so vividly.
#
Is it the case that you also find that things that happened in your childhood
#
can be incredibly vivid memories.
#
But a lot of stuff that happened in your adult years are not quite that vivid.
#
Because my dad had Parkinson's in his last years.
#
And one of the things that I read about people who have dementia
#
and whose memory starts going is you remember the edges.
#
You remember what happened yesterday.
#
You remember what happened 60 years ago when you were 10 years old.
#
But you don't remember a lot of stuff in between.
#
And I was struck by your memory being so vivid.
#
So is your memory in general vivid in terms of just remembering those kinds of details?
#
Or is it like all of us, right?
#
There are certain things you just happen to remember really well.
#
No, my memory is just like any other people.
#
Our memory doesn't work as a continuum.
#
important or a transformative or a very impactful event in your life,
#
that memory gets captured.
#
I mean, I remember one journalist friend of mine once telling me
#
there was a phrase for this kind of a memory which I've forgotten now.
#
So like everybody knows where they were at 9-11.
#
Across the world, you ask people, everybody knows where they were.
#
They vividly remember when the news first got broken to them on 9-11 where they were.
#
So that's how the memory works.
#
If something is impacting or changing your life, like our father's death,
#
we all vividly remember that day as to where we were,
#
what was happening, where we were standing,
#
what were those last moments when things were happening.
#
So my memory also works like that.
#
There are chunks which I don't remember.
#
They would remind me of something and I would have no memory of that.
#
I've met them or I've had conversations with them.
#
And then there are minute things.
#
I would just remember them.
#
I remember once when we were young, we were in Panchgani
#
and there was this paan shop guy and I kind of bantered with him while having paan.
#
And then two or three years later when I returned to Panchgani for some other trip,
#
I went to his shop and I took his name and he was completely shocked as to
#
he of course had no recollection of me having paan at his shop.
#
But he was completely shocked that I've come back after three years
#
and I still remember his name and I remember that whole exchange that took place between us.
#
So it works in strange ways.
#
How your mind is sieving through things,
#
what it feels is important, what touches it,
#
what it wants to capture and store and what it wants to discard.
#
Sometimes it is our necessities.
#
You know, as somebody asked me,
#
like I normally get asked this question,
#
and I said, ask a doctor.
#
How does she remember all the medicines and all the diseases?
#
How does a lawyer remember all those
#
articles and preamble and constitutional things and legal terms and precedents?
#
It's because your survival is linked to that.
#
The essential purpose of the brain is survival.
#
Its purpose is to make sure that how it keeps your body surviving
#
and your livelihood is survival.
#
Whatever is essential and most basic to your livelihood,
#
to your survival, your brain will remember that
#
because it realizes that this is a very critical information.
#
Whatever is not, get discarded.
#
But sometimes you are remembering stuff which is not critical to your survival.
#
Why are you doing that?
#
And that is the gray area.
#
We don't know why brain is selecting some memory and why it's discarding some memory.
#
It's not that I've not had more vivid dreams in my life,
#
but why do I remember a vivid dream which I had some 30 odd years back in such clarity,
#
whereas I've had more vivid dreams later,
#
but I do not remember those vivid dreams or I remember only a few of them,
#
just a handful of them.
#
Similarly, I may not remember
#
moments with someone very special in my life,
#
but I may remember a moment with a stranger,
#
an interaction with a stranger many years later.
#
So it is still a mystery.
#
I'm sure if somebody was working on how mind works
#
and would perhaps have a better answer for that,
#
but I do not know as to how brain is able to sometime pick on our information
#
and feel that this is a relevant information
#
and that gets retained in your memory
#
and how it kind of discards sometimes which is very essential.
#
People forget their wives' birthdays.
#
Well, you could say they shouldn't because survival depends on that logic.
#
How can you forget something so critical?
#
You must be wondering why I was looking at my phone
#
because when you were reading the last poem,
#
it reminded me of a poem that I wrote.
#
So it's called The Bookstore at the Street's End.
#
There is a bookstore at the street's end
#
that sells the dreams we once dreamed.
#
I didn't know of it till I walked into it.
#
And the balding salesman eager flashed his wisdom-stained teeth.
#
Sir, I know what you want.
#
No, he wasn't jaundiced or crack-brained.
#
Acquiring a musty glow, unfeigned,
#
that comes from a lifetime of browsing through reams of unsought pages.
#
But what do you think I want?
#
Dreams that yet taunt your growing wrinkles, gray hair.
#
Stretching six feet across the display gallery,
#
he picked your dreams, rich or muckabur.
#
But astonishingly, the words bedimmed and in my hands
#
bore another's name, another claim.
#
Hey, what may I pay to buy this book?
#
Write and gift us this very book, said he.
#
So it reminded me, you know, when you read that poem out.
#
Beautifully circled, huh?
#
So since we are talking about memories,
#
I shall call upon your memories and ask you to, you know,
#
go back to the thing that makes survival a possibility,
#
So, you know, tell me about, you know,
#
where you were born, what were your early years like?
#
Tell me about your parents.
#
I was born in a small village in Uttar Pradesh,
#
district called Ghazipur.
#
And my parents were in Delhi at that time.
#
My father was a field economist and he used to work
#
in this adjunct office to Delhi School of Economics
#
called Agro-Economics Research Center.
#
He was an agricultural economist.
#
And my mother was a student at that time, I think.
#
She was still studying.
#
It was the tradition that when women had to deliver,
#
they would go to their parents' house.
#
So my mother went back to a village
#
where my maternal grandfather and grandmother were.
#
So I got delivered at home by, you know, a dai,
#
And for the first three months, I was there.
#
And then after that, you know, my mom came back to Delhi
#
because she was studying in Delhi.
#
And then I've lived all my life in Delhi.
#
And, yeah, that's what it is.
#
And, you know, you mentioned somewhere at your village
#
was near the village of Gangauli,
#
which is, you know, plays a part in Ada Gaon
#
And I did an episode with Amitav Kumar a couple of years ago.
#
And he sort of referred to that at one point
#
and, you know, referred to this young man called Tanu
#
who returns from battle.
#
And he's convinced, you know, partition here,
#
Pakistan Java and all that.
#
And he says he's very resonant words.
#
And I'm, of course, reading it out in English,
#
where he says, I am a Muslim,
#
but I love this village because I myself am this village.
#
I love the Indigo warehouses, tank and these mud lanes
#
because they are different forms of myself.
#
On the battlefield, when death came very near,
#
I certainly remembered Allah.
#
But instead of Mecca or Karbala, I remembered Gangauli.
#
And I often, you know, cite this and ask a question.
#
I've asked this question to many of my guests.
#
Where is your Gangauli?
#
And I have a feeling that
#
even though you've lived all your life in Delhi,
#
your answer to it would still be uncertain
#
because you have often spoken about
#
how even in Delhi you felt like an outsider from the start
#
and, you know, struggling to find your identity
#
and your place and whatever.
#
So how would you address that kind of question?
#
Where is your Gangauli?
#
One of the autobiographies which really hit me hard
#
when I was young was Edward Said's Out of Place.
#
And when I read Edward Said's Out of Place,
#
I was like, wow, this is exactly how we all are.
#
We are constant refugees.
#
We are constantly searching for a place called home.
#
We are constantly in a both physical and mental realm,
#
which is very dissatisfactory and giving us a feeling
#
that there is something which is not home.
#
To go back to a deeper philosophical take on this thing,
#
I think we start missing home the moment we are born.
#
Because the true place that where we were at home
#
And the greatest disruption of our life is our birth itself.
#
And that in itself results in this existential angst
#
This thing that there is more that we need to do.
#
There is somewhere else we need to reach.
#
There is something that is missing.
#
All that is a kind of a reflection of that disruption
#
that took place at our birth.
#
I remember once we were having a conversation with someone
#
and they were talking about Urdu poetry
#
and they were saying that classical Urdu poetry
#
is basically about a loser lover
#
and forever yearning or pining for a beloved
#
who would never bother to even cast her benevolent eye
#
And it's all about just a very pathetic loser
#
that the poetry is all about.
#
And I said, you didn't understand.
#
It's really not about that.
#
It is essentially about the existential angst.
#
Because that beloved is essentially the womb
#
that you can never, never reach again.
#
And the only way that you can reach that womb again
#
is in death because you can never go back into the womb.
#
So this thing of having a beloved which is inaccessible
#
is having a yearning for a home which is inaccessible.
#
You would never be able to reach there.
#
And perhaps somewhere in some multi-dimensional realm,
#
perhaps death is the one which will make you reach there.
#
And that's why there is so much of that angst
#
that you see in the poetry.
#
So I think this question is, where is your Gangali?
#
And I mean, I really love the way you've put it.
#
And what has happened that over these five decades
#
that I've lived, even the conception of identity,
#
even the conception of who you are,
#
even the conception of you were earlier tethered
#
to a certain land or you were earlier tethered
#
to a certain identity is all getting rigged up.
#
You don't know what is happening, who's where.
#
So this question becomes even more deeper
#
and philosophical and disconcerting
#
because it's like if you were to ask a Palestinian right now,
#
What would that question mean to them?
#
Just the utterance of the question,
#
the pain that it will cause.
#
So this is what this question has done
#
as to when you say, where is your Gangali?
#
How do you answer that?
#
It brings and it inundates you with so many things.
#
I mean, one of the things that's coming in my mind is this,
#
that when we look at identity,
#
essentially, if you were to broadly divide identities,
#
we only have two sets of identities.
#
One is inherited, one is acquired.
#
Now, if you look at how we function daily,
#
we normally like thinking of ourselves
#
through our acquired identities.
#
What are the acquired identities?
#
I see myself as an actor.
#
You probably as a podcaster or a producer.
#
So when somebody meets us,
#
the top of the mind thing is not our inherited identities.
#
You don't think of yourself as, let's say,
#
a Hindu or a Muslim or an Indian.
#
These are inherited identities.
#
We basically think of ourselves as,
#
through what our acquired identities are,
#
and then I realized that as a society would evolve,
#
it would give importance to more of acquired identities.
#
As a society would regress,
#
it would become important for them
#
to harp about the inherited identities.
#
So the moment you find societies are clamoring
#
for inherited identities,
#
it is a clear sign that we are regressing
#
because acquired identities are a challenge to them.
#
Acquired identities would ask questions.
#
Acquired identities would push for an agenda
#
where the status quo would be disturbed.
#
So I realized that all our lives
#
we were aspiring for an acquired identity.
#
I want to be a scholar.
#
I want to be a filmmaker.
#
But as we are regressing,
#
and not just here, globally,
#
there is more and more emphasis on inherited identities.
#
And because we have functioned
#
with inherited identities for so long,
#
that's how the status quo has been able to be what it is
#
because of focusing on inherited identities.
#
So it becomes very, very difficult
#
or to suddenly unleash acquired identities.
#
And that creates a problem for people
#
who've been believing in acquired identities for long.
#
It doesn't matter as to what you are.
#
You are reduced to you being a Muslim in this country
#
or you're being reduced to a Jew
#
or you're being reduced to an Arab.
#
You're reduced to a skin color.
#
You're reduced to your gender.
#
And that can be very dehumanizing.
#
That could be very demeaning.
#
I mean, just somebody would be a great filmmaker,
#
a great thinker, a great strategist, a great designer.
#
But the moment a man molests her
#
or outrages her modesty on street,
#
she's been reduced to just a gender,
#
which is extremely dehumanizing and demeaning.
#
So I think these are the questions that we need to find out.
#
These are the questions we need to ask
#
because for me, answering, where is my Ganguly is not important.
#
For me, the question is, who is taking away my Ganguly?
#
Why can I not find my Ganguly?
#
That is very important.
#
So if we just ask the question, where is my Ganguly,
#
I think we're not really diving deep.
#
But who is displacing Ganguly?
#
Who is making sure that Ganguly is removed from the map of the earth?
#
I think that is a more important question.
#
And I think that would give us more understanding
#
of what is happening around us.
#
I love your framework of inherited and acquired identities.
#
I use perhaps an orthogonal phrasing for a similar thing
#
where I often celebrate the fact that I, and in fact, both of us,
#
happen to be from a generation
#
where we are not restricted to communities of circumstance,
#
but can join communities of choice,
#
where we no longer restrict where you are born,
#
what is your geographical and social location, et cetera, et cetera.
#
But you can use technology in a globalized world
#
and reach out to others and form those communities of choice.
#
Pretty much all the close friends I have, barring one or two today,
#
are people, you know, post-internet people
#
I would never have met otherwise.
#
It simply wasn't possible.
#
And what you speak about this sort of clash
#
between acquired identities and inherited identities,
#
another way of thinking about that is through what I think of
#
as the whole project of civilization.
#
Like we are the only species which can reprogram its hardwiring, right?
#
All animals are hardwired in certain ways, so are we.
#
Some of our hardwiring is what we would call today good.
#
Some of it is incredibly toxic, like the tribalism and so on and so forth.
#
And the whole, in a sense, the whole Enlightenment projects
#
and perhaps projects elsewhere would have at their heart the fact that
#
let us, because we are thinking animals, let us build a culture
#
and fight, you know, the bad parts of our hardwiring
#
and sort of amplify the better angels of our nature, as it were.
#
And I would have said that this is always a struggle that requires eternal vigilance.
#
But what I, and I'm kind of thinking aloud here,
#
but what I feel has happened in the last 20-30 years also
#
is that social media especially has played a part
#
in turning the wrong knobs in our brain, you know, in amplifying our worst instincts.
#
For example, you know, we have become more and more popularized
#
because our tribal instincts are always amplified by social media.
#
And discourse gets incredibly polarized.
#
No one who is not for one particular tribe or the other even dares to speak up.
#
There's no space for nuance anymore.
#
The great writer Timur Kuran uses this phrase called preference falsification.
#
He's done an episode with me and he wrote a book in 1999,
#
in the mid-90s called Private Truths, Public Lies,
#
where he spoke about how people may have certain instincts,
#
but it's not polite to express them so they don't do it, right?
#
Or it's not safe to express them.
#
One example was Soviet Union breakdown.
#
Now, until the point the Soviet Union breakdown,
#
a lot of people inside imagined that they were the only people who opposed it
#
and everybody else is in favor because everybody was doing preference falsification.
#
They weren't expressing their true feelings because the consequences were harsh.
#
And then one day you realize that, hey, I'm not alone.
#
Everybody is like me and there's what he calls a preference cascade.
#
And I think that's happened in a very negative way in Indian society.
#
My hypothesis for, for example, the rise of Modi and all of that,
#
and what we see around us in society today,
#
is that a lot of innate prejudices that people have,
#
which they could not express, suddenly became socially acceptable.
#
You know, you might be a closet bigot.
#
You know, you might feel women belong to the kitchen.
#
You know, you might not want to share a glass with someone with a different surname,
#
et cetera, et cetera, right?
#
But it's not polite to say that you have to have a different kind of face in public.
#
But suddenly you see that the interwebs are full of people like you.
#
And actually they may not be,
#
but you amplify those aspects get amplified and expressed much more.
#
And then we go down that direction.
#
And suddenly then if our worst instincts are getting ramped up,
#
then no wonder that inherited identities, you know, come back in such a big way.
#
Because I think I certainly thought when I was young that the arc of history,
#
as Martin Luther King put it, you know, bends towards justice,
#
freedom, liberalism, whatever you call it.
#
It is clear to me now that it doesn't necessarily do that, you know,
#
and it is not necessarily cyclical either.
#
I'm not sure if I can be absolutely sure that, oh, it's a cycle.
#
It's a phase, nationalistic phase, you have strongmen, it'll go away.
#
We'll be, I'm not sure anymore because of,
#
so just a bunch of, you know, rambling thoughts again, just me thinking aloud.
#
No, I mean, in the sense that, you know, what you're saying,
#
I think what has happened is we all have a kind of, you know,
#
a little bit of bias, prejudice, inherent blind spots,
#
which we are not aware of, which others can see.
#
But I feel that it's not that the kind of bigotry or the prejudice
#
that you see at a mass level today.
#
I don't really think that you should take it on face value.
#
I think that inherently, I still believe a lot of people still believe
#
in the idea of justice, still believe in what is good,
#
still believe in fairness, because that is the human instinct.
#
To be fair is a very human instinct.
#
That is something that instinctively we pick up when we are growing up.
#
And I think a lot of people are still like that.
#
I think a lot of narrative that you see is actually hacked.
#
It's, you're made to see this and you're made to believe
#
that this is what the mainstream is.
#
You're made to believe that this is what the predominant thought
#
in the society is right now.
#
And I think the silent majority does not have the spine to stand up to it.
#
The silent majority, it is the preference falsification
#
that you're talking about, is that they do not have enough faith
#
or trust that there will be many like us who would stand up.
#
And then the fear that you would be hunted really keeps people quiet.
#
But I actually believe that a lot of social media that you see,
#
a lot of mainstream media that you see is actually hacked,
#
is actually you are made to believe that this is the narrative,
#
which I doubt is not the narrative,
#
which I think that there is inherent goodness in people
#
and there is, even if you can say that, yes,
#
there is an amount of prejudice, there is an amount of bigotry,
#
But I don't think in mass people,
#
like the kind of madness you're seeing in Middle East right now,
#
where I don't think it's like that.
#
It is more because the narrative has been hacked
#
and it is more because the silent majority
#
is the way the silent majority has always been in this country.
#
And I think I was having a conversation with a Kashmiri pandit friend of mine
#
and I said, you know, the problem with this country is that
#
whoever the ruler that came in,
#
the elites and the silent majority just sided with them.
#
We never really stood up.
#
There are very few, 1857 or very few instances
#
that you can say that some people really stood up.
#
But most of the time, instantly the ruling elite,
#
the majority elite sided with whatever the power was at that time.
#
And that is the story of this country.
#
It continues in the medieval times,
#
in the prehistoric times, in ancient times,
#
and it continues even now in the modern times.
#
Instantly, those who have resources,
#
those who have the status quo,
#
they want to preserve it and they immediately align with whoever is in the power.
#
And that is the reason why we suffer.
#
Because we do not believe in this covenant,
#
you know, say constitution or say a rule of law.
#
We do not believe in that.
#
We do not have faith in that.
#
We have allowed to erode our institutions ourselves,
#
even at a very private level.
#
And when we find ourselves in a situation like this,
#
it is easy to say that, you know, it is to blame someone else.
#
But the point is this, that somewhere we all are complicit in this.
#
Somewhere we all, by not standing up,
#
by not doing the right thing,
#
by not sticking to what was the mutually agreed covenant,
#
by cutting corners, by taking shorter routes,
#
and then finding ourselves in a soup,
#
and then complaining that why we are in the soup
#
is really what the problem is.
#
And it goes across ideology,
#
it goes across identities,
#
it goes across regions and genders.
#
And that's why we are in this.
#
So I think at somewhere, if any kind of change has to come,
#
it has to begin at a very introspective level with the self,
#
as to really, I mean, have I been fair about things in my life?
#
Have I been able to do things
#
where I can demand this kind of a fairness
#
from a broader social structure that I'm looking at?
#
And I think that becomes very important.
#
Yeah, I guess first you change what you see in the mirror,
#
and then you can think of changing the country.
#
And I used that exact phrase,
#
you used silent majority in my episode with Varun Grover,
#
where I postulated that hey, you know,
#
vocal minority kuch bhi bole on both right and left,
#
but the silent majority is largely sensible, nuanced,
#
and, you know, whatever.
#
And I think he disagreed with me, if I remember correctly.
#
My memory is not that great,
#
but he was much less optimistic than you.
#
And I think to a certain extent, I'm kind of inclined to agree.
#
I've kind of swung from where you are to, you know,
#
And part of that is actually a process
#
that partly doing this podcast over the last few years
#
has kind of brought me to,
#
because my, like, perhaps not doing this podcast,
#
but just living through the last 10 years,
#
like my impression as a young man,
#
living in an elite English speaking urban bubble as I did,
#
is broadly we are liberal, broadly we are secular,
#
broadly we are tolerant,
#
sab theek hai, it's a melting pot.
#
There are fringes and that's a problem and all of that.
#
And doing episodes with people like Akshay Mukul,
#
who wrote that amazing book on the Geeta Press,
#
made me realize ki nahi yaar, you know,
#
outside my bubble is not like that.
#
You know, we are the fringe,
#
that actually there are,
#
there's a deep rooted conservatism within the country.
#
And conservatism is fine.
#
I don't want to place a value judgment on conservatism itself,
#
but there are these deep rooted strands within the country.
#
And you see it in the sales of many of the Geeta Press books,
#
for example, which Akshay has written about so well.
#
So I'll link those from the show notes.
#
And I begin to wonder, did I miss something?
#
And then what convinces me that I did miss something
#
and that it's not that society has changed,
#
but that society is expressing these aspects of it much more,
#
is the fact that one thing that I believe about politics
#
is that politics is downstream of culture.
#
You know, Andrew Breitbart's famous quote,
#
politics is downstream of culture.
#
It is supply responding to demand, you know,
#
that there is a demand out there.
#
It is not as if, you know,
#
a group of people have suddenly gone
#
and they're manipulating people
#
and they're hacking a narrative and they're doing all that.
#
There is demand out there.
#
Now, where I would sort of agree with you is that
#
that is not the only kind of demand.
#
and I think all other parties are kind of failing in this
#
in terms of, there seems to be this default assumption
#
the Hindu vote is we can't do anything about it.
#
So one party will chant Hanuman Chalisa,
#
one party will visit temples
#
and make an ostentatious show of that.
#
And I don't really believe that,
#
maybe they're closer to the ground,
#
maybe they know better than me, I'm sure they do.
#
But at some level, a part of me says that,
#
no, we can build other narratives
#
and appeal to the silent majority, as you say,
#
we can build other narratives.
#
Somebody may be a bigot,
#
but he may also want economic progress.
#
He may want his kids to have good jobs in the future
#
and et cetera, et cetera, live in a different place.
#
And I think all of these are, you know, related.
#
Cultural tolerance and social tolerance
#
is related to prosperity.
#
You can't kind of decouple those as it were.
#
So that is just kind of my feeling.
#
But, you know, you're someone who's been much closer
#
and out of the bubble from a much younger age.
#
Like you, of course, you've grown up
#
speaking three different languages
#
and we'll speak about that later.
#
I find that really fascinating as well.
#
But you've had access to different streams of thought
#
therefore, and different kinds of people.
#
Has society changed fundamentally
#
or would you maintain that?
#
No, it's still the same.
#
No, we haven't changed.
#
We're still primordial.
#
I mean, the other day I recall
#
I posted somebody's quote.
#
Basically, it said something like that.
#
We have emotions which are very paleolithic.
#
Institutions which are very medieval in technology,
#
And, you know, that is kind of creating
#
this incongruence that we are seeing.
#
And, you know, coming back to what you were saying,
#
fundamentally we haven't changed.
#
And because today there is technology
#
which dissipates the inner lives much faster and wider,
#
we are much more aware of this.
#
Things were a lot more hidden earlier.
#
Also, because it's also been hacked a lot,
#
so you are kind of made to believe
#
that there's a certain kind of narrative
#
which is floating around
#
and that is the narrative which most people hold.
#
So, we haven't fundamentally changed in that sense.
#
Now, the whole idea, the whole modern idea
#
of education and enlightenment was that
#
perhaps we will be able to break away
#
from the shackles of inherited identities
#
and we will be able to create a far, you know,
#
cosmopolitan world where people with acquired identities
#
and what their acquired identities is what would matter
#
and nothing else would matter.
#
But sadly, you know, it has not taken off.
#
It has regressed in some sense.
#
And it is also because I think at some stage,
#
and especially with, you know, the post-World War II,
#
we kind of really neglected
#
as to who we are putting in power,
#
who are we handing over the reins.
#
And that has kind of resulted in what really,
#
so in the sense that, you know,
#
there were all this great talk about great institutions,
#
about, you know, education, about progress,
#
about taking the society further,
#
about enlightenment, about science,
#
But we were slowly and slowly handing over the reins
#
to people who were uncouth, who were unscrupulous,
#
who were basically, you know,
#
more worried about a certain agenda of agronizing themselves.
#
And this is beyond any particular party.
#
This is basically the political class that we have.
#
And over a period of time,
#
we just handed over the reins to people
#
who are completely unscrupulous
#
and they have no desire, no agenda
#
of human enlightenment or progress,
#
and they have digressed as to where we are today.
#
And that's why we see strongmen all over the world,
#
I mean, whether it's the Dutch election
#
or it's Argentina or what we've seen before,
#
Dittarthe, Turkey, US, India, everywhere that you look,
#
you know, so we have allowed that to happen.
#
And somewhere, I think the blame is more
#
with the elite class, the English speaking,
#
the people like us who were perhaps more aware,
#
perhaps who could discern more
#
and who chose to live in their bubble.
#
And now what we see is reactionary,
#
which is coming from people who were basically on the fringe
#
or who were not there getting the benefits
#
of all this development that was happening.
#
And they've been hijacked and they've been made to believe that.
#
The people who are responsible for your painful life
#
is these people and the political class
#
and the strongmen are using that effectively.
#
So it's kind of a vicious cycle,
#
which has gone on a double loop, you know,
#
it's like it's exponentially increasing.
#
And that is kind of giving the hopelessness
#
which you talked about, you know,
#
when speaking to Warren Grover,
#
which you talk about that you're not sure
#
whether it's cyclical anymore.
#
Because what is the thing,
#
the new thing that has come in this is the technology,
#
which was not there 50 years back, 70 years back.
#
So the nature of things could still be believed to be cyclical.
#
But now the surveillance state that we are living in,
#
where every aspect of your life is monitored
#
is making it difficult for the status quo to be broken.
#
And it's becoming even more difficult
#
that we'll be able to get rid of this completely.
#
even if we say that there is a change of power
#
and a new government comes in,
#
why would they give off the control that they have acquired?
#
Why would they discontinue things
#
like Digi Yatra and Aadhaar Card
#
because all that is giving control to you.
#
And whoever is in power
#
would not like to let go of their control.
#
So it will become increasingly difficult
#
to kind of a society where the agenda
#
that we're talking about acquired identities
#
and development and progress.
#
It would become more about a handful of people
#
taking charge of all the control
#
not for the benefit of human beings,
#
but to subjugate human beings
#
and to make sure that we go back
#
into some kind of an ancient period
#
where the Egyptian pharaoh is ruling
#
and you have slaves just building up the pyramids.
#
I agree entirely with your lament.
#
I'd once written a column for Bloomberg
#
when talking about handling a question
#
people will sometimes ask
#
that why did we have such great leaders
#
during the freedom struggle and not anymore?
#
And my answer using public choice theory
#
was that you look at the incentives
#
of the people involved,
#
that during the freedom struggle,
#
all of these great leaders,
#
they had nothing to aspire for in terms of power.
#
They were rebels outside the system
#
rebelling against the great empire.
#
The only reason they bent the distances
#
on the basis of principles
#
and that's all that drove them.
#
So you had that caliber of person coming
#
to the top within the freedom movement.
#
But then we designed a state
#
and here again it's fair
#
to blame the English speaking elites.
#
that has centralized power so much
#
that the only kind of people now drawn to politics
#
are people with a lust for power
#
and that has led to the kind of politicians
#
That's just how the game is
#
and that has led to the kind of leaders
#
that we kind of have today
#
and those are the incentives
#
and even about that other thing you said
#
if this lot goes and another lot comes.
#
I often say that to me India has three problems
#
and one is approximate problems,
#
two are deeper problems,
#
and this is just my opinion,
#
listeners may feel free to disagree.
#
The proximate problem is a party in power.
#
I think that is a problem.
#
But the two are deeper problems
#
which I think are fairly indisputable is
#
one, there is a predatory authoritarian state
#
which rules us rather than serves us
#
and two, there are the fractures
#
which I just see getting worse
#
and it's like a vicious circle.
#
It's kind of playing on itself in a sense.
#
I think what we've forgotten
#
is kindness and compassion.
#
I mean, at a very basic human level,
#
forget about enlightenment,
#
forget about education,
#
forget about just to be kind
#
and just to be compassionate.
#
The ability to recognize
#
that the other human being
#
and if I would prefer something for myself,
#
perhaps the other person
#
would also prefer similar things for themselves.
#
If I would like people to be kind to me,
#
if I would like people to be empathetic to me,
#
if I would like people to give me a little leeway,
#
give me a little leash,
#
the others are also expecting the same thing.
#
That ability to recognize this
#
It has become things at the expense of others.
#
That is what it has reduced to.
#
And also, I had it in my mind
#
the second point that I wanted to raise.
#
All right, we'll come back to that.
#
But at a very human level,
#
is something that we've forgotten.
#
Second, this whole narrative of hero
#
You know, this messiah,
#
this savior to come in,
#
Why this inability to believe in collectivhood?
#
Why this inability to believe
#
that we together can make things happen?
#
And this is very primordial.
#
This goes right back to our genes' willingness
#
and make sure that the gene survives.
#
So it's like this yearning for immortality,
#
this yearning of mining being carved somewhere,
#
this yearning of me outliving my lifetime,
#
this yearning of kind of standing up in the crowd
#
and becoming bigger than the rest of the crowd.
#
In some sense, what it does is
#
that it becomes detrimental to institutions,
#
the collective institutions
#
that we are trying to create.
#
Because institutions necessarily work
#
when everybody puts in together.
#
If not everybody is not pulling it together,
#
then it's not going to work.
#
And it's like a double-edged sword.
#
So we want to create great institutions,
#
and yet we don't want you to question institutions.
#
So people are sacrificed for ideas,
#
people are sacrificed for institutions.
#
And institutions are made for you,
#
you are made to believe
#
that institutions are bigger than you.
#
You can't question institutions,
#
yet you don't want institutions to function
#
the way the institution should function,
#
and you still worship heroes and messiahs
#
and you want strong men to come and kind of save you.
#
And I think that's where the problem is.
#
What it does is it starts making you believe
#
that I can become bigger than others
#
at the expense of others.
#
And it removes other people out of the equation.
#
And I think that's where the problem is.
#
If you would stop believing in hero worshipping,
#
if you would stop believing in messiahs,
#
if you would stop believing in saviors,
#
and if you start believing in that
#
you and I and this person and that person together
#
can pull this off, then let's join hands.
#
And each one of us has the same stake.
#
And it's not about who would be credited,
#
let's just all pull it together.
#
but that would require a certain mutual respect,
#
a certain deference to the other,
#
a certain kind of a negotiated space
#
where you let go of something,
#
where you accept something,
#
and a certain kind of compassion and kindness.
#
Let me ask you about a related sort of thought.
#
As a storyteller, you know these two concepts very well,
#
the abstract and the concrete.
#
And storytellers will always kind of mix the two
#
and put a lot of concrete in there.
#
And it has kind of been my belief over a period of time
#
that abstract concepts can drive us apart,
#
and in the concrete we are more likely to come together.
#
Now there may of course be exceptions to that,
#
but what I mean by that is that
#
we find a lot of people not really together
#
with each other in a physical way.
#
I could be sitting with you somewhere,
#
but we are both looking into our phones.
#
We are in sort of, I think what Santosh Desai
#
would call a cloud world instead of a real world.
#
And abstract concepts like nationalism,
#
you know, purity, tribalism,
#
all of these can drive us apart.
#
But whereas in the abstract,
#
when X and Y actually physically meet,
#
they are polite to each other,
#
they are nice to each other.
#
I was chatting with a friend of mine yesterday,
#
Nilanjana made a very interesting point about Delhi,
#
where she said that one of the things,
#
and I may not be citing it with as much nuance as she had,
#
she has, but she'll be on the show at some point
#
and can elaborate on it.
#
But her point was that what has happened in Delhi
#
is that you have had these great secular spaces,
#
which one might look down on as, you know,
#
people are going there to do consumerism.
#
But her point was that today,
#
there can be an air-conditioned mall
#
where anybody can walk in.
#
And when you're in a food court,
#
you don't care who the person at the next table is,
#
and you're interacting completely freely,
#
and you mentioned deference to the other,
#
you mentioned negotiated shared spaces,
#
both of those terms sort of apply to a space like that.
#
And it strikes me that what you do with your work
#
is you are always engaging with people in the concrete.
#
My belief is that if people are meeting people more,
#
which is why even with India, Pakistan,
#
you know, there used to be this phrase,
#
people-to-people contact,
#
which just became a cliche,
#
but I believe there's so much power in that phrase,
#
that if you just have people-to-people contact
#
even within our cities and our neighborhoods and all that,
#
the hatred isn't really there.
#
Now, I understand there are exceptions.
#
There are abstract notions I deeply adore,
#
like freedom and consent and all of that.
#
Equally, in the concrete,
#
you do have riots and violence and all of that.
#
But I think one of the problems is that it is very easy
#
to, you know, hate this imaginary other
#
when you're swiping on your cell phone
#
and you're living in an abstract world inside your head.
#
But when you are actually interacting with them all the time,
#
you don't hate them anymore.
#
You make that negotiated space
#
because it's better for both of you.
#
It's a positive sum game.
#
So what are sort of your thoughts in that?
#
Because it strikes me that one reason for the optimism
#
you previously expressed could also be that,
#
one, you are all the time
#
actually performing in concrete spaces
#
where you see different kinds of people come together
#
and appreciate the work you do.
#
And secondly, there might be a selection bias
#
in the kind of people you interact with
#
because they're more likely to be people like you
#
or people sympathetic to you.
#
So what are your sort of thoughts on my ramble?
#
You know, it reminds me of that Amitav Kumar's book
#
Bombay, London, New York.
#
And he talks about textbook enemies.
#
So when you have an abstract people interacting,
#
you kind of create textbook enemies.
#
These are two-dimensional cardboard enemies that you have.
#
The funny part is people who are more vocal
#
they are the least likely people
#
who would have interacted with their enemies
#
or would have ever met them or would have...
#
So what we are doing that
#
when we are creating textbook enemies,
#
we are dehumanizing people
#
and we create this kind of a compartmentalized
#
understanding of the world
#
where there is fairness in your part of the world
#
but you don't extend that fairness
#
to the other set of human beings
#
because they've been so dehumanized to you
#
that you feel that they don't merit to live.
#
whatever exists is natural.
#
There is nothing unnatural about anything that exists.
#
So if something is existing,
#
it is natural and it has the right to exist
#
within this sphere of ecosystem or earth that we have.
#
So I think the moment you kind of bring people together,
#
you start giving a human face to them.
#
You start making people realize that
#
they are not too far away from who we are.
#
And that's where the problem starts arising
#
for those who are in status quo
#
or those who want this abstractness to continue
#
because then they would start losing their base.
#
Then people would start seeing more.
#
But what is funny is that
#
I could have understood this 100 years back
#
or 150 years back that narratives had such stronghold.
#
What is funny is that today when everything is available,
#
such strongholds are still there.
#
People still are blinded.
#
And what that brings us to
#
is to how disinformation has spread on the internet
#
in the sense that now today if you were to go on a Google search
#
or if you were to go on YouTube,
#
You would find disinformation and you would find information.
#
And there is so much of it
#
that it is hard to discern what is true and what is not true.
#
Even for people who are reasonably smart to kind of discern,
#
even they at times can get tricked.
#
That's how disinformation has become.
#
So what has happened is that
#
we have allowed people who are in power
#
to use technology to serve their end
#
to continue expanding this abstractness.
#
if today internet is a very democratizing thing,
#
the first thing is you started removing the Web Vibe search
#
and you started making it about apps.
#
And as you make it apps,
#
you make sure that the data gets more control
#
rather than when you were just browsing on earlier
#
these browsers that you had.
#
So I'm saying that what we've done is this,
#
that at some stage in the last decade or a decade and a half,
#
technology giants started understanding this thing
#
that they can use the internet and the technology
#
to spread or to control information in a manner
#
where the abstractness continues,
#
where the make-believe continues.
#
And you trap people so much in the make-believe
#
because it is like a tillism.
#
It is like a world which you get trapped in
#
and you believe this is what reality is
#
and you continue living in this reality.
#
So I'll follow up on that with a slightly long-winded question,
#
question which appears to be about politics
#
but is actually about storytelling
#
and therefore there is perhaps no one better equipped
#
You know, you mentioned tech companies.
#
I think what tech companies were maximizing for was engagement.
#
It wasn't that they decided,
#
let us polarize everyone,
#
No, absolutely not, absolutely not.
#
They were optimizing for engagement
#
and it just so happens that this gets the most engagement.
#
Now, this reminds me of a story Pratik Sena of Fault News once told me.
#
He's been on an episode with me
#
but this was not on the episode.
#
Somewhere else we were chatting
#
and he told me about how early on
#
and I hope I'm remembering the detail.
#
I mean, I won't remember the details correctly
#
but here's the gist of it.
#
There was some fake story about some politician.
#
He did his usual brilliant forensic work
#
and figured out that, okay,
#
it has originated from this particular small town,
#
from this particular publication,
#
this particular person is the one who originated it
#
and he published his, you know,
#
usual immaculate sort of busting of that fake news.
#
Then a few hours later,
#
he gets a WhatsApp message from that person,
#
and the guy was saying,
#
Bhaiya, can I talk to you?
#
So then the person calls him
#
and he speaks to the person
#
and the person is a kid.
#
He's like 17 or 18 or he's some kid
#
in some village or town somewhere completely remote
#
and he's not being controlled by the IT cell,
#
What is happening instead is that he opened the website,
#
he decided I want to be popular.
#
What kind of stories do I put to be popular?
#
He put a whole bunch of stories.
#
he was putting all kinds of different random stories
#
and then he found that hate sells, right?
#
And people are attracted to that kind of story.
#
It is not necessarily the supply.
#
I say that beyond the point,
#
the BJP IT cell also doesn't need to do that much
#
or any IT cell for that matter.
#
Doesn't need to do that much.
#
There is a demand for these kinds of stories.
#
A related thing which Pratik and I did mention on our episode
#
and I think it baffled him also,
#
is that there used to be these rumors
#
about how strangers in traveling through towns and villages
#
are kidnapping children.
#
So people would get lynched.
#
And the interesting thing about this whole thing
#
is that it wasn't one random general rumor.
#
It was a rumor that was constantly customized
#
and modified to a particular time,
#
and it struck me as bizarre that first of all,
#
why would someone do this?
#
that there is an appetite for these stories.
#
People want stories like this.
#
They don't want stories of love.
#
You want dog bites man.
#
You don't want man bites dog rather, you know.
#
You will never hear about a plane that didn't crash.
#
It's this sort of preference for bad news
#
and so on and so forth.
#
And what really took a bizarre turn
#
and what I still can't figure out
#
and I hope you can help me,
#
is the wave of conspiracy theories
#
we've had in recent times.
#
For example, when Sushant Singh Rajput died.
#
You know, there were some crazy conspiracy theories,
#
the craziest of them which went completely viral,
#
which I linked to at that time also,
#
was that Sushant Singh Rajput had once tweeted
#
about some quantum mechanics thing
#
where an atom can be split.
#
So the rumor was that he has been split into two
#
and the fake Sushant Singh Rajput is the one who died
#
and the real one is being held in prison by Adityanath
#
who wants to get the recipe for the COVID vaccine
#
which hadn't yet been created,
#
which Sushant has invented, right?
#
This is such a crazy theory.
#
It is completely bizarre.
#
To even think of something like this,
#
I think requires a feat of crazy imagination.
#
I mean, unless you really want to take the piss,
#
which perhaps the originator did,
#
but so many people buy into this shit
#
and various other theories about him and all of that.
#
And my question to you therefore as a storyteller
#
is that it is okay to speak of kindness
#
and compassion and all of that,
#
but the kind of stories people seem to want
#
are either stories of hate
#
or really the more outlandish the better.
#
That's why conspiracy theories are so popular.
#
You have QAnon in the US
#
where apparently Democrats were running pedophile rings
#
to pizza parlors or some crap like that.
#
Crazy conspiracy theories
#
which people are dying to believe.
#
why do you think that is the case?
#
Why do we have this preference for stories of this sort?
#
somewhere chemically inside,
#
We want to challenge and we want to reach that edge
#
where we kind of mock at death and come out alive.
#
And we're willing to risk it so much
#
that we might just die because we're so close to it.
#
So this death wish has always been with us as a species.
#
It's kind of a proven fact.
#
And that at individual level, at mass level,
#
it kind of takes us to closer to the edge.
#
The other thing is this that
#
by the very nature of what we are,
#
we've been so curious that we are always
#
wanting to expand our horizons.
#
Now, when we didn't have technology,
#
And you would see that the fantasy genre
#
where you talk about fairies and monsters
#
and beasts and tricksters and fantastical landscapes,
#
you would see that these stories prevail more
#
in the ancient and the medieval times.
#
And this genre only kind of came back with Tokyo
#
and in our modern times.
#
But actually, the earlier stories were more about fantasy.
#
And then when the Victorian age came in,
#
it became novel kind of rose above every other form
#
of literature and it became about realism
#
with people like Charles Dickinson and Emily Bronte
#
And then you have the Russian Revolution coming in
#
and this whole movement of art for a cause
#
with progressive writers movement coming in
#
and that huge conference that took place in 1920s
#
in France and in Paris,
#
where a few of the biggest writers of European
#
and of French and other European languages,
#
They kind of posed this question as to
#
what is the purpose of literature?
#
And then with the rise of novel
#
and with the rise of short story in the 20th century,
#
we kind of went the other way around.
#
from pushing ourselves towards imagination,
#
we went inwards towards human psychology
#
about how bizarre we can be as human beings
#
and how bizarre we can come out with.
#
And then, of course, the stale part gets culled out
#
and it's the dramatic part which gets retained
#
in the screenplay and in the story.
#
And the more bizarre you become,
#
the more dramatic it is
#
and the more it attracts and fascinates people.
#
Wow, somebody could be Jack the Ripper,
#
somebody could be psychopathic,
#
somebody can think so outlandish.
#
And it is always a reflection of ourselves.
#
but somebody is being this,
#
This is kind of a wishful me,
#
wish I could be outlandish like this,
#
wish I could be like this.
#
So somewhere there is this inert desire in us
#
that somebody is doing it,
#
even if it is so macabre and so inhuman.
#
But it is a self-reflection in some sense
#
as to why we are as a society
#
choosing this kind of a thing.
#
It is somewhere that death wish
#
and that death wish at a very collective hysterical level
#
that's coming out where we are okay with violence,
#
we are okay with inhumanity,
#
we are okay with cruelty.
#
It is somewhere that my morality,
#
my unspoken norms restrain me from doing this.
#
But at least I can escape this in a story.
#
At least I can escape this in a screenplay.
#
And the sad part is this that
#
it is also being done in real life.
#
In fact, the cruelty that's there in real life
#
sometimes is far more bizarre
#
than what you're seeing in literature
#
or you're seeing on screen
#
or you're reading in stories.
#
But somewhere I think that the reason is the death wish
#
and the reason is to go beyond what I see.
#
I mean this whole obsession with paradise.
#
The actual truth is that this is the paradise that we live in
#
because even with all your James Webb
#
telescope technology and science
#
you've really not been able to crack
#
and find an expo planet
#
which you can say is truly like earth.
#
You have near earths or you have
#
but you really cannot say for certain
#
that tomorrow I can take my spaceship
#
and the moment I step out
#
it's like stepping out of any airport
#
and I can breathe and I can be
#
like I'm on another earth.
#
We've not been able to find.
#
So in this vast universe
#
with your technology becoming more and more cutting edge
#
where you can literally see galaxies
#
which were 13.5 billion years old
#
through your James Webb telescope
#
you've not been able to find one planet
#
which has the requisite conditions for life to exist.
#
So in some sense in this vast universe
#
the only paradise you have is earth.
#
Yet it is so dissatisfactory for us
#
yet there is a search for life elsewhere
#
yet there is a search for life elsewhere
#
yet there is a search within our inner worlds
#
and in our outer worlds
#
a belief that there is a better world that we can go to
#
and we are completely disregarding what we have with us
#
that this is the better world
#
there is no better world.
#
Maybe we should save this one
#
maybe whether it's our inner world
#
maybe for whatever our circumstances
#
and whatever our lives are
#
this is the life that we have.
#
There is no other life that we will live
#
but this human curiosity
#
this fantasy to go beyond where we are
#
to believe that there is something else
#
and that's the reason why we're still living in this
#
Milan Kundera's world of life is elsewhere.
#
We're constantly believing that there is something else beyond the edge
#
without realizing or disregarding what is there
#
on this side of the edge
#
from where we are appearing
#
from where we are coming out
#
perhaps the better world is on this side
#
which we are disregarding
#
and not on the other side of the edge that we are looking at.
#
Sir at this point in time
#
I must correct you and say
#
that a planet just like earth has been found
#
which is why they had to get rid of him
#
and Subhash Chandra Bose is living there right now
#
that aside I'll come up with another hypothesis on the fly
#
you know earlier in the episode
#
when we were talking about aging
#
it struck me that like one theory
#
I've heard about why time seems to pass so quickly
#
is that you're not doing anything new anymore
#
you're constantly doing new things
#
and that keeps you engaged
#
and time seems to pass a little more slowly
#
you get into routines and ruts
#
and you're doing the same damn thing every day
#
and time seems to pass really slowly
#
and in fact I heard of someone
#
who I think was vlogging or blogging
#
they were going to do a different thing every single day
#
every single day they would try to
#
do something entirely different
#
and you know see if that kind of helped
#
and I wonder if that quest
#
for breaking out of the monotony of everyday life
#
is why people believe outlandish theories
#
the more outlandish the better
#
because at least those fantasy world may
#
at least you know there's something interesting
#
it is a boredom that drives us towards
#
you know all this craziness
#
I think we've not really understood who we are
#
I mean even at a very medical level
#
what I don't think we've completely
#
understand how brain functions
#
this is an understanding which I got
#
when my father fell ill
#
and he had this chronic kidney disease
#
and before that I kind of thought
#
medical science is a very exact science
#
and when my father fell ill
#
and for eight years I had to you know
#
be at hospitals with him for dialysis
#
and constantly be in conversation with doctors
#
I realized that it is not an exact science
#
a lot of it is hit and try
#
you know a lot of it is actually
#
speculation and estimation
#
with your known set of belief and knowledge
#
and see if this will work or not
#
and I realized that a lot of medicines
#
that we are using are actually
#
which are not really disease specific
#
it's like spraying an insecticide
#
and you kill all the insects
#
rather than choosing one particular insect
#
so all these things made me realize
#
that there is so little that we know
#
and there is so much more
#
that we need to discover and find out
#
both in terms of our mind
#
and how it works and our body
#
how it works and if you extend that analogy
#
to everything that's around us
#
we really really are at a very nascent stage
#
of understanding how the whole universe works
#
and every time when we discover
#
which is contradictory to our held beliefs
#
everything is you know thrown out of the bath water
#
and you still you have to reconstruct everything
#
to understand as to how
#
this whole thing is working
#
so I think I think we are
#
at a very very primary stage
#
of our understanding of
#
what we understand as universe
#
what we understand of us as human beings
#
of what we understand of our bodies
#
and there is a lot that
#
we still don't understand
#
and we still don't know how to
#
to have a handle over that thing
#
and the problem is this that
#
our greed and our death wish
#
is messing up with this quest for
#
creating something more meaningful
#
so the the advancement of knowledge
#
is constantly being thwarted
#
and by our this willingness
#
to kind of continue and keep the status quo
#
and we are constantly underperforming
#
we are constantly living in an underwhelming age
#
where things are not really up to their potential
#
and if they are at their potential
#
at some places the benefits are only too few
#
it's not trickling down
#
so essentially if it is not trickling down
#
then it's not suffering
#
I mean we've seen technology trickle down
#
today in the palm of your hand
#
you have so many things
#
but then we are also seeing that
#
how it's being manipulated
#
where you may feel that
#
yes it has become a more universal thing
#
this progress has been thwarted and too slow
#
it's like taking two steps forward
#
and then three steps backward
#
and then you know you're only moving
#
in a very very staccato
#
zigzag sideways manner forward
#
RK Narayan had a great metaphor
#
for the point you make about medicine
#
where he was talking about chemotherapy
#
and was really appalled by what it was
#
and he said it's like if you want to
#
roast a chicken in an oven
#
you burn down the whole house
#
and that's such a great metaphor
#
and the way I like to think about it is that
#
we think of medicine 200 years ago
#
and we are appalled at how backward it was
#
and 200 years later if we still exist
#
I think they'll look back on this time
#
and they'll be appalled at
#
the kind of science there is
#
you know the scientific method
#
and what you said about
#
people getting in the way of progress
#
like one of the best essays I've read
#
in recent years is called
#
Four Quadrants of Conformism by Paul Graham
#
and he talks about how there are really
#
and you know the conventional minded
#
like the two broad kinds
#
are the conventional minded
#
and the non-conventional minded
#
who are you know thinking differently
#
and the conventional minded
#
can be aggressive or passive
#
and ditto for the other side
#
and the most dangerous people
#
which are probably almost a vocal majority
#
often are the aggressively conventional minded
#
and they stand in the way of progress
#
that every time you express a thought
#
that is heretical to receive wisdom
#
you'll have them coming down on you
#
right and you see this time
#
and again in science as well
#
like most tragic example
#
I can think of is Ignace Semmelweis
#
who you know discovered
#
that so many people die
#
that you aren't washing your hands
#
that washing your hands
#
will cut down the deaths
#
for a couple of decades
#
they did not believe him
#
he died in a lunatic asylum
#
today that is just considered
#
a similar thing with the doctor
#
I spoke about it in my episode
#
who discovered that cholera
#
is because of bad water
#
he was completely ignored
#
because a conventional wisdom
#
and this is something I realized
#
that even people who might
#
speak about things like
#
we are this we are that
#
will actually be extremely conservative
#
when it comes to their actions
#
you need to tell yourself
#
a story to explain the world
#
and once you've told yourself
#
you are stuck to it man
#
is ever going to change
#
that requires less energy
#
that's kind of a lament
#
abstract subjects for a long time
#
I want to take you back
#
this thing that you mentioned
#
it is also our relationship
#
which results in a lot of way
#
because of our inference
#
drawing and our pattern
#
we deconstruct knowledge
#
voluminous book of words
#
but the moment you divide it
#
and you get a handle over it
#
it's easy to comprehend
#
so what happens is that
#
that we start ossifying it
#
and of that nomenclature
#
then we want to make it sacrosanct
#
and now the cost of dismantling that
#
in order to find a new knowledge
#
that we are not willing to
#
with this ossified structure
#
it's passed its shelf date
#
but we don't want to do that
#
in order to get new knowledge
#
of how we disseminate knowledge
#
that something is working
#
we don't want to change it
#
but that is the nature of the beast
#
that the more you want to know
#
because unless you're not questioning it
#
you will not find a new thing
#
that everything we've done now
#
and it should not be touched
#
this is how it should be
#
I think that's where the problem is
#
if you look at the political systems
#
this belief that democracy
#
you know perfect system
#
and today it is kind of wobbling
#
and we are realizing that
#
so you have these reactionary people
#
who are coming from behind
#
and who want to dismantle it
#
and want to take you to
#
an era of authoritarianism
#
we basically need like in India
#
this very middle class narrative
#
of having a benign dictator
#
you have people who still believe
#
that no this can function
#
and maybe we need stronger institutions
#
and are fighting tooth and nail
#
what is not happening is dialogue
#
and what has that polarizing
#
that you were talking about
#
what that has led us to that
#
of having difficult conversations
#
we do not want to be in room with people
#
whom we don't agree with
#
and have a conversation with them
#
because that emotional discomfort
#
is something that everybody wants to avoid so much
#
that everybody wants to be in their silos
#
and everybody wants to just
#
talk in their echo chambers
#
and everybody just wants to hear
#
is the art of difficult conversation
#
and not run away from that moment
#
and say let's have a conversation
#
we may choose to disagree
#
and I will hear you out
#
and I think it is essential
#
to bring that middle space
#
but in order to bring that middle space
#
irrespective of ideologies
#
you will have to inculcate
#
so that the difficult conversation
#
because only when that will take place
#
there is a possibility of finding
#
which is agreeable to everyone
#
otherwise it will always be this
#
but I mean yin and yang
#
is not the right example to give here
#
but there's this polarizing
#
and it's always the death wish
#
do you personally find it easy
#
to have those kind of conversations
#
with whom you viscerally disagree
#
I just don't want to talk to
#
at such a fundamental level
#
like obviously the business
#
I talk to people I disagree with
#
I'm very happy to do that
#
I feel it expands my view
#
but there are boundaries
#
beyond which I just don't want to go
#
beyond which I just don't want to talk to you
#
WhatsApp groups are so toxic
#
WhatsApp group is so toxic
#
and there are questions
#
personally dealing with that
#
what Kashi Nath Singh Sir
#
right you do your own thing
#
I don't want to engage with toxic people
#
I want to be surrounded by my own kind
#
and the other thing what you're saying
#
actually involves a lot of effort
#
so what has sort of been
#
your experience with these
#
are these conversations possible to have
#
have they been fruitful for you?
#
always engage in a difficult conversation
#
there are certain people
#
I would not like to engage with
#
which are very important
#
and the other is face value
#
you know if you operate from grace
#
attack the dignity of people
#
when you are in a difficult space
#
what is one of the primary things
#
it is the threat perception
#
it is the threat perception
#
that the other person is an enemy
#
is detrimental to my benefits
#
the other person is here to attack me
#
if you remove the threat perception
#
I am not a threat to you
#
in a kind compassionate manner
#
below their you know belt
#
and not be ungracious to them
#
so if you operate from grace
#
and if you operate from
#
I give you the benefit of doubt
#
at the moment you place trust in people
#
the moment you take people on face value
#
in some way you trip them
#
now they are kind of bound to hold
#
whatever they are saying
#
it may it may not happen overnight
#
or it may not happen in one conversation
#
what most of the time is happening
#
you go with the preconceived notion
#
you go with threat perception
#
and you do not loosen that
#
the tension is always building up
#
it was futile to enter this conversation
#
anyway in the first place
#
I knew this was going to happen
#
but if you go with grace
#
if you take people on face value
#
then there may be a little way out
#
it's a little difficult to get grace
#
there is a word in Urdu
#
the literal meaning also means pyaala
#
so the one who has a big bowl
#
the water will not spill
#
the one who has a small bowl
#
so the more graceful you are
#
and the water will not spill out
#
you will not get down to your
#
basal instinctive level
#
you won't lose your temper
#
you won't hit below the belt
#
but if your bowl itself is less
#
obviously the water will spill out
#
so I think it is beautiful
#
that the etymology of the word
#
and the other meaning that it has
#
the fugitive meaning that it has
#
so I think that is very important
#
when people are assured
#
that this person is not going to be mean
#
even if this person disagrees
#
the dialogue starts happening
#
that their space is secure
#
even if they are on the different side
#
or if you don't believe in them
#
kind of progress starts happening
#
some kind of meaningful dialogue
#
I just love this image of
#
so the water doesn't splash away
#
I mean the phrase that I use for
#
the attitude that one should take
#
unless you have concrete reason
#
and if you are just going to
#
before even beginning a conversation
#
it sort of obviously doesn't help
#
and I will come back to an earlier question
#
that when you talk of grace
#
that is one of the qualities
#
I don't think it is natural
#
I think I would have to make an effort
#
if I tell myself rationally
#
that my behavior should be like this
#
are not intrinsic to me
#
or they are not the first instinct
#
that comes into my mind
#
but I have to make an intentional effort
#
perhaps you know listening more
#
with certainly doing a podcast
#
because the form shapes
#
but before we go into a break
#
I want to ask you about
#
that you are intentional about
#
and were you always kind of intentional
#
or like what role does intentionality
#
because one thing is that
#
you just carry on with the current of life
#
you flow with the river as it were
#
that you begin to take control of your story
#
and say I want to shape myself
#
and that these are the things
#
I want to be intentional about
#
you know which could be mundane things
#
like just a routine of your day
#
or which could be deeper things
#
like how you relate to people
#
and how you engage with them
#
couple of things which weigh now
#
in my daily interactions
#
and the other is privilege
#
and they're kind of linked together
#
so I'm becoming more and more aware
#
a why do we become angry
#
and b that anger is so much
#
associated with privilege
#
and because I'm in a certain position
#
I am allowed to kind of get angry
#
and people kind of take it
#
to take that out of equation
#
so whenever a situation
#
and I'm not saying I'm successful
#
but whenever a situation
#
and I ask why am I getting angry
#
is there another way of resolving this
#
and then also being cognizant
#
of the fact that most of the time
#
because of my privilege
#
which should not be the case
#
a very revealing thing to me
#
to realize that a lot of times
#
people actually are not trying to rile you up
#
people are doing something
#
out of their own better intentions
#
but it's just landing badly
#
which results you getting angry
#
so I realized that most of the time
#
because the intention of the other person
#
but it just landed badly for them
#
which was not how you were expecting it to
#
a little more giving to the other person
#
understand the circumstances
#
as to why it's landing badly for them
#
and maybe help them to rectify it
#
so that it lands correctly for them next time
#
and then the problem will be out of the equation
#
and it'll be taken out of the equation
#
so that started helping me
#
instead of getting upset
#
I started understanding why
#
it is becoming a challenge for the other person
#
and why it's not landing correctly for them
#
and at times I even started
#
kind of having this conversation with them
#
and helping them see as to how
#
other ways you can make things land
#
which was very helpful to me
#
which is very helpful to me
#
and the other thing is this that
#
becoming aware of the fact that
#
we're possibly the top 2, 3, 4 percent in this country
#
that's a huge privilege
#
irrespective of how we've reached here
#
and we may not be super rich
#
but we're still in a position
#
where we are better off than a lot of people
#
and it is not because of
#
they're not doing anything
#
it is the way the society has constructed itself
#
it has given unimaginable advantage to certain people
#
whereas it has not opened those doors
#
for a lot of other people
#
and it is imperative that
#
even if we cannot tweak the system
#
into a more just system
#
at a very individual level
#
we do start facilitating other people
#
we do start making things easier for other people
#
even with basic things like
#
people just doing their job correctly
#
I mean if all the bureaucrats
#
sitting in the government offices
#
if they were to just follow their jobs
#
whatever their job assignments are
#
their job cards are telling them
#
whatever the constitution is saying
#
telling them whatever their scope of their job is
#
even if they start doing that correctly and honestly
#
it would make a lot of difference to people around
#
so I mean if you are a production designer
#
a spot boy or light gaffer
#
you know railway engine driver
#
if we just start doing things
#
the way the scope of our things are
#
and with the intention of making sure
#
that the larger project is facilitated
#
a lot of stuff you know would improve
#
and at the same time also being a little human about it
#
not being arrogant about things
#
not being filled with oneself all the time
#
you're just one among many
#
and we all have to do it together
#
and when everyone kind of pitches in
#
the chances are that what would eventually come out
#
collectively we all would be better off
#
than what we were at the start of it
#
and everyone would benefit
#
even individually and even collectively
#
so all these things are a little bit in my mind
#
especially anger and privilege
#
these are the two things that I think a lot these days
#
and I'm forever thinking
#
how do I curb the instinct
#
where I'm not intimidating
#
where I'm not covering people down
#
that is very important for me
#
I want people to be open
#
to be able to say what they want to say to me
#
to not do preference falsification with me
#
I mean that is very important for me
#
and I think if we are able to create that kind of an atmosphere
#
where there is no preference falsification happening
#
then there is a chance of creating something better
#
rather than one person's vision being imposed on everybody else
#
wise words on that note
#
let's take a quick break
#
and we'll come back on the other side
#
There was a time when Pune used to be called the Oxford of the East
#
it was a hub of social movements
#
of educational institutions
#
of intellectual ferment
#
but since the seat of government is in Delhi
#
all the policy making happens there
#
this episode is sponsored by the Pune Public Policy Festival
#
the Pune Public Policy Festival is an important step
#
towards re-establishing the city
#
and the center of intellectual discourse
#
on the 19th and 20th of January 2024
#
Pune's brightest experts of business and policy
#
will interact with some of the most eminent economists
#
and thinkers of the country
#
this particular event is about the trade-offs
#
that India will face in the next decade
#
trade-offs between growth and equality
#
development and environment
#
convenience in technology and privacy
#
professionals and bureaucrats
#
insiders and outside experts
#
will gather together to discuss the shaping of the world
#
and to register head on over to www.pppf.in
#
this will also be linked from the show notes
#
the Pune Public Policy Festival 2024
#
a historic city building towards a brave new world
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen
#
I'm chatting with Dhanesh Hussain
#
and we spoke for almost two hours before the break
#
and didn't actually start talking about his life
#
so I want to sort of again take you back to your childhood
#
and the part of it that I find really fascinating
#
and I actually envy is that you grew up amid
#
different languages as you have pointed out
#
that you know your mother of course taught Persian literature
#
but you had the Persian thing happening
#
you had Urdu you had English obviously
#
and at the same time you were open to other languages
#
in one of your other interviews you've spoken about
#
how your mom could sometimes be a little finicky
#
about the right way to use a language
#
and what is Gurdurdu and all that
#
but your dad was totally chill
#
comfortable with all languages
#
you were drawn to languages like you know
#
Bhojpuri for what you've pointed out
#
the Mithas and the Apnaiyat
#
which is such a lovely term
#
and so I want you to you know
#
tell me about what that was like
#
having so many different languages
#
because to me each language is like a separate world
#
it's like a separate universe
#
it activates your brain in different ways
#
and that's why I said I kind of envy that a little bit
#
I mean all Indians are multilingual
#
but you typically end up focusing on just
#
one language at the end of the day
#
and in your case you have been like prolific
#
you've been incredible across all of these languages
#
so tell me a little bit about what that growing up was like
#
what was your reading like
#
what was your approach towards those languages
#
so I was growing in a very unusual household
#
most people were scholars or academicians
#
were linguists or poets
#
so in our house at least Urdu, Farsi, Hindi
#
people knew three languages very well
#
one uncle is walking in and reciting a new couplet
#
she's reciting a new couplet that she's written
#
and so we were constantly in this literary atmosphere
#
the oral literacy was very high
#
even though we were also victims of middle class
#
where suddenly after the abolition of the Zamidari Act
#
and the aristocratic Muslim families
#
they found themselves really not doing anything
#
and education being the only way to pull them out of this
#
this new changed world that they were in
#
so a lot of people went into academic, bureaucratic
#
or medical or engineering
#
these kind of professions in our families
#
so the middle class insecurity that
#
you will not have enough money to earn and to sustain yourself
#
resulted in having a government job
#
having an English education
#
going to a public school
#
so our generation saw a shift where we were not
#
there was no insistence
#
there was more insistence that you should learn English
#
that's the gateway to a good life
#
that's what will take you places
#
so we were growing up in a very
#
this kind of a discordant scenario
#
where we are trying to learn Urdu but we are not interested in studying
#
we are studying English in a public school
#
so we don't really want to study Hindi
#
but the environment at home
#
it's a very literary atmosphere
#
where everybody is talking in poetry
#
and in Urdu and in Hindi
#
so we kind of mistook that as the norm
#
that is the norm at everybody's household
#
when my mother would get angry
#
she would read a poem by Iqbal
#
which was something like what a tragedy
#
the caravan's wealth kept getting pilfered
#
but the worst was that the caravan kept losing its sense of loss too
#
so that was the perennial couplet
#
that was quoted when we were wasting time
#
that not only our wealth is getting pilfered
#
but we are also losing our sense of loss too
#
and for the longest time in my life
#
I never understood what this couplet was
#
but then there was one Persian couplet
#
that she used to recite
#
which I cannot remember for my life
#
but the meaning of that was
#
that we have done some land work
#
and now we are going to do some sky work
#
me and my sister kind of thought
#
that this is the way every household is
#
and then when we started interacting
#
you know when we reach a stage
#
when you start talking with your friends in school
#
and when you go to the university
#
and you start realizing that no
#
other households are not like this
#
we live in a very different household
#
where language is a kind of a privilege
#
you know we've inherited that kind of language
#
then so the oral literacy was very high
#
so when I switched from a career in banking to acting
#
and when I came to literature and to drama
#
and to plays and to storytelling and performances
#
it was easy for me to pick things up
#
because somewhere there was an echo of these things in my head
#
you know somewhere I had listened to these great poets
#
these trends in literature
#
so all these things were very easy for me to comprehend
#
it was mainly about like now okay let's dive into it
#
but I've seen this lake many times
#
I've passed this lake many times
#
I've never stopped here
#
I've never paused here to take a dive in it
#
but I've passed this lake many times
#
so it was not an unfamiliar territory for me
#
and I think it was easier for me to get into it
#
vis-a-vis most actors or most people
#
who do not have that kind of privilege which I had
#
in the sense that you know you spoke about Dr. I. Masoom Raza
#
and in the extended family I'm kind of connected to him
#
he was in some sense a distant uncle of my father
#
but my father had a great rapport with him
#
so you know he would always travel
#
and the first time I came to Mumbai was in 1983
#
and at that time he would still get it
#
LTC, Government Employees Kumalta, Leaf Travel Concession
#
so my dad took an LTC and he booked a first-class cabin in the train
#
and we all came from Delhi to Bombay
#
to spend Christmas and New Year in 1983
#
and we stayed at Rai Sahib's house at Bandstand
#
so that's my first memory of Bombay
#
that's the first time when I saw sea in my life
#
and it's very funny that Poonam Saxena
#
who was the cultural editor of Hindustan Times
#
and she was translating Rai Sahib's novel Scene 75 into English
#
and she reached out to me and she said
#
I want you to write an afterword
#
I mean I'm not an expert on Hindi literature
#
there are much you know there are worthier people to write this
#
and she made a very interesting observation
#
she said you what I find fascinating
#
is that you two belong to the same family
#
you have a kind of a similar career path
#
you both left wherever you were
#
came to Bombay switched your career
#
and then you made a name
#
and you both have a very similar arc
#
and I said I never thought like that
#
I never thought that two people
#
remotely connected in two different eras
#
they follow an arc and that arc is kind of similar
#
so I said that's very fascinating
#
but I mean I never thought like that
#
but I said now that you've made this observation
#
I'll write the afterword
#
and I wrote the afterword that of that novel
#
and one of the things which I read when Rai Sahibs
#
I've kind of read all his novel
#
and all of his writings over the years
#
he mentions in one of his writings that
#
we spoke a very special kind of a language at home
#
which he used to call Bhojpuriya Urdu
#
so it is basically Bhojpuri
#
but it has a lot of Urdu words in it
#
and sometimes a brushed distorted words Urdu
#
but he said that's the kind of language we spoke at home
#
and that's the kind of language my father also spoke
#
you know my father could switch
#
from very upper you know
#
stiff upper lip kind of Urdu to
#
suddenly into Ka Bhaiyaa Ka Hora Hai
#
you know into Bhojpuriya
#
and I used to love that about my father
#
because he was in some sense
#
this socialist kind of a man
#
who would always banter with the riksha wala
#
with the class four employees at the university
#
he would always hang out with them
#
he would rarely be seen with his own peer class
#
you know he would always be mixing around
#
with the people who were truly like
#
at the lowest rung of the hierarchy in the university
#
and the kind of language that he would speak to that
#
and I found and this is the thing with language
#
this is the thing with our body
#
because our function our brain's function is to survive
#
so it is always trying to find out ways of conserving energy
#
and that applies to speech also
#
so the moment you can speak a word in a different way
#
which uses less of your muscles
#
you kind of slip into that
#
and words get distorted
#
and people start speaking that word
#
into in that easier pronunciation of the word
#
which is not what the purist would like to
#
so a lot of words kind of change like that
#
and they enter the language
#
and then they get distorted
#
and then they become part of the dialect
#
or part of that local language
#
and same happened with a lot of Persian Urdu words
#
which came into the language of the local people
#
and they kind of got distorted
#
and now they've become those words of those language
#
examples like a word like
#
which is a word which in bhojpur people use for
#
their partner for their spouse for their wife
#
but it's actually a Persian word
#
which means which means son faced
#
means son and means face
#
so it's sun faced basically
#
so which is a kind of a Persian word
#
and that's from you have face to face
#
so a word like becomes for a term for use for wife
#
so I'm saying that's how
#
and that used to fascinate me
#
this dovetailing of language
#
this loan words coming in
#
and becoming part of a language
#
so much so that people forget
#
that it came from somewhere else
#
and that part really fascinated me
#
and when I started working
#
you know in theater and storytelling
#
I started looking for the things like these
#
these connections that you have in language
#
stories how they are traveling
#
like there's a story which I
#
which A.K. Ramanujan has in his Folk Tales of India
#
and the similar story is being decided
#
in the Scandinavian Folk Tale also
#
so it's an Indian Folk Tale
#
it's in Scandinavian Folk Tale
#
I remember I was once performing
#
at a storytelling festival
#
and there was a French storyteller
#
and she starts telling a story
#
and I'm thinking how does she know the story
#
this is an Indian story
#
maybe somebody in our team told her
#
and then later when I asked her
#
she said no this is a French story
#
so you know that's how stories travel
#
and then they get they go
#
and assimilate in a certain culture
#
so these things started fascinating me
#
words traveling stories traveling
#
now when I'm it doesn't surprise me
#
when I hear something belongs somewhere else too
#
because that's the way we've been
#
we've been plenty potentially
#
we've been migrating all our lives
#
that's what I meant when I say we are a river
#
we're permanently in a state of flux
#
there was no fixed period
#
there was no glorious age
#
beautifully said I have a bunch of questions
#
sort of double clicking on different aspects of this
#
and the first of it you know
#
goes to what a friend of mine Ajay Shah
#
with whom I do a YouTube show called
#
everything is everything
#
and he pointed to this study
#
by this Nobel Prize winning scientist
#
but we'll do an episode on YouTube on it
#
because I want him to talk about it in detail
#
what the study showed was that children
#
who have grown up in families
#
where they are listening to
#
10-letter words around them
#
end up with an extra layer of cognition
#
that other kids don't have
#
and obviously I think of 10-letter words
#
serving as a proxy for a more sophisticated discourse
#
right and Ajay's point was
#
that in all the discourse about privilege
#
there is an extremely important part of privilege
#
that most of us miss completely
#
which is a privilege of growing up in a
#
you could you know grow up in a family
#
which is rich and doing well in material terms
#
but everything you do could be goal-directed
#
there could be no sense
#
that seems like a waste of time
#
everything is goal-directed
#
so what you're reading is to pass exams
#
you become vice president at 40
#
but there is something missing
#
and Ajay's point was that
#
this is a big problem to solve
#
we need to think about how to kind of address this
#
and make 10-letter words available to more people
#
now I tell my writing students
#
that don't use big words obviously
#
so I don't mean it literally
#
but I mean in terms of a discourse
#
that goes beyond the stuff that you read
#
for instrumental purposes
#
to pass exams and which are goal-directed
#
and I'm just thinking that an added element to this
#
that you had was not just the sophisticated discourse
#
but the discourse in all these other languages
#
and I'm saying that that is then
#
perhaps a big part of why
#
when you're working in a bank
#
you know after dabbling part-time
#
but then you decide to quit and do theatre
#
the thought could not even have occurred
#
to most of your colleagues
#
because they haven't had those circumstances
#
so what do you sort of feel about this
#
because one thing I realized is that
#
when I speak to my guests
#
and this is something I started observing 3 or 4 years ago
#
that those who are mostly English speaking like me
#
will see the world in a particular way
#
those who are you know who grew up
#
reading Hindi newspapers or Urdu newspapers
#
will have an extra layer of awareness
#
they'll have a nuance that the pure English speaker won't
#
and it is not a question of intelligence
#
or attitude or something
#
it is simply a question that it was
#
so what is your sense of that
#
that when you in hindsight when you look back
#
when you think of what set you apart from people around you
#
how big a factor do you think that was
#
and do you sometimes feel even today
#
that you know the uniqueness of that kind of upbringing
#
which like you said you normalized it
#
you thought everybody's childhood is like this
#
but the uniqueness of that
#
also sets you apart from the people you work with today
#
who might have had a different kind of unidimensional
#
but you've got those three languages
#
you've also got the masters in economics and the MBA
#
and working in a bank you have that life experience
#
and all the literature you have read
#
so your LLM as it were to use an AI term
#
is just so much larger than many other people
#
so what are your thoughts?
#
I think there are there's an advantage that I get
#
by being who I am in the sense that
#
there is one thing which a very dear friend of mine
#
who's a psychoanalyst pointed out to me
#
and I was like at the in the crosshair of privilege
#
now she pointed out something very interesting to me
#
think in terms of how majority
#
majoritarianism and minoritarianism works
#
she says think in terms of gender
#
why is it that women know more about men
#
than men know about women?
#
because women are at disadvantage
#
they need to protect themselves
#
so women by instinct have more idea about how men will behave
#
so that they can you know protect themselves
#
in case there is harm happening to them
#
whereas men generally because they are in the position of power
#
they would be oppressed
#
they would be oblivious
#
they would be ignorant to women
#
and she says that's how majoritarianism also works
#
people who are from minority
#
would always be more aware about the majority culture
#
whereas people from majority
#
will be oblivious or ignorant
#
or less interested in the minority culture
#
because they are mainstream
#
because they believe that what they are is the norm
#
like men believe this is what the norm is
#
it's like the example I gave
#
you know remember in early north
#
where people from the kryptonite planet
#
comes to retrieve the child
#
but when they land on earth
#
they have to wear the helmet
#
to kind of cut out the noise
#
so somebody asked them the question
#
as to why wearing the helmet
#
and they say that there is so much noise
#
women are just like that
#
they are cognizant of this noise so much than us
#
they are the people from the kryptonite
#
they realize and they are aware of
#
so when it's a man walking on the street
#
and it's a woman walking on the street
#
the amount of awareness that a woman needs to have
#
while she's walking on the street
#
is some 10 folds in what a man needs to have
#
and it's the same thing
#
which goes with the majority culture
#
and the minority culture
#
so I think this unique being in the crosshair
#
if I would have been a kid of majority culture
#
and would have had the privilege
#
because somewhere this inherited identity
#
which I'm being made aware of all the time
#
why it is being forced on me
#
why it is imposed on me
#
why I'm at a historically disadvantaged position
#
and yet at the same time I am reaping privilege
#
I am reaping privilege of some sort
#
so this kind of places me in a very unique position
#
which gives me perspectives
#
which gives me hindsight
#
which possibly I would not have had
#
if I would have been a regular
#
you know English speaking majority going person
#
I think that kind of tells it
#
to having a certain nuance
#
or having a certain way of looking at things
#
which possibly I would have missed out
#
if I would have been a person
#
from the majority mainstream
#
there's a great point about women knowing men
#
better than men know women
#
and I'd actually say women know men
#
better than men know men
#
and there's a you know great quote by Margaret Atwood
#
men are men are afraid that women will laugh at them
#
women are afraid that men will kill them
#
so obviously your level of awareness is much greater
#
you know the point that you made
#
I mean that was one of the layers of blindness
#
that was lifted from me
#
among many other layers of blindness a long time back
#
when I realized that women
#
not just like walking down the street
#
but in every interaction you enter a lift
#
he's never going to look around
#
and kind of be aware of who might be there
#
but for women there's a constant layer of attention
#
and awareness that they sort of always carry with them
#
so I mean coming back to what you're saying
#
so what what was happened that you know
#
also there was a time where the intersectionality
#
did not come into effect
#
because the class difference
#
and the identity difference
#
so sometimes the class identity overpowered
#
and it overpowered most of the time
#
so if you belong to a certain class
#
you became people like us
#
that there would be enough you know
#
whereas if you were not from that class
#
irrespective of wherever
#
whatever identity you are holding
#
and if you are not from the mainstream
#
then you are further disadvantaged
#
but what has happened because of
#
this class difference has started stripping out
#
now even if you belong to an elite class
#
is something that you're being made aware of
#
so the class protection is not there
#
and this is just the beginning
#
it is first for let's say the Muslims
#
or the Christians or the Sikhs
#
and then it will go towards
#
where you will be titled as liberal
#
the class privilege would be stripped off
#
the Dalit feminist Jyoti Langevar once said
#
that Dalit women are also Dalits
#
in relation to Dalit men
#
within the Dalit communities
#
I'll go to another question
#
like I love the way you said
#
that you mentioned Bhojpuria
#
and one of the sort of interesting phenomena
#
is a reversal of an older phenomena
#
now the older phenomena
#
which I would often lament
#
and which seems like such a disaster
#
is the homogenization of everything
#
and everything is in everything
#
you know the most vivid example for me
#
is what Vikram doctor mentioned
#
in an old episode with me
#
which is a Cavendish banana
#
you know we send bananas out all over the world
#
we have incredible diversity of bananas
#
one particular kind of banana
#
became popular in Latin America
#
called the Cavendish banana
#
and then that got exported back to India
#
and now because of some natural advantages
#
it has like it shows better and whatever
#
it is replacing all the other bananas
#
the Cavendish banana is becoming mainstream
#
and that hurts our banana diversity
#
that a similar thing is happening with languages
#
right and that the big mainstream languages remain
#
but the dialects kind of go out
#
so you will have a certain Hindi
#
but Maithili and Bhojpuri
#
and all of those will kind of suffer
#
because when you go from a village
#
where you speak that dialect to a city
#
you know the incentives are towards conforming
#
and being part of the mainstream
#
and it was a lament I used to have
#
I used to think it okay
#
you know this is it's really unfortunate
#
what has been happening in recent years
#
is that the same forces of markets and technology
#
which were causing the homogenization
#
are now sort of bringing about a reversal
#
with the founder of Stage
#
and Stage is it's an they said
#
they're an OTT platform
#
they position themselves as a Netflix for Bharat
#
but the languages they are in
#
are not the mainstream languages
#
like Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali
#
they are Haryanvi, Bhojpuri, Maithili
#
that all of those dialects
#
do have many people speaking them
#
and now to find entertainment
#
is such a delight for them
#
that initially they don't even care
#
they're just happy it's there
#
he speaks about this reverse migration
#
where like Haryanvi is one of the languages
#
so he speaks about this reverse migration
#
where kids who went from Haryana to Bombay
#
to make a career in Bollywood
#
and there are some more than
#
three four thousand kids out there
#
who are making Haryanvi content
#
and their rates when I last spoke to him
#
were as high as Netflix
#
and they had some three four lakh subscribers
#
so you know already profitable
#
I believe they got a massive round
#
of venture funding also
#
after my episode with him
#
not because of my episode
#
you know and that gives me the hope
#
that there is way for traditions
#
which might otherwise have gotten marginalized
#
and lost in the growing push
#
and the growing mainstream
#
because one thing that I am coming to believe
#
is that in more and more fields
#
the mainstream is dying
#
and I think that's a good thing
#
and of course it means that
#
those niches become profitable
#
on your own for a creator
#
you need a thousand two fans
#
but you know it allows the culture
#
to sort of become more diverse
#
in a different kind of ways
#
that someone like you in a sense
#
has been part of keeping
#
even reviving an old tradition in a sense
#
and building an ecosystem around it
#
so what are sort of your thoughts on both of these
#
one is my lament about homogenization
#
which broadly is massive
#
and you know and I'll link
#
to a great essay I read recently
#
is it the cult of the average
#
it'll be in the show notes
#
which is about everything
#
you know buildings start looking the same
#
you know brands start making
#
chairs start looking the same
#
you know there's this beautiful picture
#
of like 40 different brands of SUV
#
and they all look identical
#
why because they all went
#
into the same wind tunnels
#
optimized in exactly the same way
#
so when you push for scale
#
and when you have mimetic desire
#
what their neighbor wants
#
you have this push to what sameness
#
there is I think now the scope
#
for people to rebel against that
#
and that is what makes them distinctive
#
and you know that gives me
#
you know the first homogenization began
#
began when religion came in
#
and I mean in terms of languages
#
if one reads Kanishk Devi's work
#
in the Indian languages
#
and he said in the 1981 census
#
he was going through the census
#
and at right at the bottom
#
there was one column which says other
#
and it said 1500 and something languages
#
besides these mainstream
#
and then there was a column
#
it said other club together
#
the dialects and some 1500 in India
#
and this over a period of 30 years
#
from 1981 to 2011 census
#
because that's the last one
#
and we never had census after that
#
that other column dropped
#
from 1500 something to 700 something
#
we lost some 700 languages
#
and dialects in this country
#
which brings us to the question of
#
what sustains a language
#
what sustains the dialects
#
and I've forgotten the name
#
but there was this one great
#
linguist professor at JNU
#
the difference between a dialect
#
a language is a dialect
#
language is a dialect with an army
#
yeah so essentially essentially
#
wouldn't show that their culture
#
is the dominant culture
#
wouldn't show that they are mainstream
#
the reason why you and I
#
are sitting here and talking in English
#
is because of the colonial legacies
#
because England was able to win
#
if France would have done that
#
we would have been speaking here in French
#
if Dutch would have done that
#
we you and I would have been speaking in Dutch
#
if the Mughals would have persisted
#
probably you and I would be speaking
#
the late Mughal culture came in
#
Urdu became the lingua franca
#
Urdu would have persisted
#
if Greece had colonized us
#
I would not understand a single word
#
you would be saying right now why
#
because it would be Greek to you
#
good I had to get that out of the way
#
it is the way it functions
#
but what what technology did was
#
in some sense it freed us from that
#
when technology started
#
so you realize that most of the blogs
#
the most of the websites were in English
#
there was not enough technology
#
to support writing in Hindi
#
but then slowly and slowly
#
and the coding for these languages
#
and now you see websites
#
people are writing in these languages
#
in various languages if you want to
#
you just keep adding those languages
#
like I have in my phone
#
you know English, Hindi and Urdu
#
so I can type in these languages
#
if I wish I knew more languages
#
I can see there's a Marathi
#
enough thing has been done
#
that these languages can now be used
#
in the sense that people realized
#
that technology can also be used
#
and that has also led to
#
the kind of democratization
#
that you're talking about
#
like what COVID did was
#
that suddenly the regional cinema
#
the only way you could watch
#
either you go to those states
#
and see the films there
#
or if some regional film
#
would become big or cult
#
then it would get released
#
you know if you're a cinema buff
#
but what what COVID did
#
what subtitling did was
#
that it just made it accessible
#
and suddenly when people were
#
who are privileged like us
#
and not people who were dying
#
to get their two breads for the day
#
but people who were privileged
#
who could afford to be in lockdown
#
they got open to this world
#
and suddenly you have people
#
watching Malayalam films
#
there is good cinema happening in India
#
besides in the cinema too
#
you know the greatest discrepancy
#
the incongruence you find
#
it's like I had a student
#
who had come to Lucknow
#
when I was performing in Lucknow
#
she made this remarkable observation
#
that's taught to me in the classroom
#
on the roads of Lucknow
#
are two different languages
#
I'm not able to comprehend
#
I'm completely flummoxed
#
and then somebody told her
#
that actually you should learn Urdu also
#
is kind of a healthy mixture
#
and that's unless you know
#
you will not be able to comprehend
#
so she went back to the university
#
and she enrolled in an Urdu class also
#
and then when she started
#
getting an understanding
#
of both Urdu and Hindi languages
#
her comprehension of the street language
#
that both these languages
#
are in a way the same language
#
I mean I'll come to this point again
#
but I'm kind of digressing
#
the homogeneity of the culture
#
and especially the Hindi landscape
#
made a very great observation once
#
Hindi cinema had to cater
#
cater to a pan-India culture
#
and there was no pan-India culture
#
was kind of manufactured in our film
#
of a Nehruvian social model
#
which comes from the smaller town
#
believes in nation-building
#
and these greedy capitalists
#
you know create a just system
#
that you are creating on screen
#
because there is no family like that
#
that speak that kind of language
#
because if you go towards
#
it is a series of dialects
#
that you would encounter
#
that image that you hear
#
ki kos kos pe badle paani chaar
#
that if you look at the northern belt
#
if you look at the grand trunk road
#
you look right from Punjab
#
the language is gradually shifting
#
various dialects of Punjabi
#
but it's a different language
#
Braj can understand Haryani
#
but it's a different language
#
the person speaking Avadi
#
but it's a different dialect
#
then you move to Bhojpur
#
person speaking Bhojpuri
#
but it's a different dialect
#
then you move towards Bihar
#
and the person speaking Methili
#
can understand Bhojpuri
#
but it's a different dialect
#
and you're moving towards Bengali
#
and the person speaking Bangla
#
but Bangla is a different language
#
and then you move further
#
the person speaking Assamese
#
but it's a different language, but by the time you've reached there,
#
Rasmus is a very different language than Punjabi.
#
But there's a hand-holding happening as you go down the northern plain.
#
It's a river. There's a hand-holding happening out there.
#
So the point is that there was no one homogenous language like Hindi.
#
That Khariboli was only in that region around Delhi and Haryana,
#
and maybe a bit of western UP, that's where this Khariboli was being spoken,
#
which we kind of understand today as Hindi.
#
But in effect, there were these all-sister languages being spoken,
#
or dialects, and together they formed this great confluence.
#
Now, what we've done, we've disregarded that.
#
We've reduced them to a substandard level,
#
that this is a language.
#
There's no status of a language.
#
The language should be this.
#
So in some way, we've imposed a language.
#
And that imposed language, which I call Samvidhanik Hindi,
#
even till date is not bringing true.
#
Because what has developed organically over a period of 700-800 years,
#
through the confluence of languages,
#
because anything that's organic will have more sustainability
#
than rather than something which is manufactured and imposed on people.
#
So that problem will always be arising,
#
when you will have something which is being imposed.
#
Now, the other thing is that,
#
in terms of the language,
#
so my example that I give out to people is this,
#
that when the Turks and the Persians came in,
#
and Delhi was the area where Delhi Sultanate was coming up,
#
now they were using the language which was primarily Persian,
#
because the Persian Empire had grown huge and big,
#
and was perhaps one of the most powerful empire,
#
was on the silk trade route,
#
Persian was like the English was to the world in the later imperial era.
#
So that was what Persian was to the major Asian region.
#
And everyone who wanted to sustain themselves better
#
in terms of trade, in terms of mobility,
#
knew that Persian is like an international currency,
#
which we can, you know, if we go somewhere and speak in Persian,
#
probably we'll be received better.
#
People in the Delhi area,
#
where the Khadi Boli was being used,
#
they figured out that if we start writing Khadi Boli in the script
#
which the Persian speakers are using,
#
perhaps they will be able to comprehend what we are saying.
#
And thus, that writing of this language in this script
#
started developing into what became eventually a different language,
#
which became Rekhta, and Rekhta later became Urdu.
#
And also, the word Urdu kind of, the usage for the first time
#
was used in 1780, 1790.
#
Before that, no one knew Urdu as Urdu.
#
So, which means a potpourri of languages.
#
So, because your necessity forced you to write a certain language
#
it was the necessity because you wanted some kind of a dialogue
#
to happen with those who were ruling you,
#
a different language kind of came into existence.
#
It's the same thing that today,
#
a lot of people use Roman English to write Hindi.
#
Now, 50 years down the line,
#
somebody starts claiming that Roman English written Hindi is a different language
#
and Devanagari written Hindi is a different language.
#
What would be your take on that?
#
Would you consider Roman English as a different Hindi?
#
Or would you say, no, no, I'm just using another script?
#
So, it is just using another script.
#
But what has happened that, especially after the Fort William College in 1801
#
and the diversification of these two languages,
#
where a very nationalist kind of an effort came to Sanskritize Hindi
#
and a very purist kind of an effort came to kind of Persianize Urdu,
#
the languages kind of started parting away,
#
and today they kind of literally sound as two different languages.
#
But the point is that a language is not decided by the words,
#
by the vocabulary, it's decided by the syntax,
#
it's decided by the grammar, by the construction of a sentence.
#
And the construction of the sentence of a Hindi and Urdu language are same.
#
They use the same grammatical rules and same syntax construction rules,
#
That's why they are the same language.
#
So, supposedly, I'm sitting in this room with you and I say,
#
Brother, Amit, it's very cold in this room.
#
Now, in this whole sentence, I've only used one AC as an English word.
#
But if I were to say this sentence, Brother Amit,
#
it's cold in this room.
#
So now, I've used literally half the sentences filled with English words,
#
but you would not call it English,
#
because the construction of the sentence is Hindi.
#
So, filling the words with the different language does not change the language.
#
It still remains a Hindi, because I'm using the same syntax,
#
which is for a Hindi sentence,
#
even when I'm filling it with English words.
#
So, if you look at, and there was this European scholar,
#
I'm forgetting his name,
#
what he did was that he analyzed 100 op-eds of Hindi newspaper
#
and 100 op-eds of Urdu newspaper,
#
and he came to the conclusion that 80% of the language is the same,
#
because it is using the same syntax, the same construction,
#
the same way the word is being said, the language is being transmitted.
#
So, I'm saying that we are kind of stuck in imposing things,
#
rather than salvaging our inherited intangible culture,
#
rather than seeing beauty in something that is organically developed
#
and saving it and preserving it,
#
we are more interested in destroying it and imposing something which is manufactured
#
and thinking that we would fall for this, that this is what culture is.
#
But that's really not how culture works.
#
That's really not how language works.
#
I mean, if people are so purist, then why are you wearing trousers?
#
Why are you wearing shirts?
#
You can never go back to anything pure, because there is no anything pure.
#
There was always a confluence of people migrating, coming, mixing, and things developing.
#
And that's how the nature of the things would be.
#
I mean, potato is not really an indigenous Indian food.
#
So, the poor people who eat aloo bhanda, who eat puri sabzi in the morning,
#
what did they eat 600 years ago before the arrival of the Portuguese?
#
I've had episodes in Seen Unseen, and everything is everything about
#
how most of what we think of as Indian culture actually originated elsewhere,
#
which is fine, you know, we are a river.
#
I have two follow-up questions to this, and one of them is this,
#
you said it so beautifully that language is in the word, you know, it evolves.
#
As economists would put it, it's an emergent order, it evolves,
#
it's always bottom-up, that is the only way it could be.
#
Now, what we did see in the last couple of centuries was an essential political movement
#
to kind of separate Hindi and Urdu, and then a political movement
#
that led towards what they call Shudh Hindi and blah blah blah.
#
And my thinking was that top-down can never work when there is such a strong bottom-up.
#
That was my thinking, but I wonder if that thinking is true,
#
and I'll ask your opinion on it.
#
And the other thing that I wonder about is that,
#
and I don't want to talk about politics, but just in the context of language,
#
that the language that I see Prime Minister Modi using is a very Shudh kind of Hindi, often.
#
A lot of those words are not, you know, used in regular speech,
#
and yet he is so incredibly popular, and I'm like, why is that then the case?
#
That if you, you know, have this sort of top-down imposition of a way of speaking
#
and you teach that in schools for years and decades and whatever,
#
that it eventually does seep in, and that the, you know, the homogenization does happen,
#
that everything that has evolved beautifully in that bottom-up way does come under threat.
#
So, what are sort of your thoughts on this?
#
It will. But still, when you hear Modi hai toh mumkin hai,
#
mumkin is essentially an Urdu word that's being used there.
#
His clothes are delightfully Islamic origin.
#
So, I'm saying, and again, I would again point out to you that Urdu is really not Islamic.
#
No, I was referring to Churidhar.
#
Because now it has been identified as Muslims language.
#
That's a political label.
#
But again, it's a political thing.
#
Because, you know, one of the first things which startled me,
#
and this is what, you know, when you kind of live in a particular bubble,
#
this is what it does to you, is when you get out of the bubble,
#
you're shocked as to how diversified and different the world is.
#
And the first shock came to me when I first came to Bombay as a 13-year-old boy.
#
And I had never gone out of North India till that time.
#
You know, the farthest I had gone to was Banaras from Delhi.
#
The farthest I had gone up was Chandigarh and north, you know, at the age of 13.
#
The farthest I had gone west was Jaipur.
#
The farthest south I had gone was probably Agra, you know.
#
So, you can see how limited my world was as a 13-year-old boy.
#
Basically, Chandigarh and Agra and Banaras forming the outer limits of my world.
#
So, when I came to Bombay at the age of 13,
#
I was shocked that there were so different kind of Indians.
#
One of the shock that I got in this city was that there are Indians who can't speak Hindi.
#
One of the other shock that I got was that there were Muslims who can't speak Urdu.
#
Because I was running into Bori Muslims, I was running into South Indian Muslims,
#
I was running into Assamese Muslims in Bombay,
#
and they had no clue as to, you know, they were speaking their languages.
#
They were speaking Tamil, they were speaking Malayalam, they were speaking Gujarati,
#
they were speaking Assamese, and they were Muslims, visible Muslim people.
#
Similarly, they were Indians, but they were not speaking Hindi.
#
They were comfortable with other languages.
#
So, it just broke my bubble.
#
For the first time, I realized that this was such a diverse country as a 13-year-old boy.
#
And what misconceptions I had carried as a boy living and growing up in Delhi,
#
that if you are belonging to a certain religious community,
#
then that's the language you need to speak.
#
Or if you are an Indian, then it's imperative that everybody should know Hindi.
#
And this is all conditioning.
#
This is the conditioning that I was going in the public school.
#
This is the conditioning that I was going through my daily life,
#
where suddenly my friends from different religious community,
#
they kind of made it very casual that,
#
oh, if you're a Muslim, then you know Urdu very well.
#
But I realized that, no, that's not the truth.
#
So, I'm saying that that kind of conditioning,
#
and it takes a long time to break that kind of conditioning,
#
to realize diversification, to realize that there is strength in diversification.
#
What you're saying is correct,
#
that eventually power, brute power, homogenization,
#
will make sure that everything is decimated and wiped out.
#
And that's how so many of indigenous cultures have wiped out,
#
so many of tribal cultures have wiped out,
#
so many of other cultures will wipe out.
#
Because slowly, and it's not just in languages and arts and crafts and traditions,
#
you would find a lot of these things happening.
#
So, I'm saying that that is true.
#
But then the point is this, that we can't be fatalistic about it,
#
that eventually a brute power will take over and will decimate everything.
#
It does not mean that, okay, you give it up,
#
because no, what's the point of then that way?
#
What's the point of living?
#
Because eventually we all are going to die,
#
or in the long run, we all are going to be dead.
#
When Keynes was asked about why doesn't his economic policies
#
are about longer economic cycles and just shorter economic cycles.
#
So, I'm saying that if we became fatalistic
#
or just see the futility of things that eventually this will be,
#
then it gets us to the very basic question
#
that eventually we all are going to die,
#
then what is the point of doing whatever we are doing,
#
which we are doing when we are living.
#
But it's not about individual lifespan.
#
Because if that would have been the case,
#
we would not have been sitting where we are.
#
One of the things that we have created is language.
#
And what we have done through language
#
is one of the most ingenious things
#
that we have created as human species,
#
is that we have created symbolism.
#
And through that symbolism of visual symbolism and sound symbolism,
#
we have been able to create a repository of knowledge
#
which we can pass off from one generation to the other.
#
And as we pass on this repository of knowledge
#
from each generation to each generation,
#
the collective knowledge survives.
#
Even if the individual knowledge kind of dies,
#
because through language we are able to pass off this repository of knowledge,
#
the collective knowledge survives.
#
Now, so every time, out of your prejudice or out of your bigotry,
#
you are decimating a culture or you are decimating a language,
#
you are cutting off a branch of human knowledge.
#
And imagine how much you are losing out.
#
Why would you like to do that?
#
Even if you are prejudiced, even if you are bigoted,
#
why would you like to do that?
#
Why cut off an organically grown branch
#
and a repository of knowledge
#
which has passed on from generations to generations
#
and has reached us here?
#
Why should that be cut off or stymied?
#
So that we can get in every time you...
#
I mean, we all know of this.
#
Every time we learn a new language, a new universe opens on us.
#
A new world opens on us.
#
Suddenly it's like living in a multiverse.
#
You can switch from one universe to the other
#
when you move from one language to the other language.
#
Why do you want to take away that privilege?
#
Why this homogenization?
#
Can you eat the same meal every time?
#
You don't. You look for a variety.
#
How boring the world would be if everybody would be Dhaneshwar's hand for me.
#
So this variety, this color, this diversification
#
is something that really gives us the thrill of who we are
#
and why we kind of keep moving on
#
and why we keep on discovering.
#
My one sense of hope actually is
#
that technology does empower individuals
#
and some of this stuff doesn't die out.
#
It can enable a move in the reverse direction.
#
My next question is about
#
something I learned from Peggy Mohan's book
#
Wanderers, Kings and Merchants. Have you read it?
#
I've not. It's on my shelf.
#
Masterpiece. Just read it.
#
Shift it up your wait list.
#
You especially will just go mad.
#
The book made me so happy.
#
And one of the interesting insights in that
#
and one of the things that the book does fundamentally
#
is what Tony Joseph did with genetic research
#
in terms of going back in history.
#
She does that with linguistic research and so on and so forth.
#
And one of the insights there is that
#
when the Aryan migration happened
#
it was mainly bands of men who came
#
and they would marry local women
#
whether consensually or otherwise.
#
But bands of men would come
#
as migrations tend to happen
#
they would marry local women
#
and they would speak different languages.
#
And she talks about how the men would speak
#
a particular language, the women would speak
#
a different language because
#
they're essentially from different places at that time.
#
And when the children would grow up
#
you would have the children grow up
#
like the boys would first spend the first
#
two, three years with the mother
#
and then you would be in the world of the men
#
but the languages were different.
#
And in speaking about people's
#
you know, childhoods of past guests and all that
#
I've often come across memories that they have
#
of how the women would speak a particular language at home
#
and the men would speak a particular way
#
and I would imagine that even if it is the same
#
it has different inflections to it and different shades to it
#
and so on and so forth.
#
of like you earlier said that women know
#
men better than men know women.
#
This could also, and I'm speculating and thinking
#
completely aloud now, but it could also be the case
#
that the women understand the men's
#
language and what is gendered about it
#
but the men don't have that same
#
So is this something that you've noticed or thought about
#
multiethnic couples and their children
#
when I run into them I envy them
#
because you know mother is Bangla, father is
#
Punjabi and the child can speak
#
both Bangla and Punjabi and I was like
#
automatically inherit two different languages
#
and you are adept at both the
#
languages which I would love to do.
#
the moment multiethnicity
#
comes in, the multilingual
#
it opens and it enriches us and
#
homogenization is the first thing that
#
would attack that and would not let that
#
happen. So obviously I've
#
noticed that. Sometimes the language
#
is also as a weapon, as a source of
#
protection and when MeToo happened
#
and I met a lot of my female actors
#
and they told me that they have
#
kind of these private WhatsApp
#
group where all these girls
#
their observations about
#
particular men. So they kind of warn
#
off each other that look this is a predatory
#
kind of a person, stay away from that person.
#
this is what the gender difference
#
normally do a locker room conversation
#
achieving and look I was with this
#
girl and with that girl. But the whole
#
conversation is very different. It is
#
taking us back to that outward
#
kind of comment that they
#
would laugh at us and be fair that
#
sometimes this was also a way
#
of protecting yourself, of having
#
person in the family cannot understand
#
and kind of protect yourself.
#
But it also came from multi ethnicity
#
that you're talking about because initially
#
they were coming from a different set of place and
#
these people were from a different set of place
#
and somehow this multi ethnicity
#
continued over some generations
#
before a kind of a common
#
language would have evolved.
#
feel threatened when we feel somebody is
#
And I think that's what evolved society
#
should do. Evolved society
#
should create institutions
#
that should remove the threat perception.
#
that's what was meant to be.
#
That's how it should have been,
#
but we are not heading that way.
#
I mean, when a tourist comes, we should be welcoming
#
that person and not feel that you're
#
in a strange land, but you should feel welcomed.
#
That, you know, you've come
#
here and all the institutions
#
and everything that's here will serve
#
you in some sense that make you feel at home
#
and make you feel comfortable. And you can
#
freely go around and explore
#
the land and learn things and
#
life or financial loss or
#
being scammed or being conned,
#
you would go back and reach to your
#
place. And when we would come there,
#
you would possibly reciprocate that to us.
#
I mean, it was meant to be like this, but
#
the con artist in us, the evil in us
#
kind of gets the better of us.
#
there is, even if you have a good thing
#
it's a death wish, we want to just destroy it.
#
and it just kills the whole good thing.
#
Another question about language.
#
I did an episode with Chandrabhan Prasad ji,
#
the great Dalit thinker, and
#
he insists on always wearing a suit
#
and only speaking in English.
#
At least for the recording, he only spoke in English.
#
In the breaks, we were chatting in Hindi and stuff
#
like that. But in the recordings, he insists
#
and there is a strong, very coherent
#
political reason for that. And I'll quote from
#
one of his pieces where
#
he writes that there are,
#
he talks about how language
#
subconsciously takes a lot of these
#
differentials, they get
#
embedded within the language. So at one point
#
he says, quote, there are too many caste-based
#
abuses in India. People say,
#
In the countryside, these abuses
#
are quite common. Like,
#
is often used as a threat.
#
And what a lot of people
#
won't realize because these have been so normalized
#
and yet the language has
#
evolved and they're used in regular ways.
#
And his rebellion against
#
focus on English. Like, he's even built a
#
temple in Banka village for the goddess of English.
#
goes in that direction quite hard.
#
And even with dress, like at one point
#
Chandrabhanji wrote, when you speak
#
English, it so happens that you dress up differently.
#
I get invited to parties and
#
when I speak in English, people talk
#
differently and are even ready
#
to listen to me. What I speak, if spoken
#
in Hindi, doesn't make an impact at all.
#
I am dismissed. But if I say the same thing
#
in English, I am heard and
#
applauded. Stop, quote, and
#
this is really a two-part question.
#
place value judgments on languages.
#
in one of your interviews, you've spoken about how
#
for a certain part into
#
adulthood, till perhaps you started doing theatre,
#
the literature you were reading was all English.
#
And in my case, particularly,
#
I had a deplorable, snobbish attitude
#
towards, you know, local
#
content and I would consume everything in English
#
and I would think western cinema is superior
#
and etc, etc. And later,
#
of course, thankfully, I kind of changed my views
#
and all of those things and realized I was so wrong.
#
one, that it's about the hierarchy
#
of languages and how does one then
#
get past that. And the second
#
gherai with which you look at language,
#
you know, the granularity with which you examine
#
every word and every phrase and all of that.
#
have there been layers falling
#
off in front of you all the time? Because not
#
just caste, not just gender, there is so much politics
#
embedded in the language that you
#
use and the, you know, the things
#
that you say. Like, Chandrabhanji will always
#
shake hands and say hello. He will never do
#
namaste because he says even that has a connotation
#
of, you know, superior, inferior
#
what are sort of your thoughts on this?
#
Because I find it fascinating that
#
language not only conveys
#
of the proximate thing that you're trying to say,
#
but embedded within the words
#
that you choose to use without knowing
#
Absolutely. I mean, it's the
#
what Chandrabhanji is saying is the intersectionality
#
English and people kind of
#
suddenly pay more attention, it's
#
a colonial legacy. It's because Gora
#
Sahab was the repository of
#
know-all post-renaissance
#
they were able to, through
#
their mercantile adventures,
#
you know, come over to rule the world.
#
legacy is still there, is that the
#
very western outfits, we speak
#
English, there is suddenly
#
this more acceptability in our society
#
that, okay, this is a civilized person,
#
this is a more cultured person, this is a more
#
knowledgeable person, which has been
#
taken away from the pandits
#
and the jnanis and the gurus and the ustads,
#
which were far more knowledgeable in the indigenous
#
set-up that we had, people who were coming
#
out of, you know, barchalas and madrasas
#
understanding of Sanskrit and Urdu
#
and Hindi and Farsi and
#
the indigenous languages, the bolis,
#
the muhavras, the poetry.
#
Somehow, because, you know,
#
this whole East India Company and
#
the later, you know, people like
#
Winston and John McCauley and
#
the British government's
#
to dehumanize the natives,
#
to dehumanize their culture, to
#
dehumanize anything that they have
#
it's all deeply embedded, as
#
the casteist slurs are deeply embedded, as
#
the racist slurs are deeply embedded, as the
#
religious connotations,
#
you know, slurs are deeply embedded.
#
These are deeply embedded, so much so
#
that after a certain while,
#
they become the norm. You don't even think
#
that generational shift now.
#
A lot of things that our parents are saying,
#
politically incorrect. Like, how can
#
you say that? They're not bad
#
or they're not ill-intended people,
#
but it's so normalized in their
#
world that they would say
#
it without thinking, and we are more cognizant
#
of that, and the generation after
#
us is even vokier than us,
#
and they would point out to
#
things that we say, which are politically
#
incorrect in today's age.
#
So I'm saying that that recognition
#
is slowly coming in, but it has also
#
been taken to the other side, where
#
there is extreme kind of vokiness,
#
where everything is becoming cancel culture.
#
again, the room for dialogue,
#
this difficult conversation of understanding
#
That space is kind of slowly going
#
again becoming either you're here
#
with me or you are with them,
#
and that us versus them, that polarization
#
what is in some sense was
#
good, is again become weaponized.
#
And again, that thing is not
#
really helping us having a conversation.
#
But what I'm trying to say is this that
#
Because that's the way we have created
#
A science class is an act of politics.
#
A culinary class is an act
#
A yoga class is an act of
#
A gym culture is an act of politics.
#
Eating in a restaurant is an act of politics.
#
Choosing what to dress as an act,
#
everything is an act of politics.
#
Because every time, every
#
time you pick on something,
#
There is a counterculture running, there is a statement that you are trying to make.
#
Now you have to figure out and you have to make yourself aware as to am I doing it inadvertently,
#
am I aware of it or I am just doing it without thinking, just thinking it's cool to do it.
#
And I think that's what is important.
#
What is important is eventually to disseminate knowledge.
#
You give people knowledge, teach them, make them aware, they will reach the result themselves.
#
But you don't give them knowledge in capsules.
#
Because that neem Hakim is a danger to life.
#
The half-knowledge Hakim is a danger to life.
#
So that is what is important.
#
When you kind of package things, this is what the influencer culture is.
#
When you package things, you make it in capsules and you make people believe that everything
#
is a bullet point and take it and consume it and your world will become better.
#
We need to kind of make sure that we are able to create that kind of atmosphere where willingness
#
to take new knowledge opens up, where curiosity is kind of initiated in people, where people
#
are willing to ask questions.
#
And I think then possibly we will move towards a higher plane in the sense that a plane where
#
there is more understanding, where there is more compassion, where there is more kindness,
#
where there is more quest for actually finding something out which would be beneficial to
#
or a simple, pure pursuit of knowledge, where understanding how things are the way they
#
are, why this thing is behaving in this way in nature.
#
It doesn't have to be goal-oriented, as you said at the beginning.
#
There doesn't need to be a payoff at the end of it.
#
It can be purely for the sake of what it is, of understanding simply what my station in
#
this world is or what our station in this universe is.
#
When that would start happening, a lot of these things, this counterculture, this slur,
#
this prejudices, this biases would start dropping out because people would start seeing that
#
these are kind of roadblocks.
#
These are these little, you know, bit of nails that you find on the road when you're driving
#
and you need to just take them off because it's just obstructing your path towards something
#
which is greater, which is better.
#
Every bullet point is a bullet.
#
Before we go in for our lunch break, I just remembered a great example of what I meant
#
of politics embedded in language and I got this from Shreina Bhattacharya in my episode
#
and she spoke about how, you know, women will often say,
#
and see the difference in the agency there, and it is so common for women to use that
#
and obviously, I'm sure listeners can think of counter-examples of elite women who have
#
and I'm getting married to them, but, you know, I thought if you just listen to language
#
closely that there's so much embedded in there which can be so instructive, but, you know,
#
let's have food for the stomach and then more food for thought on the other side.
#
Thank you so much, Amit.
#
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#
Welcome back to the Senandi Onsen, a sumptuous lunch has been consumed and you will note
#
I used passive voice, which Peggy Mohan, I remember, had once told me that the languages
#
to which passive voice is most natural are Marathi and Urdu for some reason.
#
And she spoke about some connection between the two.
#
And I found that really interesting because I had earlier observed in my years as a cricket
#
writer that there are some commentators and the examples I noted was Sanjay Manjrekar
#
and Rameez Raja, who speak backwards, who will say, beautiful shot has been hit to the
#
boundary by sort of Ganguly.
#
And the reason for that, of course, is in their native languages, that is exactly how
#
they would say that is a correct construction.
#
And then they would mentally translate it and it would come out like this.
#
I just found it so charming.
#
I mean, these guys are speaking backwards.
#
Let's kind of go back to talking about your childhood.
#
Tell me about what were the influences to you in terms of books and reading.
#
You've already mentioned that there was this mahal where there are many languages and you
#
are exposed to poetry and literature and all of that.
#
But tell me about how your view of the world began to form.
#
What were the big influences in that?
#
I think I was like most regular children in urban centers like us, public school.
#
And I remember when I was young, I had an uncle who used to work for penguins.
#
And there will be a lot of these rejected books because there'll be some printing error,
#
some page torn, some cover torn.
#
So they would get immediately rejected at the press.
#
And he would just pick one of those and especially the children book and he would come and he
#
And sometimes that error would be so small that you would hardly even notice it.
#
It would almost look like a normal new book to you from a bookstore.
#
But so that was a great advantage because soon I had a library.
#
He would get me those ladybird books and he would get all those penguin puffin children
#
range and they were published very lovely.
#
They were illustrated beautifully.
#
So it got me interested from a very young age in reading.
#
Then my dad, my uncles were great storytellers.
#
So we would always end up at night hearing especially from my dad and my uncle stories.
#
So very early on, I got interested.
#
The next shot I got at reading was when in our school in the Hindi section, we had the
#
Hindi short stories kind of given to us.
#
And suddenly I was reading Premchand stories and I was reading other writer stories and
#
I was quite fascinated by that world, those short stories that I was reading.
#
And then again, it was the usual growing up, Hardy Boys and Agatha Christie and Nancy Drew
#
and Indrajal comics and Chanda Mama and Champak and Amar Chitra Katha.
#
Our generation had no choice and that was the mainstream and it's now dead.
#
So I was reading all this stuff.
#
I think the real education in terms of opening to the literary world and that began when
#
And when I went to college, my friends, people I made friends, introduced me to some great
#
So suddenly, you know, at 18, 19, I'm reading Milan Kundera and I'm reading Marquez and
#
I'm reading Sol Bello and I'm reading Henry Miller and I'm reading Octavio Paz.
#
I'm reading all these great writers and a lot of it I was not able to comprehend because
#
the ideas that they were talking about, even in their fiction, a lot of things were beyond
#
But even then, there was so much meat in it, you know, so much blood got smeared to your
#
face that that lust for that literature increased.
#
And after that, I never returned to the Robert Little Looms and James Hadley Chasers of the
#
After that, when I got exposed at the age of 18, 19 to these writers, my search kind
#
One of them was also Salman Rushdie when I read The Midnight Sill in that age.
#
So that hunger kind of kept increasing.
#
And the other transformative era or age was when I went to Delhi School of Economics.
#
And there I was truly exposed to like really world-class ideas in the sense, the kind
#
of thinkers we had to read in our syllabus, you know, the kind of people we were interacting
#
We almost had an Ivy League faculty at that time, and not just in economics, in the sociology
#
department also, which was across.
#
And you had these interdepartmental seminars, you have, you know, André Beate coming in
#
and talking and Jeet Oberoi coming in and talking and Kaushik Basu is standing here
#
and talking and Menhal Dutta Chaudhary is saying something.
#
So you know, you were forever surrounded with these brains, you know, and saying things.
#
And that really opened a lot of stuff that my desire to read great literature and great
#
thinkers and great writers increased when I went to Delhi School of Economics.
#
And then the next turn obviously comes when I leave banking and become a theatre actor
#
and then I have to go back to Hindi and I have to go back to Urdu and I have to start
#
reading again writers in these languages.
#
That's like homecoming.
#
And suddenly you realize that what is this great world that you've been missing?
#
And one of the realizations came for me when I was performing.
#
And I realized that I was comfortable performing in Hindi and Urdu.
#
And I was for all my English education, for all my English training and reading literature
#
And it just didn't ring true to me when I performed in English, I felt it was too alien
#
I felt performing an English play was too alien to me, playing an English character
#
And the moment I was given an indigenous character, a moment I was doing a Hindi play, a Hindi
#
or Urdu language performance, it was like natural.
#
And slowly and slowly I started appreciating the power of knowing your own language and
#
performing in that language and playing characters from that language.
#
And that started appealing me more and more.
#
So much so that I'm not excited at the idea of playing an English speaking character.
#
I'm always excited playing an Urdu speaking or a Hindi speaking character.
#
You refer to this as discovering Hindi literature again as a homecoming.
#
And in a different place, you've cited Dom Mourez's poem, I'm here in a foreign land
#
building a bookshelf for myself.
#
And maybe that's your Ganguly.
#
You know, your language, your books, that is home.
#
Yes, I mean, I'll invite you to one of these days to my home and like your place, the most
#
obvious thing when you enter my house is books.
#
And that's all that you see everywhere, books, books, books.
#
And that's what I saw at my parents' house, books, books, books.
#
That's what I saw at my uncle's, my relatives' houses.
#
So for me, perhaps this is the only wealth I've inherited.
#
This is all that I know of.
#
These are the, it's like a very interesting conversation I was having with somebody.
#
And that person made a very apt observation that people don't want to part with what they
#
consider it as their wealth.
#
So those who think money is their wealth are not willing to part with that.
#
And they said for you, your wealth is your book.
#
That's why you keep telling people that you can read whatever you want, but you can't
#
take it from my bookshelf because that's your wealth.
#
And I thought that was so cool.
#
I never thought like that.
#
When it comes to money, I really don't think much about it.
#
I am very happy to dispense with my money, but when it comes to books, I'm very particular
#
I kind of come down heavily on people and say, no, sorry, you can click a picture, you
#
can go and buy it yourself, but I'm not lending this book to you.
#
And if you're reading on Kindle and all your books are in the cloud, then even that, I
#
mean, then there's no concept of giving away.
#
Everyone can get their own sort of digital copy.
#
I want to ask you next about the anxieties of identity.
#
Like on the one hand, you've spoken in the past about how you had to sort of grapple
#
with being an Indian and then with being a minority within that as a Muslim and then
#
being a minority within that as a Shia.
#
And then with whatever cosmopolitan identity you were building apart from that.
#
And that's one element of identity.
#
But I also find that all of us, when we reach adulthood, there are two simultaneous anxieties
#
And one is the anxiety of trying to fit in always what other people are thinking of us.
#
And we often like there is a great phrase in psychology, the looking glass self, where
#
we shape ourselves through what we see in the eyes of others.
#
And so that's one anxiety I want to ask you about that.
#
How much of you was being shaped or how many of your actions were being directed by the
#
anxiety to fit in and where does that take you?
#
And the second anxiety, in a sense, is the anxiety of finding oneself.
#
Like what the hell do I want to do?
#
And many people just fall into a groove and they're in that groove all their lives and
#
they never have that moment of self-reflection that is this really what they wanted to do
#
or et cetera, et cetera.
#
And in your case, it seems that, you know, that journey you took, you know, where you
#
do your BA and your MA in economics and you say, hey, I don't want to do a PhD.
#
So you do an MBA instead, then you join banking and then you start doing theatre in the evenings.
#
And then one day you say, forget it, I'm giving this up, you know.
#
And so to me, that seems not what is interesting there is not the exterior event so much.
#
But what your interior life must have been, because all of that time, you're obviously
#
figuring out what you love doing, who you are, what do you want, what do you not want.
#
So take me a bit through that process of understanding yourself and shaping yourself.
#
Yeah, it's like one of the things when people ask me in the press interview as to what made
#
you leave your banking job and become an actor.
#
And I said, one thing which one understanding that dawned on me at that time was that this
#
What I want, I don't know.
#
But I certainly know that this is the career, this is a life that I don't want.
#
I said that was very clear to me when I resigned from the bank.
#
I wanted to be an actor, but I was very vague about it.
#
In my family, nobody has been in acting or in this industry.
#
Nobody had any clue how to go about it.
#
So there was absolutely no role model in that sense to look at that, you know, I can go
#
to this person, I can ask this person, I really had no idea how to do it.
#
And I wanted to be an actor, but I didn't have aspiration at that time to be a cinema
#
I would be a stage actor.
#
In fact, when I resigned, my dream was more because I've been doing theater for two,
#
three years by that time, part time.
#
So my dream was more to open a repertory company, a theater company of my own and maybe just
#
create plays and maybe just travel the world with my plays and perform everywhere.
#
And that's really what I thought at that time was my dream, to have a repertory company
#
and to perform the plays that I want to perform and to travel the world with my plays.
#
And then and then as I proceeded with this career choice, at times not having a game
#
plan, at times not understanding how things are going to pan out, at times not realizing
#
that how much disadvantage I have not having a pedigree, not coming from an institute like
#
NSD or FDII, not really knowing that circle, not having the ears of the grapevine, how
#
much I'm at disadvantage.
#
But it was pure kind of, you know, sometimes when you when you don't know much, when you
#
know less, it also can be an advantage to you because you're not weighed down by the
#
knowledge of what is around you, you're not intimidated by what is around you, you just
#
like foolhardy like a blinkered horse, you know, run straight into the field without
#
realizing where are you heading into and who are who what what is the dynamics of this
#
place? Who all do you need to negotiate to kind of find a foot under the sun?
#
So I didn't have and then life started happening.
#
Things started happening. One thing led to the other.
#
One thing led to the other.
#
And after a certain point, I realized that this is a unique journey that I'm on.
#
And this is how it is panning out.
#
And one of the things that you were talking about in the question that you just asked
#
me, one of the things was the process of acting and storytelling.
#
And I thought and I think that a lot of these anxieties that you mentioned, I was able to
#
comprehend through the process of acting and storytelling.
#
One of the things that dawned over these years, and I think now after two and a half
#
decades doing theater, acting, storytelling, I feel I have a little bit of handle now on
#
I think I understand acting a little better now.
#
I understand storytelling a little better now.
#
I understand performance a little better now.
#
I don't think I have the full handle on it, but I think that now I do not come from the
#
I come from the place of slight insight into what I'm doing.
#
I have a little handle over things.
#
And this has come while trying to understand the process of storytelling and acting.
#
And one of the things was this thing of how you've been perceived by others.
#
This anxiety of how you've been perceived by others, the acceptance, the affirmation.
#
And when you're a performance artist, that acceptance and affirmation, in fact, becomes
#
slightly more exaggerated than for a normal person because you are putting yourself out
#
for display, for other people to see you.
#
And for the longest time, I felt that I was not able to understand the process of storytelling.
#
I was too self-conscious.
#
When it's like the moment you turn on the camera, people become different than what
#
I felt for the longest time, I was too self-conscious.
#
I do not belong to this current generation who are so comfortable with camera because
#
when they were born, the cell phones were already around, memes and videos were already
#
We were born in an age where it was a privilege to have a camera.
#
It was a privilege to even get a photograph clicked, forget about video or film, just
#
to have a photograph clicked because not everybody had a camera.
#
And sometimes you'll have to either go to a studio or hire a photographer and probably
#
it'll be some family wedding or something where you'll probably have your pictures
#
Otherwise, on a normal day-to-day basis, it was very difficult to have pictures.
#
So it took me a while to understand that how our behavior is altering when camera comes
#
in front of us, how we become self-conscious, and it took a lot of work to peel that layer
#
of self-consciousness, of becoming comfortable with camera, of becoming comfortable with
#
how the world is perceiving you, of becoming comfortable with how not to fit in and yet
#
be functional, to become comfortable with.
#
It does not matter what others think.
#
You have to do this job at hand, which is to portray a character or to tell a story.
#
And it requires an element of this anxiety to be taken away from you because otherwise
#
you will be so entrapped by that anxiety that you will not be able to perform, that you
#
will not be able to tell the story, that you will not be able to comprehend the moment
#
the character is living in and how to bring that moment out in front of the audience.
#
Because if I'm forever aware, and that is what happens when our emotions are getting
#
triggered inside, and if we are not self-conscious in that moment, then we are in some sense
#
true in representing those emotions.
#
People are in private settings and there was that lovely line you said, private truth,
#
So what is it that when we are in our private moment, when we know that we can express what
#
we can express without any repercussion happening, without people judging, and we show our true
#
colors, where people are having these locker room conversations or closed door conversations,
#
and they know they can say things and get away.
#
That is a more true representation of who they are because in that moment they're not
#
And how can I portray that self-consciousness publicly, on screen, or on stage unless I
#
get rid of my own self-consciousness.
#
So in order to portray the character's lack of self-consciousness, I need to get rid of
#
my own self-consciousness as an actor.
#
I need to get rid of my own self-consciousness as a storyteller because unless I do not do
#
that, I will not be able to pull you into the story.
#
If I'm forever obsessed with how I'm looking, how I'm performing, will I be accepted or
#
not, then my focus is going away from the content that I'm providing.
#
My focus is going away from the dialogue that I'm speaking.
#
And that is very important.
#
And it takes, it's very difficult.
#
It is, it takes a lot of practice, introspection, thinking.
#
So like one of the things I'll tell you, I feel cringe when I watch my own performances
#
because I can suddenly see what are the glaring mistakes that I'm making, which maybe other
#
people may not see it or they may think it's great.
#
But when I see, so every time a video of my performance drops in or a movie of my drops
#
I don't know what, you know, what will be there.
#
So I quietly, whenever there's a private screening or there's a premiere screaming,
#
screening, or I watch it quietly and my reactions are only two.
#
I'm doing shit job or this is okay.
#
I've not done a bad job, but I've seldom come out feeling I'm thrilled with what I've
#
done, you know, so because all the time when I'm analyzing my own performance, you know,
#
when I watch a video of my own performance or when I watch a film of my own, I am forever,
#
someone from the outside may not know, but I know my moments of vulnerability and I know
#
my moments of self-consciousness and I know my anxieties.
#
I know what are the anxieties and how they are functioning.
#
And the truth about performance is that the moment to become self-conscious,
#
it rings a fake note and the audience is able to judge that.
#
Audience is very smart and they are immediately able to understand this is.
#
So no matter how much you, how good your craft is that you're able to fake it, but
#
there is an element of honesty, a truthfulness, an element of,
#
I don't know what honesty and truthfulness are.
#
Actually, these are abstract terms and we don't, everybody's, it's absolute.
#
It changes what is truthful to you is not truthful to the other person.
#
But the element of self-consciousness, am I putting on an act or am I actually
#
doing what I'm doing in this moment?
#
That for me becomes a difference.
#
So when I'm doing a gesture on screen, when I'm looking this way, when I'm doing that,
#
and it's very difficult to, to delineate these things, it might be natural.
#
It might be staged, which one is true.
#
So I'm very, very particular about finding the organicness of what the performance is
#
and trying to bring in that without self-consciousness.
#
And that's why I'm very critical of whatever I'm doing.
#
And, and that has kind of made me also look at human psychology,
#
also look at our own personal anxieties,
#
also look at the way we conduct ourselves in real lives is that the anxiety of being accepted,
#
the anxiety of being acknowledged, the anxiety of being, of fitting in, the anxiety of,
#
of self-doubt and removing that self-doubt, the anxiety of,
#
And that is the greatest anxiety that we all have.
#
Will we be, will we become irrelevant?
#
And, and that's the reason why a lot of time our actions are really not about grabbing power.
#
A lot of time our actions are about grabbing relevance.
#
As we don't, that is the greatest fear everybody has to turn to become irrelevant
#
and to become irrelevant in their own lifetime.
#
Isn't it a fear that no one should have because it is outward facing.
#
It is about what other people think of you because relevance after all is,
#
Like are you with it at the moment?
#
Whereas I would imagine every artist you try to get beyond.
#
Because relevance is tied to a lot of other benefits that you get.
#
No, no, I agree that in a practical, rational way, you want to be relevant.
#
But to grow as an artist, do you want to be relevant?
#
Yeah. I mean, I mean the, the, that it's again a double-edged sword in the sense that,
#
in some sense to find your unique voice and in some sense to find something which is peculiar
#
to you. You need to be, you need to be, you need to, to, to, to disregard a lot of stuff
#
and, and really not be bothered because sometimes by not being relevant,
#
you will find the relevance. By being irrelevant, you would find the relevance.
#
But by being irrelevant, you might also become irrelevant.
#
You know, so it is, it is a very kind of a tightrope walk and, and it doesn't come easy
#
because the point is this that any world, forget about the regular nine to five job
#
world that we're talking about, any world, it, there is a hierarchy and there is a power
#
structure and there, there is the, the dynamism of that power structure.
#
And everybody, whenever, whichever, whether it's the art field, whether it's the film industry,
#
whether it's the theater industry, whether it's the music industry, you know that more
#
benefits would accrue to you if you are relevant, if you are the trend, if you are the person in
#
fad, if you are acknowledged as this great artist and that's when things will happen for you.
#
And everybody is scared because in some sense, it's open to all. Today, great actors are coming
#
from everywhere. You know, it's not just a privilege of bunch of people from Bandra or from
#
South Bombay, but you have now because of the OTT, because of YouTube, because of videos opening up,
#
you have people coming from all sorts of life and they're brilliant actors and a lot of them
#
are making a mark for themselves and a lot of them are climbing up quickly and becoming, so
#
there is no guarantee that if you have become big in one, two, three projects,
#
then that would be forever. In olden times, there was at least some kind of assurance that,
#
you know, if you've reached a certain mark, if you're living in the age of 60s or 70s or 80s,
#
then if you reach a certain mark, then there would be a consistency of work that would accrue
#
to you for over next one, two, three decades. That's not there now. You may even do one great
#
web series, two great web series, two great films, and yet you go out to work because it's churning
#
so fast because so much is happening. So the fear of being irrelevant is very high. And
#
paradoxically, you need to conquer that fear to be relevant, to keep finding newer things
#
in your own work. Because if I'm forever besieged with this fear of irrelevance,
#
then I will not be able to function. So I will have to disregard the fear of irrelevance and I
#
need to kind of keep exploring to the extent where I am flirting with irrelevance. And that's
#
possibly something new will come out. That's where something cutting edge will come out.
#
And all of these things, I kind of figured out over these two decades of thinking about
#
performance, thinking about acting. So everybody wants big work, better work, big money.
#
I also want all that, but I've not hankered for it. I have kind of went on a path which
#
where I would rather do stuff which will be more meaningful for me, which will help me find the
#
artist that I'm in. But rather than do that, rather than just pick work, which is just
#
meaningless or just gets me money. Because I've seen that people who've done that have been
#
reduced to irrelevance because they exposed themselves too early and they just went for
#
whatever came their way. And I did not do that. And I'm pretty grateful for that. I don't know
#
what will happen in future. I don't know where will this lead me. But at least I have the
#
satisfaction at this moment that it has allowed me to explore and figure out my artistic temperament
#
and my way of doing work without this constant fear of I need to earn money and I need to be
#
relevant and I need to be seen and I need to be imprinting myself in other people's head.
#
And the good part about our industry is that you can't really be a con man for long. You
#
can't cheat for long. If you're good, people would notice you irrespective of whether somebody
#
wants you on screen or not. And if you're not good, no matter how much backing support you have,
#
it's not really going to help you. Yeah. My question about relevance was not so much
#
in terms of acting where I guess one is dependent on being relevant in a sense. So I get the fear
#
but about the arts and you put it very well when you said that to be relevant, we have to get past
#
the fear of relevance. Like the way I would think of it is if your objective as an artist is to be
#
relevant, you will perhaps chase the lowest common denominator or be something you're not and not be
#
true to yourself and not get there. But if you get past that fear, then you can realize yourself as
#
an artist, which automatically makes you relevant. So I guess that would be, I have two questions I
#
want to ask about acting, you know, double clicking on things that you mentioned. But before that, a
#
brief anecdote, you spoke about how you find fault with every performance of yours and that took me
#
by surprise. But I remember this anecdote about the musician Rubinstein, where he once said that
#
if I don't practice for one day, I notice. If I don't practice for two days, the critic notices.
#
If I don't practice for three days, the audience notices. Wow, that's a great quote. Yeah. And I
#
thought like, yeah, so you are, I guess in the Rubinstein and one day kind of phase or zero days
#
kind of phase. So one of the things I want to double click on and which made me curious is when
#
you spoke about the fact that you didn't have formal training, like a lot of your colleagues,
#
they would have been from NSD or FTI or whatever, formally trained and whatever. And you said that
#
that might even have been an advantage. And I want to sort of ask you to elaborate on that sort of
#
trade off between training and intuition, and whether the training can sometimes get in the
#
way by making you think along fixed grooves, whereas your intuition sort of leaves you open.
#
Like in this book called Theatre of Independence by Aparna Dharmadkar, she quotes one of your
#
mentors Habib Tanvir as saying that the true theatre of the people exists only in the villages.
#
Right. And one of the ways I interpreted that was the reason for that is that in the villages,
#
they don't have the baggage of prior conditioning of what theatre would be. And you can go back to
#
a more primal sense of the role that storytelling plays in your life and all of that. And I don't
#
know if that is related to the question about training versus intuition, you know, not carrying
#
the baggage of the training or not even the baggage, but just the set formats along which
#
you might think. So can you elaborate on that for me? I think what came handy
#
was this oral literacy and this exposure to this rich literary life in my young age.
#
Because I think when I started acting, both in theatre and in cinema, the fact that I'd read so
#
much literature, the fact that I'd read so much poetry, the fact that I was exposed to this kind
#
of a multilingual world, both in terms of poetry, literature, people, personalities,
#
it kind of gave me a little edge. Because at the end of the day, as an actor, I realized that
#
my primary job is to engage with human psyche. My primary job is to really understand
#
the human characters that I'm playing. And what better place to learn that than literature?
#
Because what a lifetime of experience can teach me, someone like Mantu and Isma Chokta,
#
I can write that in three pages, which is 15 minutes of reading. In 15 minutes of reading,
#
I can get Sol Bellow to say to me what I cannot say in 55 years of my life, 50 years of my life.
#
Like 50 books on the partition cannot tell you what Toba takes in Canada.
#
So I realized what advantage it put me in reading all that great literature before I actually
#
started acting out. And that I've held on to. I've not stopped reading. I try both in terms of
#
secondary access to knowledge, which is feeding other people, and primary access of really
#
meeting people, going out, traveling, interacting with whoever I can. Because
#
really my workshop is this. My workshop is human beings. My workshop is human psyche,
#
understanding human psyche, understanding collective psyche, understanding social psyche,
#
understanding why we behave in whichever way we behave, what are our triggers.
#
The only difference between an actor and between a regular person is this, that
#
for you the triggers are organic, for me the triggers are crafted. Because I have to portray,
#
which is not really happening to me, but make you believe that this is happening to me,
#
so my triggers are crafted. Whereas for you, your triggers will be organic.
#
So I'm saying that that advantage, I think this intuition thing that you say,
#
I think came primarily the exposure to a very literary circle society at a very young age.
#
The other thing is that over the years, I realized one more thing. I realized that
#
knowledge is not necessarily articulation and intellectual presentation.
#
I read a lot of stuff, but I don't remember. I can't quote verbatim. I don't really say,
#
this writer wrote, said this, and this great guy said this, and these are the exact quotes.
#
So I, for the longest time, thought, shit, I'm like a sieve. I just read and everything just
#
goes out, and I am not able to retain anything. I have this constant fear of imposter syndrome.
#
I have this constant fear that people generally perceive that I know a lot and I've read a lot,
#
but I don't remember anything to prove that point. I can't quote verbatim things. How will
#
this ever be translated that, yes, I actually have read a lot and I actually know a lot,
#
but then I realized that a lot of it seeps through you and gets retained as emotional
#
intelligence. And that is what I really need as an actor, this emotional intelligence.
#
What is not important as to, I can quote Mantua, or I can quote Ghalib, or I can quote
#
Freud, and I can quote T.S. Eliot, but what is important is that what I gained from there,
#
it has seeped through, and when it seeps through, it kind of gets retained as some kind of a
#
non-articulated intelligence, as some kind of emotional intelligence, and that gives me
#
great insight when I'm performing. In terms of presenting a moment, that's where that insight
#
comes in, and that gives me the advantage. And then I started appreciating this emotional
#
intelligence a lot more than actual articulated, obvious intellectual intelligence. Whether there's
#
a term like that or not, I don't know, but where it's just a mind thingy, where it's just a brain
#
thingy, you write in so many words, and you quote, and you write very well, and you quote a lot of
#
stuff, and it's very impressive, where intelligence can come out in a non-articulated way. And I
#
thought that is really where the strength as an actor lies, where you are able to assimilate and
#
present that in your bodily form, in the sense that I've forgotten this Hollywood critic who
#
analyzed 60 best performances, Oscar-winning performances from 1960 to 2020, and then he
#
wrote a long-form article on his analysis of the performances, and he said that I saw some great
#
performances over 60 years. But the one unique thing which I noticed was the presence of these
#
actors, that even when they were not saying a dialogue, even when they were in the background,
#
one could not take their eyes off from these actors. Their presence was so strong. They
#
embodied the character so deeply that you got so invested in that character that you would look
#
at that character. And I thought about this analysis, and I realized that this is what
#
emotional intelligence is, where you bring the performance in your body, where it is not so much
#
about the dialogue that you're speaking, but it becomes about being the character,
#
and it becomes about so convincingly being the character that as an audience, I get invested in
#
that character, and I get invested in the story that that character is showing to me, and I start
#
following, even if the character is not speaking a word, even if the character is mute, even if the
#
character is mute, even if the character is in the background. But that whole emotional intelligence
#
has been distilled into a performance which is non-verbally speaking to me. And a lot of our
#
assimilation of knowledge, of insight, of understanding in the world is through the
#
non-verbal part of it. I mean, it's not just what we read as words and what we hear as words,
#
but also what we're seeing, what we're touching, what we're tasting, what we're experiencing,
#
is also adding to our knowledge. And I think that is a significantly huge part of our knowledge,
#
which we kind of at times disregard because we have raised language and words to a very sacred
#
level, at a very sacrosanct level, so that if the knowledge is not getting distilled through
#
the verbal part of it, through the knowledge, through the articulated part of it, then perhaps
#
it's not so much of a knowledge. But then that's not true. I mean, if you look at ancient cultures,
#
there is like one of the things that I heard about tsunami that in Andaman, they were told
#
by their ancestors that if you see the sea receding far, then just climb up to top places.
#
And it was an understanding that their ancestors got that if the sea has receded far, then a huge
#
wave is coming towards you. There will be a repercussion. So the knowledge with these people
#
was that if you see the sea receding far, just climb up to higher places and do not waste time.
#
So I'm saying that that kind of intelligence, which is not articulated, which is felt,
#
which is understood, which you just by hearing or by seeing or by experiencing it.
#
And I think that became very important for me. And I started appreciating that over the period,
#
that this is something that I must bring in. Because at the end of the day,
#
dialogue is a very limited part of my performance. The larger part of the performance is actually
#
the nonverbal part of it. And unless I do not have the sensitivity or the capability
#
to grasp things and turn it into a nonverbal way, this intelligence, I will not be able to portray it.
#
I'm reading this great book called How Music Works by David Byrne of the Talking Heads.
#
It's a masterpiece, one of the best books I've read in years. And in that book,
#
all these five, six things that you've mentioned to me so far, just send it to me,
#
because I want to read them immediately. Sooner than you think.
#
And it made me think deeply about something that I've been thinking about a lot in the
#
context of other things I do, which is the importance of form. And when he writes about
#
the evolution of music in that, he talks about how the earliest kind of music was percussion
#
based music, because you're performing in the open, probably for the tribe, you're gathering them as
#
percussion based music that travels the best. But percussion based music doesn't always work
#
everywhere. If you're performing in a large concert hall, for example, the way European concert
#
halls are designed, percussion based music simply would not work acoustically. And therefore,
#
you have symphonies which are a particular way. And you can't have complex, dense interplay of
#
sounds in those halls, either because of the way that it would echo or reverb or whatever.
#
And that kind of complex interplay of sounds comes perhaps later in jazz clubs and little rock
#
clubs, which are full of people and full of furniture and all of that. And the music is
#
bouncing off everything. And you have that separation of tones and notes and all of that.
#
And the book is full of ways in which music sort of is shaped by the forms that it has to inhabit,
#
whether a place where it's being performed and so on and so forth. And the same, in a sense,
#
is true of acting theater, cinema. Like I would imagine that if you are a performer in a large
#
amphitheater for a lot of people, the key thing is projection. Everybody has to be able to hear
#
you. So you're going to have to project yourself in a particular way. Your stage presence has to
#
be like that. Whereas if you are acting, say, in a modern made for television European art film,
#
you know, the experience is much more intimate. Projection is a bug, not a feature, you know,
#
and so on and so forth. Like another interesting way in which form comes into play is in the visual
#
medium. And I often like to give this example. If you're watching a film in a theater, there's
#
a certain distance between you and the screen. And there's a similar distance often between the
#
camera and the actor. So you have your grand westerns and your car chase scenes and all of
#
that. If it's a television, it's a couple of meters and a similar distance between the camera
#
and the actors of Friends, Seinfeld. If it's YouTube, it could be you just see somebody's
#
face because your laptop also is that much away. And that's perhaps the most intimate. I mean,
#
I argued at the most intimate medium possible is the podcast because it's a voice in your head.
#
I want you to, you know, talk about this in the context of what it means for acting,
#
because you've spoken even in the past about the emergence school of acting,
#
about being a character, being a character so much that nobody notices the actor.
#
You know, and I must say, whenever I've seen any of your films, I've seen you in Newton or
#
blood or whatever. After the first moment of recognition, I forget it's you,
#
you know, and that totally works. But it seems to me that that is not all you have to do,
#
inhabit the character. You have to inhabit a character in a different way, depending on
#
whether it is an open air theater, whether it is a small intimate theater. If you are acting for
#
camera, it is completely different. So take me through all of these, that how does the
#
authenticity of you being the character and the self-consciousness being absent,
#
how does that authenticity then translate into all of these? What are the learnings you've had?
#
What's the journey you've made in growing as an actor within these
#
different fields while keeping true to what you call, you know, the emergence school?
#
So, you know, at the end of the day, the brass tacks is this, that you want
#
a certain story to reach to your audience. That's the brass tacks. So my first focus or my first
#
attention to detail is that I want this story to reach that audience.
#
Now, what happens is that once we've understood that, now we have to understand as to what is
#
the medium that we are using. Sometimes it's a stage, sometimes it's an intimate theater,
#
sometimes it's a proscenium, sometimes it's a thrust stage, sometimes it's an open air,
#
sometimes it's a promenade theater. So each time your surrounding is changing,
#
it is impacting the medium, the process of sending your story across to your audience.
#
And the same analogy will go to whether you're making a grand panoramic western,
#
or you're making an intimate love story, or you're making a podcast. So it is very important that
#
A, we understand the story that we want to send across, B, how we want to send that story across.
#
If we do not have the understanding of these two, then we might have a great story, but it may fall.
#
I mean, you can't make somebody sip wine from a barrel. You will have to make them sip it from a
#
wine glass. So you may have a great wine, but you can't just place a barrel in front of somebody
#
and say, have the wine. So it is also important how you present it. It is also important what
#
is the form that you're using to present that. And that form enhances your story. That's why
#
you're using that form. What can be said in op-ed cannot be perhaps said in a fiction story.
#
What can be said in a fiction story cannot be said in an op-ed. What can be said as a lecture
#
cannot be said in writing. What can be said in writing cannot be said as an anecdote.
#
So the moment the form is changing, the messaging, the story is also changing.
#
How the same messaging can go in different ways when it's an anecdote, when it's a short story,
#
when it's a long form novel, when it's a cinema, when it's an OTT series, when it's a podcast.
#
It all, this all is impacting the way your story is being told. So it becomes important to understand
#
that. Once you have an understanding of the story you want to send across, you have an understanding
#
of the form that you want to send across, then it is about you, the performer, the teller. What are
#
your vulnerable parts? What are your strengths? How do you play to them? No. So this understanding
#
of who you are and what you can do better and what you can't do good has to be factored in
#
when you're telling the story because otherwise if you're not doing that you may have the form
#
correct and you may have the story correct but the teller of the story is not using her or his
#
strength can also be detrimental to the telling of the story. Then once you have the understanding
#
of these three things, the next you need to understand who you're telling the story.
#
What is your audience? Who are these people? So unless you don't know who your audience is
#
because they are the one who are going to receive it, you might have a, this is the usual example I
#
give, that in two places a person can say his own thing without caring about the audience.
#
One is satsang and the other is a government function. Because in satsang you have to sit with your mind set,
#
you have made such a big mess of religious imposition that you have kept it from above,
#
that this is coming from above, it is divine. You have made such a mess of divinity that
#
a person feels so small in himself, he has to sit and listen to it in satsang.
#
And the same thing is authority, that this is government, this is a pageant, this fan,
#
this whole trumpet is playing and this whole function is taking place and this is the whole
#
protocol. So now you have to sit there with your mind set and you have to take the whole
#
three hour ceremony. But everywhere else you have to factor your audience, you can't disregard your
#
audience. So then understanding who my audience is, what is going to work with them, what is it
#
that is going to appeal them. I may have a great story, I may have the medium correct, I know my
#
own strength but I don't know who am I talking to. If I am talking to a bunch of youngsters I need to
#
present the story differently, I can't present them very complex intellectual ideas. So that
#
is very important. And once you have all these four things, the final thing is the larger world
#
that you are operating in. Now how you are operating in the larger world is your politics.
#
If I am telling you a story right now and I am disregarding that there is Gaza happening right
#
now or there is climate change happening right now, either this in itself is my politics that
#
I want to be insular and in the bubble or I am ignorant. But it cannot be free of any politics.
#
It can never be free of any politics. So if your neighbor's house is burning and you keep pretending
#
and having a great dinner in your own home, then it is your politics or you are so ignorant that
#
you don't know that your house is going to get burned too very soon. But somewhere this has to
#
reflect in the storytelling that you are doing. Somewhere these things will seep in because you
#
cannot, it is like being a coal in a pit and you are complaining about fire being very high,
#
the temperature being very high, something like that. So it is very important that you are
#
cognizant of all these things. And that is when the whole packaging, the whole messaging starts
#
coming through and it starts reaching out to your audience. So it is not just about having a great
#
story. It is about looking at all these elements and getting all these elements right before you
#
can be kind of sure that your story reaches out to your audiences. Can you give me an example of how
#
something, maybe a snippet of a scene or a scene or a story could be presented differently
#
depending on the medium or the form or the audience, you know, just to make it more concrete
#
and vivid for us? Like supposedly if I have to play a scene on stage and I have to play a scene
#
and on camera, the playing of that scene would change. Now when I am playing it on stage,
#
the first thing is the way the audience is perceiving the scene and it is unidimensional
#
in the sense it is only in one direction they are looking and only in one direction the performance
#
is coming to them unless they are sitting on a revolving stage or something like that or the
#
stage in itself is revolving. Normally it is static. So the physicality of it is unidimensional.
#
It is only coming this way to me, frontal. Now there is also a physical distance between me and
#
the audience. So there has to be a projection. So a lot of things go in more exaggerated forms
#
in terms of the body language, in terms of the voice and you have to find that balance that you
#
are louder than what a natural person would be in a natural setting and yet that loudness seems very
#
natural to what is happening on stage. So you have to calibrate your performance to a level where
#
you are louder in terms of your physical gestures, in terms of your voice, yet at the same time
#
maintaining the integrity of the emotion that you are playing and it should not seem fake or it
#
should not seem unnatural to the audience that is watching. The moment you go on screen, you have
#
to understand that what is the edit going to be. Now suddenly you have different perspectives.
#
You have a wide perspective, you have a mid-shot perspective, you have over the shoulder perspective,
#
you have over the shoulder perspective here. So literally why are you doing this cutting?
#
This cutting is happening because you want to take your audience in every zone, in every plane that
#
you can, which cannot be achieved when you are on stage. There the plane is there in front.
#
That is the only plane. But with the use of editing, I am able to bring my audience in a
#
different plane. So you are standing behind the shoulder of this actor, then suddenly you are
#
standing behind the shoulder of this character, then slowly you pull out and you are having a
#
vantage view and you are seeing both the actors in the frame. So I am doing this because I want
#
to give a multi-plane kind of an experience to my audience. Now when I am giving a multi-plane kind
#
of an experience to the audience, the performance kind of changes because sometimes you are far,
#
so the camera is viewing you from far. So perhaps you could be a little louder where the performance
#
is not so much in your face, but the performance is more in your body because it is a wide shot.
#
So you are being seen from far. So your performance in your body becomes louder and it is not so much
#
what is happening on your face. But the moment the camera cuts and comes to close up, then the
#
performance comes in your face because now they are watching your full-blooded face on screen.
#
So there again, calibrating the performance becomes important. How do I act in a wide shot
#
and how do I act in a mid shot and how do I act in a close up? And what my performance will be
#
in a wide shot scene would be different than what my performance would be in close up, though they
#
both will be the same scene. I am saying the same dialogue. It is the same scene playing out,
#
but when the camera is wide, my performance is more in my body because you are watching my body.
#
When the camera is close, it is not so much of my body and my performance comes into this,
#
so that you are watching. But then I have to make sure that what I am showing here
#
and what I am showing here are consistent, so that when you are cutting from wide to close,
#
you do not feel it is a fake performance. You should be able to feel that this is exactly what
#
is happening in the moment. What you saw a person from far and when you come close,
#
you find the same expression in the person. It is the same intensity that you find in the person.
#
So it is like you are standing at the edge of the road and you see a mob fighting and you see two
#
people fighting. You see them fighting from far, but when you come closer to disentangle them,
#
the expressions on their faces are also of livid anger, which is very true to what you
#
experienced when you were standing far and when you decided to go and disentangle them.
#
That is again the same thing which is happening as an actor. When the audience is watching a
#
wide shot, they are basically watching me from far. Now when they have come close and watching
#
a close-up, the audience has possibly come close to disentangle. So what they are seeing from far
#
and what they are seeing close should be consistent. That is how you kind of calibrate it.
#
This is quite mind-blowing because it was obvious to me that you act differently for the stage and
#
for the screen, but what you are describing that even for a wide shot and a close-up,
#
you have to act differently. It makes so much sense. Now that you say it, it seems obvious,
#
but I hadn't thought of it before this. I always tell my writing students that you have to keep
#
your reader in mind when you write, but the distinction to be drawn is that you have to
#
keep them in mind in terms of the form that you used to reach them. In terms of the content,
#
you must never compromise. Your content is only about you. Be true to yourself. Be true
#
to what you want to say, but in terms of the form, get to them in the form that will speak
#
to them most effectively. An example I give of this is in fact a theatre person in Shakespeare.
#
The point being that Shakespeare A, even though some of his language seems archaic today,
#
wrote in essentially the everyman's language of the time. All those words were in common usage
#
and the rhythms he used for his language were the rhythms in which we speak. Iambic Pentameter being
#
one example of that, but that is the way normal people speak. Let's go for a cup of coffee.
#
Iambic and that's the way normal people speak and nothing fancy there at all. That's exactly
#
what Shakespeare would have done. You've spoken about, again, the same thing, the importance of
#
reaching your audience and keeping the audience in mind, but one interesting thing that I notice
#
in a lot of work that I see in Rigta and so on is that often a lot of the words are words that I
#
don't understand are not in common usage and the performer is aware of that. Very often while
#
performing you will explain words as you go along. There is this absolutely delightful interview of
#
yours by Irfan Saab where he does an extremely user-friendly thing that whenever you use a
#
complicated Urdu word he puts an English translation on the screen, which is very thoughtful and
#
just a lovely conversation. How does one then reconcile that? Because at one level,
#
to me it's a trade-off between being authentic and being accessible. At one level you are being
#
authentic to the language and to the flavors that it carries and you can't be disloyal to that.
#
At another level you want to reach the audience and you want to make sense to them and so on.
#
So how have you thought about this over time and reconciled this?
#
This is something that I've been grappling right from the start because when I started off,
#
especially with Dastan, my thing was that this is a great piece of art and I'm presenting it
#
and if I dilute it then I'm not kind of being true in presenting what I'm presenting and the
#
example that I used to give was that if you have a Khayal singer you can't really request a pop song
#
from that person. If you have a jazz purist you can't really request the jazz purist to play
#
a rock number or something. But then over a period of time I also started realizing
#
that it is my responsibility to be accessible as a performer because at the end of the day
#
the audience is invested in me. They've taken out not just their financial investment but also
#
their emotional, their time, they've come and they've come to watch the performance and it is
#
slightly unfair to kind of expect them to know everything and unfortunately we don't live in
#
that kind of a milieu where it's not like Ramlila which has a continuous tradition. So even if you
#
go on the seventh day and you see Laxmanji fainted on the stage, you don't go around asking what's
#
wrong with this man? Why is he fainted? You know exactly when you're entering the story,
#
what point of the story you've entered. You go and you see, oh okay, Laxmanji has fainted,
#
I've reached this stage. Because the milieu still exists, this is a continuous milieu,
#
so there is no need for explanation. I'm doing stuff where the milieu has been disrupted.
#
That milieu is not there anymore. Those stories are not there anymore. That language is not being
#
spoken anymore. So I cannot play a purist and say this is Chaucer and that's how Chaucer was.
#
That's it. So you have to understand. You know if you don't understand then go and read you Milton
#
again. It's not my problem. But I can't do that with the audience. So I had to find a way of making
#
the stuff accessibility. In order to find that route of without compromising the performance
#
and yet being accessible, I found how we listen and how we get attracted to stories.
#
And I found that we don't like linear narrations. We like circular narrations. And it's the same
#
thing that I said to you in the morning. It's about first getting excited by this dense forest
#
and just running wild into it. And then finding yourself lost. And then again finding the trail
#
back. And the same thrill comes back that I have found the trail. So you wanted to get lost initially
#
but then in between you wanted to be found again. And then you again want to get
#
lost because that's the thrill. And then you again want to be found. And that's how narrations work.
#
So people don't like linear narrations. People like circular narrations. People like segues.
#
People like detours. And then people love when you come back to the same point.
#
And I found that in these segues I can bring in glossary. In this segue I can bring in
#
explanations. In this segue I can bring in accessibility. So there are portions when I'm
#
going pure into the language and then I break it. The tonality of it, the form of it, the mode of it.
#
And then I become conversational. And I crack an aside. I do a joke. I basically do
#
possibly what a stand-up would do. I would have a joke at the expense of the audience. I would have
#
a joke at my own expense. I would get into a gloss. I would tell an anecdote. I would recite
#
a couplet. And then I would come back into the story. And that keeps constant engagement because
#
one of my struggles forever has been how do I retain people's attention? How do I make sure
#
90 minutes, one hour, 20 minutes that I'm on stage? You should forget about your phones.
#
You should not even think about it. You should get so engrossed in this world that I'm creating
#
that when it gets over, then you realize you have a phone. You have a life outside. You have to
#
think about that. And I had to find ways of finding that engagement. That engagement did not come
#
just in one go or just in one performance. It took me two decades of performances
#
and engagement with audiences and performing again and again to find that kind of rhythm
#
where I know that how by breaking the monotony of voice, by breaking the monotony of content,
#
by segues, by detours, by sides, I can bring in both accessibility and yet not compromise on the
#
form that I have or the language that I have. And I think I have a little hang of it now.
#
I haven't mastered it because the kind of repository of knowledge that one should be as
#
a great dastan go, I don't have that. I forget things. I find that my brain is like a sieve,
#
but yet I'm retaining something and I'm understanding, I'm basically understanding
#
the listening habits of audiences. And the more I understand the listening habits of audiences,
#
the more I'm able to bring in a story and a presentation which would appeal to them.
#
And that would not come unless you practice listening yourself, which I did a lot. Which
#
brings me back to your anxiety question, I curved a lot of my impulses to talk about myself, to talk
#
about what my life is or talk about who I am when I'm in a gathering, when I'm in a place.
#
And I started making it more about listening, about being genuinely interested in people,
#
about being curious about people, about asking who they are, about what they are doing,
#
what their lives are. And the more I heard and listened with the actual intention of understanding,
#
the better my comprehension of understanding what people are. So by making people talk,
#
I understood better what they like listening. And slowly and slowly I worked around the telling
#
of the story in such a way that the engagement starts becoming more and more so that the audience
#
completely forget about their phones and about their lives outside and they get completely
#
engrossed in the story that's being told to them. So my next question is about another sort of
#
trade-off, which is exemplified by this beautiful story you told in a performance
#
which I watched on YouTube, I'll link that from the show notes as well,
#
where you speak about how Mahatma Gandhi once goes to a concert by Bare Gulam Ali Khan.
#
And after Bare Gulam Ali Khan has given the sublime performance, everybody applauds.
#
And then Gandhiji says to him that, you know, you were singing, I was in heaven,
#
but there was a clap and I came back to earth. You know, words to that effect.
#
And it seems to me that that's a great sort of metaphor for this classic trade-off that every
#
artist faces, that are you true to your art? Or, I mean, we are human, we crave the applause,
#
we want the validation also. And in a sense, that is what feeds us and keeps the art going also.
#
You know, as someone who's done theatre, who's done Das Sangoi, which initially
#
might have seemed to some people to be an impossibly inaccessible thing to do until
#
you actually did it and it got the sort of love and reward that it did. And then you've done film.
#
And so what do you feel about that trade-off? How does one think about that trade-off? Because
#
it is so easy even to, you know, it's easy for people to go down that direction, for example,
#
where they can rationalize making all kinds of compromises and then it's a race to the bottom.
#
I don't think I thought so deeply about those things. The only thing that I did think deeply
#
about was the applause part of it, because it's a very human instinct to crave for applause,
#
to crave for appreciation. And especially as an artist, when you are giving a public performance,
#
why are you giving a public performance? There is one innate desire to be applauded, to be
#
appreciated, to be given thumbs up for your performance. Yes, what you presented is something
#
that we value and that we really appreciate you for doing that. The understanding that I got
#
was this, that applause is like a byproduct. It is not the thing. So if you start believing that
#
this applause is the thing that you live for, then it's a fallacy that you're falling for.
#
And I give this example to my actors who work with me, that think of it as a beautiful bird
#
which has come and sat on your shoulder post-performance. So when people come and
#
praise you for your performance, they're basically praising that bird sitting on your shoulder.
#
The moment people walk off the theater, that bird flies off and you go back to who you are
#
being the normal person. So when you're out of that space and when you're walking back to your home
#
or to wherever you're going to, do not take that bird along with you because that bird is not there
#
anymore. So if you would expect people to behave in a particular fashion every time you are anywhere,
#
then that's a fallacy that you will fall for. And does that same bird also take the indifference
#
of people when a performance falls completely flat? Again, it holds two ways. So when you're
#
getting the big bats, do not take it personally because it is not personal. It is something that
#
they saw about the performance and they did not like it or they were critical of it or they were
#
not appreciative of it. Hear them out. Maybe there is a grain of truth in what they are saying.
#
You may not need to apply everything. You may not need to agree with everything,
#
but hear them out. Don't defend it immediately. Don't immediately give an answer. Even if you
#
know that that criticism is unfair, even if you don't agree with what is being said to you,
#
but just hear it out because it is a public performance. And what do you expect when you
#
publicly put out something? You would not get universal appreciation. There will be
#
people who are bound to dislike it and when they are bound to dislike it, you should be open to
#
them also. And whatever you feel is of value to you, you take it from there. See how you can use
#
it. But whatever you don't feel, you can disregard it. But it again gets me back to the question of
#
grace, is that you need to operate with grace, whether it's praise coming your way or whether
#
it's criticism coming your way. You should not be off your rocker when you are getting praise,
#
and similarly you should not be sliding down a rabbit hole when you are listening to criticism.
#
You should be just balanced enough, graceful enough to take both of them. Be appreciative.
#
People are appreciative. Be thankful to them. Be humble about it. Be kind to things that you did
#
you were able to pull off and people liked it. And just hold on to that feeling and then move on.
#
But don't make it the norm for you that every time people should be just thinking of you like
#
that. And I think that's when we start getting into narcissism. That's when we start becoming
#
delusional. That's when the ego starts taking over. That's when you start losing perspective.
#
And I think losing perspective is something that an artist must not afford. Because once you lose
#
perspective, when you become delusional, then it will start affecting everything that you're doing.
#
And also this kind of belief starts coming in that whatever I'm doing has to be accepted by everyone
#
because I am this great artist. Why? No. Nobody is obliged to take anything from you, no matter how
#
great an artist you are, no matter how great a thinker you are. Everything should be open to
#
question. Everything. My question was not so much about the anxiety for validation or the greet for
#
applause per se, but more about the trade-off between doing the kind of work that you want to
#
do and yet being commercial enough to thrive. Not that something commercial cannot be art,
#
and not that something artistic cannot be commercial, but there are moments where there
#
is a gray zone where you feel that there is a trade-off. For example, just in the context of
#
the podcast, the fact that I kept pumping the length up would sort of... A lot of conventional
#
minded people definitely did push back and say that, what the hell, we're not going to listen
#
to such long podcasts and all that. Now, it turns out that I got an enormous amount of love for it
#
and I feel completely validated and all of that. All of that happened eventually. But initially,
#
when I did it, my thinking was, I don't care. This is what I want to do. I'm going to do it.
#
I'm going to follow my heart. It's a labor of love. And if I don't find listeners now,
#
I'll find them 30 years later. I'm creating a repository. So slightly arrogant attitude also,
#
purest attitude. But I took it there saying, I don't care. Now, I'm lucky enough that it
#
really worked for me. But that choice was there. And I didn't want to enter the race to the bottom
#
where I say, okay, we'll do it for half an hour and we'll make six chapters in ten minutes. And I
#
didn't want to do that. I had a particular vision in mind and I kind of followed it. And I guess,
#
for actors, the work that is available is the work that is available. And you take the best of it and
#
you do what you can with it. But in a larger sense, for creators, for writers, for directors,
#
these must be questions. There will be times where one might feel that all the OTTs and all
#
the films are looking for a particular kind of content. There's a particular trend that is
#
happening. Do I want to try to think of something that fits with the trend? Or do I want to find
#
some terror within myself and think about what do I really want to do? What is deep and intrinsic to
#
me? What is authentic to me? And do I want to find a way to do that anyway? So this is not really a
#
question for an actor per se, because that's an unfair question. An actor, the work that is
#
available is the work that is available. But I'm not an actor. Exactly. So I'm asking the writer
#
in you. I'm asking the director in you. I'm asking the person who runs a repository in you
#
that how does one kind of tackle that? Because you've obviously done work that you really,
#
really want to do, but you must also at different times have been confronted with questions of
#
you know, acceptability and so on. I mean, it's what you're saying is an ideal scenario where
#
I could create something which I love, and it's commercially successful, and it gets the money
#
also for me. And that seldom happens, you know, even with most creative people, that they are
#
able to create a work of art, which, besides hitting all the right notes in terms of aesthetics,
#
in terms of its messaging, in terms of its presentation, also rakes in the box office,
#
also brings in the money, and really takes care of everything else. But that's really an ideal
#
scenario. It doesn't really happen. And even with your best of intentions, you can't guarantee that
#
it would happen. So when it happens, it's really some kind of a luck charm, you know, that all the
#
circumstances and forces came together to make that happen. But in normal circumstances,
#
with our best intentions, we're not able to do that. But I think the struggle is
#
not so much about hitting the commercial success note. I think over a period of time,
#
when you are able to consistently create work, which may not be commercially successful, but
#
gets a kind of appreciation as a quality or as a benchmark work, you know, there is something
#
which is thought provoking or cutting edge or different messaging or an alternate thinking.
#
Like, you know, it's like what Rupert Snell said, that the work of art should be
#
transformative, that in the sense that when you enter a work of art, and when you exit the work
#
of art, your access of existence should have shifted by some degrees. You know, you are
#
slightly a different person, if not completely transformed. So I think
#
that's what a work of art should do, actually. It should open a window which you can't see in
#
the wall. It should increase your horizon. You know, suddenly what your vision was still here,
#
after encountering the work of art, your horizon has kind of moved ahead, and you can see a larger
#
vista. You can see you suddenly have a bigger perspective. And I think that is very important
#
for a work of art to do. So I think the question is this, that am I challenging
#
with whatever I'm presenting? Am I kind of bringing in a new perspective? Am I kind of
#
being thought provoking? Am I kind of pushing people from a state of inertia to a kind of a
#
state of motion? Am I making people curious? And I think that, when that becomes the primary question,
#
the commercial success of it kind of becomes slightly, you know, second step. You know,
#
it's not really the thing that you're looking for. Because if you are able to create that kind of
#
work, it would lead you to a situation which will also be where these kind of benefits will accrue.
#
Sometimes these kind of benefits may not be directly linked to it,
#
but over a period of time, the wheel will turn and something will happen and these things will
#
start happening to you. You would be seen as a person who can create this kind of stuff.
#
So that I think is more important than really seeing that, you know, whether I'll get a
#
commercial success out of this or not. And a lot of time, again, if you are factoring in all those
#
things that I said, you know, your messaging, your form, yourself, your audience, the larger
#
world that you're living in, and you are dovetailing all this into your presentation, then possibly
#
you will hit the right note and the commercial success will also come along with it.
#
Yeah, I mean, not only do you reach the audience, but you change the audience,
#
thereby making it more sort of likely to like your future work. Sam Altman, who is now, of course,
#
in OpenAI, but when he was head of Y Combinator a few years ago, I remember he gave this advice
#
to startups, and I'm paraphrasing, that it's better to be loved by a few people than liked
#
by many people. And I really take that to heart. Like, I think all creators should really follow
#
their dictum. And I think that would be certainly true of you, wouldn't it? I mean, I'm not saying
#
there are only a few, but I didn't mean it that way. I meant the love part. Do you feel that the
#
engagement among your audiences is really deep? Deeper than, for example, if you were watching some
#
entertaining theater, for example? I don't know. Do you get people stopping you at public places
#
and saying thank you for what you do? Yeah, I do that. I mean, that does happen, but I don't know.
#
I mean, I think the world we live in is preference falsification.
#
So, a lot of time you don't know what is really happening, whether it's appreciation or whether
#
it's criticism or whether it's silence. Is it really the preference or is it preference falsification?
#
You're too hard on yourself. If a stranger stops you in a public place and says thank you for what
#
you do, obviously. No, no, I'm not talking about that. I'm not talking about that. But I'm saying
#
that the larger appreciation, I think there are two yardsticks to it to kind of figure out whether
#
your work is being appreciated or not. The two yardsticks are A, how over a period of time public
#
responds to you, because that cannot be cheated. Over a period of time, it can be cheated in
#
one performance, in two performances, in one work of art, in one film. But over a period of time,
#
it cannot be cheated, how public responds to you. And the second yardstick is how your peer
#
think about you, what opinion they have. If your peer, over a period of time,
#
value your work or value you as an artist. And I think peer affirmation is very important.
#
If peer affirmation is coming, if your peers kind of think that, yes, you're good at what you do,
#
then possibly you're hitting the right note. And if the audience is over a period of time,
#
appreciate your work, then possibly you're hitting the right notes. But otherwise,
#
for specific work, a lot of time we have preference falsifications. You're not able to judge
#
whether you've actually done it right or not. And especially as you kind of become more known
#
and more established, preference falsification becomes even more. Because sometimes people have
#
their own agenda. They don't want to upset you. They don't want to be on your bad side.
#
They don't know how you will take criticism. And it becomes more and more difficult to ferret out
#
information from people as to what is their true preference, what is it that they really want.
#
But which is fine. This is the drama part of the world that we live in. That's what makes the world
#
more interesting. I think if preference falsification was not there, then everything
#
would be stale storytelling. But the fact that it's the unsaid part which attracts us the most,
#
it is the subtext which attracts us the most, which is the one which is the unseen in your podcast,
#
which attracts us the most, is what keeps the world moving.
#
I should rename this podcast as said in the unsaid. And every eight-hour episode should be
#
four hours of conversation and four hours of silence. You know, you spoke of hitting the
#
right notes. And I want to ask now about sound, which you mentioned earlier plays a really
#
important role in your theater and your storytelling. And I know about that in the context of the West.
#
Like in my writing class, I have one webinar just devoted to sound and I'll talk about Shakespeare
#
and what he did with sound and all the things you do with it. And I'm endlessly fascinated by
#
even modern singer-songwriters who have to match the music of the words to the music of the music,
#
which the best of them seem to do with such effortlessness. And what it seems to me when
#
I listen to your performances or really anything in Urdu, or and there are other
#
languages like that also, is that they are so incredibly musical on their own.
#
That's because these languages come stronger from the oral culture.
#
The writing in these languages took over much later than the orality aspect of it. And
#
in order to pass off the generational wisdom in oral language, you had to find rhythm.
#
So if you go in Urdu, if you go in Persian, if you go in Arabic, you would find a lot of
#
rhyming words. So that makes it easier to remember?
#
It makes it easier to remember. Because if you have something rhyming,
#
because the most natural thing that we can immediately identify is the beat.
#
You know, the beat, that's why you said the percussion is the music that came earlier.
#
The beat is something that is the most inherent and the most intrinsic thing that we identify
#
very quickly. So when you have a rhythm in the language, there's a beat in the language.
#
And if that beat comes periodically, because that's how the nature is,
#
you know, there is 24 hours, there are so many minutes, there are so many seconds,
#
so many years, everything is cyclical. Everything is periodical. That's how the
#
circadian rhythm is. That's how we exist in nature. We cannot live in a nature where there
#
is no rhythm. If tomorrow we are thrown in a world where there is no rhythm, there'll be chaos.
#
We can't live. We won't survive. If tomorrow Earth is not on its orbit,
#
and we do not know how long one year will take, we'll die within one year.
#
I mean, we'll die immediately because heart will stop beating, no?
#
Exactly. So I'm saying that the very existence of ours is based on beat, is based on rhythm.
#
So when language incorporates that rhythm, that beat, it becomes easier for us to kind of assimilate
#
that within, to remember that, because we understand those patterns, we understand those rhythms,
#
and all these oral languages, if you go to all these great oral texts, whether you read Quran,
#
whether you read Gita, whether you read Vedas, whether you read Bible, all of them have this
#
rhythmic structure to it, even though they are not poetry, but they are written in, the prose is
#
written in a poetic form so that this beat is consistent, so that it's easier to memorize it,
#
and then to remember it. So that's why these languages have a lot of rhyming words.
#
So when you are writing a sentence, finding the rhymes is easier.
#
And then when you write it in that fashion, it becomes easier to remember it,
#
and also phonetically, sound-wise, it attracts. So if I start reciting something from
#
Talism-e-Mushruba, and I say,
#
now focus on the beat parted.
#
It makes it easy for memory to retain it, even though it's a very complex sentence.
#
But the rhythmic part of it, it helps, it becomes like aide de mémoire,
#
so that you're able to retain it faster, and you're able to say it, and that same thing is
#
happening in poetry, that the sound of it, you are able to retain because of the sound,
#
it's not just the meaning, so that's why poetry became the apogee of literature.
#
Because in poetry, you're bringing in rhythm, beat, music, craft, and the thought
#
measured on that meter, whether it's pentameter or tetrameter or whatever meter you want to use,
#
but you bring in all these elements and concise and put it in that, and yet you put it in such
#
a manner that when you read the poem, when you read the thought, you're not distracted by the
#
craft of it, you're attracted by the thought of it, and the thought is said in such a manner that
#
it almost becomes fait accompli, that the inevitability of word A to come after word B
#
is fait accompli, that's how a poem is crafted, so it becomes so tight that you cannot imagine
#
any other word could have come at this point, so it basically, the beauty of that is this, that
#
this word coming after this word is so imperative, it's so fait accompli, that it takes away the
#
chance of any other word coming there, that you cannot even think of any other option now
#
coming in that place, and that's where the beauty of poetry comes in.
#
Now you are taken by the thought and not by the craft of the poet
#
in this, you know, or when you say something like, yeah, the craft should always be invisible in any
#
good work, the same goes for acting, and this is the example that I give my actors. But you know,
#
the way you said that just now, was so beautiful, it wasn't just the words,
#
the words are very musical, but the way you said it as well makes so much of a difference,
#
and is that something you have to consciously pay attention to, to kind of figure out,
#
and how to make it even more musical for the language, or do you think that is already
#
baked in the words? It's already baked into it, it's, you have to follow the thought, and that's
#
what I tell the actors, I tell the actors that acting and poetry are exactly the same exercise.
#
If you understand poetry, you understand acting, if you understand acting, you need to understand
#
poetry because they're exactly the same, and this is exactly what you are doing in acting,
#
that the craft has to be invisible, the emotion has to be paramount and out there,
#
and yet while you're saying the emotion, there is a part of the emotion that is explicit,
#
and the part of it is mysterious and unsaid, and that's when the audience gets hooked on to you,
#
there is this something, this character is hiding, there is something that this character is not
#
revealing, and you know, it's like what Louis Gluck said, that what makes poetry so beautiful
#
is that it's mysterious and also inaccessible, inexhaustible at the same time, that you,
#
no matter how much you interpret a poem, it's inexhaustive, you can never exhaust its meaning,
#
there is always a certain part of it which is mysterious, which will keep attracting towards
#
you, and that's exactly what portrayal of a character is, if your character is two-dimensional,
#
then it's exposed, but if the character has, if your portrayal of a character is such that
#
there is something which you are exhibiting, and there is something that you're hiding,
#
and the audience is feeling that there is something this character has more to reveal,
#
which you're not getting it, and that mysterious part of portrayal makes the character so
#
interesting, so you know, it's very much that, the craft is invisible, it should not look like
#
you're acting, and yet you are acting, and that's why I say the more a performance looks easy,
#
the more the work on craft has been done, the more the rehearsal has been done, the more this
#
has been practiced, the easiest looking performances are the hardest worked out performances.
#
You know, what you said about something has to remain mysterious reminded me of a poem
#
by Mark Strand, so I will read it out, why not? It's again a prose poem, it's called Harmony in
#
the Boudoir. After years of marriage, he stands at the foot of the bed and tells his wife that she
#
will never know him, that for everything he says, there is more that he does not say,
#
that behind each word he utters there is another word, and hundreds more behind that one. All those
#
unsaid words, he says, contain his true self, which has been betrayed by the superficial self
#
before her. So you see, he says, kicking off his slippers, I am more than what I have led you to
#
believe that I am. Oh, you silly man, says his wife, of course you are, I find that just thinking
#
of you having so many selves receding into nothingness is very exciting, that you barely
#
exist as you are, couldn't please me more. Absolutely unrelated, except for the word
#
mysterious, which I somehow related to this. Let's get back to your chronology now, and I'm
#
curious, like you've spoken about how, you know, you were a banker, and then in the evenings you
#
would go and do plays, and you did a Barry John workshop, then you worked a lot with Habib
#
Tanveer Sahib. Tell me a little bit about these mentors and what you learned from them. You know,
#
who were the people who had a great influence on you and sort of gave you a better sense of who
#
you yourself are? Well, if I look purely in terms of theatre, because who could mentor you,
#
you don't know. You could be mentored from anyone, from anywhere, across time, across space.
#
You may not even be knowing that person at a personal level, and yet a lot of these people
#
could be shaping up and could be framing you and could be giving you a direction to your life.
#
But my first school was actually Barry John, because that's the first person I went to,
#
and that's the first time I realized that acting is a craft, and that you need to learn things
#
about it, that it's not instinctive and intuitive, it's not like you just sit up one day and start
#
acting. There is a thought to it, there is a process to it, and you have to go through it.
#
Barry was the first person who kind of opened me to that thing, to the craft of acting and what
#
really acting is. I learned from almost everyone that I worked with, but suddenly Habib Tanveer was
#
a great influence, just because the sheer wealth and the sheer heritage that that person has.
#
So much was within one person is unimaginable in today's state, in terms of his knowledge.
#
I just fared an unpublished play of Habib Tanveer, it was lying in his manuscripts,
#
and it was written in Urdu handwriting, and it was very difficult to decipher what was written.
#
A year back, somebody approached me and I said, go to my mom, because she's an expert on manuscripts,
#
and she does Persian manuscripts, so she would be able to decipher it.
#
Surely enough, my mom was able to decipher it. As she fared the Urdu text, I also fared it in
#
Devanagari, and I kind of wrote the whole play in Devanagari in that sense.
#
When you read the play, the play is about Ghalib and Ghalib's life,
#
it is literally taking a master class in Ghalib. It's just reading the text of that play,
#
the kind of debates he has in that play, the kind of interaction he has between Ghalib and
#
other characters, the kind of debate that is there between Persian literature versus Urdu literature,
#
between Persian poetry versus Urdu poetry, the kind of debate that is there about dictionaries
#
and the creation of dictionaries. It's unfathomable that one man had that kind of knowledge, that he
#
could distill it and put it as a play about Ghalib's life. That's what my mom was telling me,
#
that even if this play is not performed and just there, published in the library, and academics
#
and scholars go there and they are able to read this play, this one play will tell them so much
#
about Ghalib's life and the debates and the controversies happening in his life than they
#
can have by reading five books about that. Why academics and libraries put it for free on the
#
internet? Well, it's not my copyright, it's not my opinion, so I don't have that option. But I'm
#
saying that, so it was incredible to work with that man because the knowledge of music, culture,
#
literature, history, sociology, politics, language, it was unbelievable what all he knew and how
#
simply he kind of put that across to you when you were working with him.
#
There was never this strain on him that he knows so much. There was never this thing that
#
he's telling you something. It would just come off so casually, something so light,
#
and yet it would be so profound and deep. So certainly, he was a great influence.
#
And then, of course, I had a great time working with Naseeruddin Shah and his craft as an actor,
#
his approach towards acting, his method of deconstructing acting, his method of diving
#
deep into what he's doing. It's incredible. I mean, he's almost 74 right now, 73. And last
#
night, I saw his play at Prithvi Theatre, and he's up and about and invested and sharp and alert
#
and acting and incredible that he never tires out, that he's still looking for characters that would
#
challenge him as an actor and he would portray them. A sheer dedication and the way, I mean,
#
I remember in 2006, that was the first time when I came and I performed Dastan here and
#
Naseerbhai was having a motley festival for two weeks at Prithvi Theatre.
#
And I went on three different days. I saw Sankraman, his short story, I saw Gharwali,
#
his short story, and I saw Waiting for Voodoo. And in all three, it was a masterclass in acting.
#
I mean, such varied roles. One is a Hindi classic, one is a Urdu classic, one is an
#
English classic play. And he's playing three different people in these three different
#
things. And it was a masterclass just to watch his body language changing, his voice changing,
#
his performance changing. So I would say that these three were like really the
#
greatest influence on me in terms of my theatre. Tell me about how you kind of moved to Dastan
#
Gauri, because what I find really interesting about that is that it is different from all the
#
work you've done before, because there's so much improvisation involved, like you've described it
#
not as storytelling, but anti storytelling, where you've said that part of Dastan Gauri is Dastan
#
Rokna, where you'll stop the story at a particular point, and then you'll go off in different kinds
#
of tangents and deep descriptions and all of that. And then you bring the audience back,
#
and then you take them again and all of that. And every night in a sense is a different night.
#
And I can imagine how that must make you feel so alive and so on and so forth. So at one level,
#
it might seem that it is related, you're going up on stage and you're performing a text, but at
#
another level, it's like completely different. So tell me a little bit about how you kind of got
#
introduced to that, and also your journey into just figuring out its storied history and the
#
impact that it had after it came to India as well. And just take me through your
#
journey with Dastan Gauri in that sense. Well, Dastan Gauri got revived in 2005,
#
and I was working with Habib Tanveer at that time, and Habib Sahab, we were performing
#
in Dehradun at a Virasat festival. We had just finished performing Agra Bazaar,
#
and Habib Sahab said that tomorrow morning there is going to be a Dastan Gauri show, and
#
if you're an actor worth your name, then you should be watching this art form. And that got me
#
very curious as to what is this that he's talking about. And I went and I saw and I was like, wow,
#
this is something that I should do. And this was like literally three or four months
#
after the first Dastan Gauri show was ever staged. And because I've grown up in a tradition of
#
Marsiya Gauri, but I've seen in a long form epic poetry being performed in religious theater.
#
So I was very fascinated. And the moment I saw Dastan Gauri, I said, oh, this is a very secular
#
thing. This does not require a religious context as Marsiya Gauri needs. This could be performed
#
anywhere. And it uses the same registers. It uses the same Urdu. Later I realized that most of the
#
Dastan Gauris were also Marsiya Gauris. So when it was not Muharram, they were writing Dastans.
#
And when it was Muharram, they would go to Marsiya Gauri and they were performing Marsiyas.
#
So I said, this is something that I should do. And fair enough, a couple of months later,
#
I was offered to perform Dastan Gauri. And the whole journey of Dastan Gauri began from there.
#
And then as I started reading about Dastan Gauri and the history of Dastan Gauri, I started
#
realizing that actually it is a misconception that it's a storytelling. It is not really
#
storytelling. It is anti-storytelling because one of the greatest skills that a Dastan Gauri
#
can possess was stopping the tale, Dastan Rokna, and really having segues into things
#
which are not related to the plot of the story and yet keep the audiences spellbound and then
#
bring them back into the story. And the longer you can take them away from the story, the greater the
#
Dastan Gauri you were. I mean, this is a unique kind of storytelling tradition where the longer
#
you are kept away from the story, the greater the storyteller you are. It was not really about the
#
story itself. It was a virtuoso impromptu performance. It was about how great the
#
storyteller is and not how great the story is. And it's a unique kind of a form which is marrying
#
performance and literature. That you stop the story, you stop the tale, you take away the
#
audiences from the tale, from the plot of it, and you are impromptu creating great literature
#
while not really telling the story. And the longer you can withhold the story, the greater the
#
storyteller you are. So that got me really interested as to what is this going on.
#
And then when I started diving into the history of literature, Dastan Gauri, I realized that though
#
its origin was Arabic, but the earliest manuscripts that you get are Persian. And
#
it really started becoming like a franchisee in medieval Persia, perhaps. And the storytellers
#
possibly during the Mughal times, they came to India. Takaltu Khan was this great Dastan Gauri
#
who possibly came with Humayun when he returned from his exile. And his son Darbar Khan became
#
this great Dastan Gauri in Akbar's court. And so much so that Akbar got influenced by these stories
#
and he commissioned the largest art project in Mughal history, which is called Hamza Nama,
#
where these paintings were illustrated on a canvas of two and a half by three feet.
#
And some 1400 folios were painted over a period of 15 years in the Mughal Atelier with some 300
#
artists. And these artists of Hamza Nama are the artists which later go on and influence the
#
Jaipur School of Painting, the Malwa School of Painting, the other various northern region school
#
of paintings that you're looking at. Because when the Mughal Empire started disintegrating,
#
a lot of these painters went and they got work in these other smaller princely states. And they
#
kind of developed the artistic style of these other later princely states that came up in northern
#
India. So these paintings became a huge influence. And then one of the things which was critical
#
in storytellers becoming anti storytellers was that the position of a storyteller was always lower
#
than a position of a poet. Because a poet was considered as the apogee of literature,
#
a storyteller was just considered as some person who's an entertainer. So in Akbar's court, Faizi
#
is this great poet, and nobody has the kind of stature which Faizi has. So Darbar Khan,
#
the chief storyteller doesn't have that kind of status. So he doubles up by not just being
#
a storyteller, but also by being a political advisor, by being a military advisor. Some of
#
the storytellers are also Tanpura players, they're also musicians. Some of the storytellers are also
#
painters in the ateliers. So they had to double up their work in order to get the recognition
#
which a poet has. A poet didn't have to do any of these things. A poet didn't have to sing, a poet
#
didn't have to play a musical instrument, a poet didn't have to paint, a poet didn't have to give
#
political advice or military advice. A poet just had to write poems and their stature was there,
#
guaranteed, untouched. Whereas a storyteller had to do multiple things in order to get a similar
#
kind of respect or recognition that a poet was getting. And a lot of time, they had to dabble
#
into anti-storytelling, in the sense they had to dabble into things which were not really stories.
#
So they had to stop the plot and get into other kinds of conversations and yet keep it tethered
#
to the story and then bring it back into the story. And when they bring it back into the story,
#
it becomes even more fascinating. Do we know why this custom evolved of stopping, coming back,
#
stopping, coming back? Was there some other proximate reason for it and then it became part
#
of the form? No, I think it is the same thing which social media does. It's about engagement.
#
It's about, I mean, they didn't intend to be so diabolical but they realized that their
#
principal product was engagement. And not the story, wow. So they started creating algorithms
#
which would keep the engagement on and that's what the storyteller was doing. The storyteller knew
#
that I am relevant till I am telling and here is my great strength that I can stop the story.
#
So not only tell the story, I can even stop the story and I can still continue with my narration
#
and you would be spellbound and you'd be hooked to what I'm saying. So it is like something like,
#
it's like the same death wish. That I would perform a feat which is near impossible and
#
possibly I can die but I defy death to become a great performer. So I would be a trapeze artist
#
jumping from one building to the other. I would do a line walk from one building to the other. I
#
would do a terrace jumping. I would ski somewhere in a place. So all of that is death wish. It's
#
like I'm performing life but I would go near death, defy it and come back. I'm performing a story
#
but I would defy a story, go away from the story. Yet your engagement will not reduce and I would
#
come back to the story. I would create a social media platform and what you believe is the product
#
is not the product. The product is actually engagement and I would keep creating algorithms
#
where your engagement will not go away and that's what the storyteller is doing,
#
is creating engagement. It's not really so much about story, it's about how long can I hold your
#
attention and as long as I hold your attention I'm relevant to you and you will pay me for that.
#
You mentioned that a work of art must create a change, a true work of art must create a
#
change within the viewer or the reader or the listener or whatever. That you go in one person
#
and you come out a few degrees shifted. That was hold true far more for the artist then.
#
So tell me a little bit about how you feel you were changed by dabbling in these different forms.
#
Like first you do theatre where you know with all your anxieties you still manage to go out on stage
#
and then you manage to beat your self-consciousness and then you're engaging with all this great
#
literature and all the great plays that you're performing and I imagine that changes you in one
#
way and then Dasaang way then changes you in another way because now it is not about losing
#
yourself in the character but in a sense being the main character of stopping the stories and
#
you know grabbing that engagement and playing that part as well and then later of course
#
acting in cinema and so on. So tell me a little bit about how through all these
#
creative journeys that you've taken, how do you feel you changed and are there like short-term
#
impacts when you're doing a particular role or do you change for the good at different points in
#
time where you immerse yourself in different forms or different works maybe? I think the most
#
profound change I had was in understanding what storytelling is really and I realized that when
#
I'm playing a character I'm again doing a storytelling. It's just that I am a cog in the
#
wheel. The largest story is the story that you see in the film where there are other characters
#
also but within that larger story me as a character is opening unfurling that much of the story
#
and I had to unfurl that story in such a way that the larger story becomes engaging and interesting
#
and that understanding came with storytelling that the dialogues that I'm delivering
#
I'm opening the story a little bit for my audiences. It's the example that I give to my
#
actors is what happens if you walk into a room where you don't know anybody? How do you figure
#
out what is happening in this room? You start paying attention to people who are talking into
#
the room and whatever they are talking you start piecing the information from that to understand
#
what is happening in this room. Now in that process if there is a person who articulates well
#
who tells who talks well you automatically get attracted to that person because through that
#
person's articulation you will get a better comprehension of what is happening in the room.
#
That's exactly what you are doing as a character in a movie. If you're performing well if your
#
character portrayal is coming out well you're opening the story better for your audiences
#
by portraying that character and they get invested in that character and they want to
#
follow that character. So it became important for me to understand that this is what scene has to
#
yield. This is what the scene has to depict. Now what the eventual payoff of the scene can only
#
come through the performances of the actors. So am I lending to that or not? Am I facilitating
#
audiences to reach that payoff or not? If I'm facilitating audiences to reach that payoff then
#
I'm doing my job well as a storyteller and that changed the way I performed. That got me closer
#
to understanding the character, the character's incentives, the character's triggers, the
#
character's emotions, the character's portrayal, the character's being in the moment and putting
#
it across because at the end of the day it's again a bit of storytelling that I'm doing.
#
The other thing that it did to me was the thing that I talked about, the anxieties.
#
It made me realize how to get rid of these anxieties of not being self-conscious, of not
#
being focused on myself all the time, not be overtly bothered if I'm being recognized or
#
not recognized, if I'm being acknowledged or not acknowledged, if I'm getting the awards or if I'm
#
not getting the awards, if I'm appreciated or not being appreciated. It took me away from these
#
anxieties. I don't care for these anxieties now. For me, my joy is performance. So I live from
#
performance to performance whether I'm acting in front of the screen or whether I'm acting in front
#
of the stage. I go there completely unbridled, perform, enjoy and I get out and I don't care as
#
to whether I will get recognition or not, whether I'll get an award or not because what I get from
#
the audience is my reward eventually. The fact that they get the story, the fact that they
#
appreciate it, the fact that they enjoy it, the fact they want to come back is the reward for me
#
and not that I should get some state award or I should get some peer award or I should
#
get some acknowledgement. No, that's really not the reward. It's the happiness when somebody walks
#
up to you and talks about a performance you've done five years back or you've done a role 10
#
years back and still is reeling under the effect of that and says, I can't forget that.
#
That is my reward. That makes me feel that yes, I'm doing my job well, that people even after so
#
many years can recall when they first saw me perform or can recall when they first saw that
#
part of me, that performance of mine and can still talk about it. I think that's really what
#
all these years of storytelling and acting has done. It has kind of transformed me from taking
#
me away from these anxieties, which could have plagued someone else and which don't plague me.
#
That's why I feel very secure at times, even though in contemporary sense, I may not be hugely
#
successful, but I feel I'm pretty satisfied with who I am, with the way I am and the way I work.
#
I think you're more successful than you think. And there is one existing anxiety of yours,
#
which I'm going to take away with the reward. And that anxiety is chai kab milegi and the reward
#
is a chai. So let's take a quick break and then we'll be back for the final part of the show.
#
Hey, the music started and this sounds like a commercial, but it isn't. It's a plea from me
#
to check out my latest labor of love, a YouTube show I am co-hosting with my good friend,
#
the brilliant Ajay Shah. We've called it everything is everything. Every week we'll
#
speak for about an hour on things we care about, from the profound to the profane,
#
from the exalted to the everyday. We range widely across subjects and we bring multiple
#
frames with which we try to understand the world. Please join us on our journey and please support
#
us by subscribing to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
The show is called everything is everything. Please do check it out.
#
Welcome back to the scene in the unseen. I'm still with Dhanesh Hussain who
#
is being admirably patient and has hung with me for all these hours and hopefully just a little
#
while more. You know, earlier when you were talking about, you know, Mughal patronage,
#
you pointed out the storyteller was a little bit down the ladder, but the poet was chill. Poet
#
didn't have to do anything. In today's time, I think both the poet and the storyteller would
#
be in trouble. And it's for a reason that, again, you've mentioned and that I've thought
#
about a lot in the context of what we call the creator economy is that art is not enough. You
#
have to be an artist plus an entrepreneur. You have to not only make the work, you have to know
#
how to market it, how to do the PR of it. In a sense, you have to learn how to become the
#
entrepreneur for your own brand. And I want to ask you off that journey where, you know,
#
after you leave banking, you do theatre for a few years, then 2005 onwards, Dasan going starts,
#
and you become a film actor later, right? 2010, I think, with Peoply Life. So in that decade where
#
you are just subsisting of theatre and performances and so on, you know, A, how did you sort of make
#
a living during that time? Was there ever self-doubt that did you ever think of the road not taken or
#
rather the road given up, in a sense? And how did you find or how did you learn that entrepreneurship
#
part? Because ultimately, even an actor has to learn to act and to sell, to sell himself,
#
in a sense, or herself. So how was that sort of process for you? Coming back first to your poet
#
and the storyteller thing, the storyteller is not worse off. In fact, in today's time, the storyteller
#
is much better off than the poet, just that you don't know the storyteller as storyteller,
#
you know the storyteller as the politician, you know the storyteller as the spiritual guru,
#
you know the storyteller as the ad man, you know the storyteller as essentially every charlatan
#
that you can think of. So basically, the storyteller is much better off today, just that
#
you don't identify them with the label storyteller, you know them with different other labels. So I
#
think storytellers are having a ball of a time in this age. Coming back to your other question,
#
I really didn't have any game plan when I resigned from the bank and I remember
#
my manager, my boss, didn't believe that I'm resigning to be an actor. So for two weeks,
#
he did not forward my resignation letter to the HR department because he thought I was bluffing
#
and he was like, tell me honestly what bank you're going to because it's a small industry and we'll
#
run into each other. Are you in touch with him? No, I'm not. So, you know, so just tell me which
#
bank are you going to? And I said, no, I'm not going to any other bank. I am resigning to be an
#
actor. And he thought this was such an outlandish lie to give just because you don't want to disclose
#
which bank you're going to. Then after two weeks, he kind of got convinced that, you know, I want
#
to be an actor and he forwarded my resignation letter to the HR department. And I don't know
#
where he is, but I'm sure it must be very palpable to him now that I'm an actor,
#
that I'm not working in any other bank. And so one of the reasons why I resigned was that,
#
you know, life sucked at the bank. It wasn't in any way, there was no spark in it. It was
#
not inspiring me. It was some kind of a glorified clubdom. And I was obviously stuck in the wrong
#
side of the bank. When I was in retail banking, most of the action happened at treasury banking
#
or policymaking. And I was not in that echelon of the bank. Also, the culture, the corporate
#
culture was very obnoxious. There was a lot of sycophancy and a lot of bootlicking and
#
asslicking. And I was aghast with that culture. I could not do that to sustain myself.
#
Then the third thing was that my father was chronically ill and I had to be at
#
hospitals twice a week for dialysis. And that responsibility was huge. And I couldn't balance
#
that with my bank job. I knew that there was nobody else. And I knew that I had to be with
#
my father. I knew that I would make money somehow. I knew that I would earn money somehow.
#
I would figure out something in my life. But you know, I need to be there.
#
And then the final thing, which I think was the most important thing, which I've spoken
#
in past interviews also, is that, you know, when people say, oh, it must have been very brave of
#
you to give up your bank job and, you know, take up this. I said things like bravery and courage.
#
These are labels you give to ourselves in hindsight. At that time, normally it's a
#
necessity. I was so driven up to the wall that, you know, I had my back to the wall. I had no
#
other option. That life was becoming unsustainable for me. And the other thing was this, that I was
#
pretty mediocre all my life, you know, whether as a student or as a banker or as an economist.
#
So when I stepped on stage, that's the first time when I got appreciation. That's the first
#
time when people really took notice of who I was and came up to me and appreciated my performance.
#
And for the first time, I felt, oh, maybe there is something I'm good at. Maybe there is something.
#
I don't feel the strain of performing when I'm performing. And yet I'm getting appreciated. I
#
don't have to work hard to be successful. And if I do this thing, I just do it and it happens.
#
So it was the power of appreciation, which I think was the tripping factor, which resulted in me,
#
resigning from the bank and becoming the actor, is because I realized that
#
this appreciation is coming without being manipulated. It's coming organically. It's
#
coming with people just watching me. So possibly I'm doing something right. Possibly this is
#
something I can do well. And I jumped into it and I had no idea how will I do it.
#
But sooner or later, I needed money. That was the time when if you were in Delhi at that time,
#
you would have noticed there was a mushrooming of a lot of these management and fashion schools.
#
Almost every neighborhood had one or two schools, some MBA school, some fashion school.
#
And a lot of these schools needed faculty to teach. And I look good on paper because I was
#
Delhi School of Economics. I was faculty of management studies, Delhi University,
#
and I had worked in foreign banks. So on paper, I look very good as a faculty. They can talk about
#
it, that we have so-and-so person coming. And it worked for me because I wasn't looking for a full
#
time. It worked for them because they didn't have to keep me on a payroll. So I was a guest
#
lecturer who would come thrice, four times a week and just do one lecture. And I would get
#
a decent amount of money per lecture. So it didn't match my salary, but I would end up earning
#
reasonably well, like 50% to 60% of what I was earning at the bank. And that kind of made sure
#
that my expenses were being made. I'm not dependent on somebody. So for a good period of some
#
six years, I taught at these various institutions. I basically did freelancing, education,
#
lecture giving. And it worked for me because most of these lectures were in the morning time.
#
And most of the rehearsals were in the evening. So it divided my day very well. So I would go
#
in the morning, I would give the lectures, I would come home, have lunch, and then afternoon,
#
get ready, and I would go and then I would rehearse the evening for my new place. So it
#
worked very well for me. I think when Dastan started happening, after a while, we started
#
getting good enough shows for Dastans and we started getting a decent amount of money to kind
#
of sustain us. So I didn't have to be dependent on lectures. And the moment I realized I don't need
#
to be dependent on lectures, I gave up the lectures. Not that I wasn't enjoying it,
#
because that's also like a performance when you are in a classroom and you are teaching students.
#
But there is also a bit of responsibility and it was not my focus. So the moment I realized that
#
through theater and Dastan, I can sustain and can maintain the same amount of
#
level which I had. While I was giving these lectures, I gave up and I started full-time
#
devoting to theater and to Dastan. No, I never doubted. I never doubted that
#
have I taken the wrong road or should I have not given up the road before.
#
I never doubted that. When I made my decision, I was very certain I'm not turning back.
#
This is it. And there was some kind of a cocky confidence that I would make it,
#
that I'm not going to fail. How? What? I had no idea. There was this innate belief in myself that
#
I know this thing and I can pull it off. I need to keep applying myself. I need to keep learning
#
about it. I need to keep practicing it. But I have a little understanding of what it is and
#
how to do it. So I just kept moving forward. I never kind of thought. And there were times when
#
things dipped, which required me to reinvent myself. But even in those periods,
#
it was never about giving up. It was always about finding other ways of sustaining yourself,
#
which are related to what your work is. But it was never about giving up. I always knew that
#
it will happen. It will work. You just have to persist and you have to persist with everything.
#
All the tricks that you have in your bag, you have to persist with that. That means you don't
#
compromise on what your beliefs are. You don't compromise on what your ideology is. You don't
#
compromise what your aesthetic taste is. You don't compromise what your talent is. So you kind of
#
keep working on all of that and the wheel will turn. And like any field, there's a long gestation
#
period, but once the wheel turns, you get exponentially what you've been missing out all
#
these years. There's a classic cliche or advice that self-help books give where they say,
#
follow your heart, believe in yourself, don't give up. And I find that that's inspiring,
#
but it is also extremely dangerous because when you see people who followed their heart and didn't
#
give up and became successful, there is a survivorship bias at play there. You see the
#
small percentage of people who made it and you don't see whatever percentage of people,
#
which could be quite large, who did exactly that, but didn't actually make it. Like I like to say
#
the cafes are filled with broken dreams and people who struggled for years and got nowhere.
#
And I wonder how much truth there is to that. Like you made it, but when you look at others
#
who were perhaps your peers in the acting world or the theater world, circa 2000, let us say,
#
how many of them went on to make it? How many of them left and did other things?
#
How many of them would possibly look back with regret? Give me a sense of that ecosystem out
#
there because it's very easy to advise someone to become an engineer or a doctor because you
#
know that over there, even if you're mediocre, you'll make a living, you'll, you know, there's
#
enough demand and the supply and you'll make a living. So an average doctor, average engineer,
#
average banker, they'll all do well reasonably. There's no existential danger there, but the
#
danger in getting into a profession, which seems from the outside to be very top heavy, that a few
#
people make it and you can apply survivorship bias and say, Oh, wow, look at those guys. So
#
they follow their dreams, but you don't see the many, many people who didn't make it.
#
So give me a sense, and I'm not saying that that is the case here, rather I'm asking that give me
#
a sense of what that ecosystem is like and has it perhaps changed because of OTTs and technology and
#
so many new avenues for creators today? I think the advice, follow your heart is
#
basically incorrectly worded. It should not be follow your heart. It should be identify what
#
you're good at and then become better at that. That's what it should really be. So instead of
#
following your heart, your heart can be saying zillion rubbish things and if you end up following
#
zillion rubbish things, you would end up in zillion way wasted in your life. But identify
#
what you're good at. Identify what comes without straining to you. What is it that you have a knack
#
for? But can I interrupt you and ask a question there that initially when you start at something,
#
you're never good at it. No, but there is also a way you are getting it faster than other people.
#
You're picking the skills faster than other people. It's like you're able to see
#
two into four quicker than most people and then when you do that, you just start getting better
#
at that. Just make sure that you work at it and become better at that so that eventually you have
#
that advantage with most people vis-a-vis you in your field and that is very important and I think
#
that is more important than following your heart because following your heart really doesn't mean
#
anything. It could be just another dopamine hit that you want but does that mean that that's what
#
it means when you say follow your heart? Fair enough. Tell me about the ecosystem.
#
I don't know. I did not really actively follow other people's career or people who were there
#
with me at the start and what they're doing right now. Some people whom I've known from that period
#
have gone on to become big stars. Some people whom I've known who were younger to me became
#
bigger stars even before me. I'm not a star but they became more famous than me. Some people I know
#
are still struggling or are still surviving. Some people who seem better than me
#
now don't seem better than me. It's a mixed race. There are all sorts of people in this ecosystem.
#
Some have outlived, some have outperformed, some have faded out, some have become jaded,
#
some have completely kind of you know brilliant question and gone into something else. How much
#
of that is correlated to how good you think they were or is luck a large part of that game as well?
#
More than luck I think it is application and assessment of who you are and where you are
#
and what your circumstances are because at any given point of time there will be only
#
so many limited opportunities in front of you kept on your table. A, are you able to reach the table?
#
B, if you reach the table are you able to identify and pick that opportunity before somebody else
#
picks it up? And also being street smart, being thinking on your feet. I think a lot of these
#
things matter. Do not be in your bubble. Do not just think in your bubble. Try getting a macro
#
vision. Try getting a macro. If there is AI coming and if there is virtual realities coming, what
#
it's going to do to your filmmaking? Have an eye on that. If there's a climate change happening,
#
what would happen to your beach house when you're investing money in a beach house property?
#
So I'm saying that do not be oblivious to the larger world that you're living in. Do not be
#
oblivious to the industry trends that are there. Be engaged. Think on your feet. Anticipate.
#
It's not that if you're just an actor you don't have a choice. I can only do whatever is offered
#
to me. Make things happen. Create content. Figure out. Move things. It is not easy but
#
it is also develop the imagination to see these things. Like some people like that
#
entrepreneurial thing that you were talking about. Why does an entrepreneur become an entrepreneur?
#
Because they have the imagination to envisage something which others are not seeing.
#
So you've got to develop that and that's no rocket science. It can be developed by anybody. It's not
#
that you have to have a certain pedigree or it has to be innate. It's simply application,
#
engagement, observation of the world that you live in and slowly and slowly you will start
#
realizing what the macro picture is. You would start realizing, you would start seeing what the
#
trends are. You would start seeing what is the bet you should put your money on and how you should
#
be able to reap the best that you want to. And that requires not just in a very blinkered way
#
only looking at my skill. Okay, I would only dance. I would train. Yes, do that. Learn dancing. Learn
#
singing. Learn another language. Do all that. But you need to be also cognizant of this larger world
#
that you're living in. And if you are putting all of that together and negotiating your way through,
#
you will be able to figure out things. You will somehow reach somewhere. People like people who
#
shake things up, who are shakers and movers, who can ruffle some feathers. It's like a great
#
thing which Sudhir Mishra said that every great disciple would eventually betray their masters
#
because that's the only way they can become masters of their own.
#
If they continue being great disciples, then they would never become great masters.
#
So it is a great paradoxical relationship that in order to be a great protégé, you need to be a
#
great disciple. But then eventually to be a great master, you need to betray that very master.
#
It makes it sound kind of adversarial. I'm not sure. I think you can be a great disciple
#
and be a great master in your own right. As it is Sudhir Mishra, it has to be very dramatic.
#
And there is a drama in this line, which is not there. If I be a great disciple and the great
#
master at the same time, betrayal is the key thing here. That's a narrative we want. That's a
#
story we want. I want to double click on that phrase you used or rather one of the questions
#
that you said everyone should ask themselves in this game, which is can you reach the table at
#
all? So what are the factors that stop someone from reaching the table? For example, are people
#
skills important? One reason I like you left the corporate world really early. And my reason for
#
that is I realized that rising in that world has a little bit to do with competence, but much more
#
to do with political skills and people skills and playing that particular game. And I said,
#
I'm not going to play that game. And I'm guessing you said the same thing. But are there games that
#
you have to play within this world also? Like, you know, how do you reach the table? What do you have
#
to do? Or is it just a positive thing? Is it just showing some initiative showing some hustle?
#
So there are many ways you can reach a table. And you can also reach the table by playing the game.
#
Or games. But I think that if your eventual purpose is just reaching the table, then you
#
can reach it anyway, anyhow. But if your eventual purpose is not just to reach the table, but to
#
pick the opportunity there, and to create something huge and big, which is which has an artistic value
#
to it or a shelf life to it or a reference value to it that 50 years down the line, people will
#
refer to this work, then reaching to the table is not the end in itself. It's a means to reach
#
something greater that you want to reach. And I think that really should be the focus. If it is
#
really about being an A-lister or being, you know, in the thick and thin of things and being
#
recognized as somebody who has arrived, then I think it's a very myopic way of looking at things.
#
If you're actually someone who has this thing to present your own perspective to the world,
#
or to present a new perspective to the world, then it's just a means for you because you know
#
that the table has resources. And those resources will facilitate you to present your story to a
#
larger audience, which you cannot do if you're an indie filmmaker or if you're an indie player.
#
So I think that is what is important. Now, again, there are gatekeepers to that table.
#
You will not be able to reach it. But I also think that there are opportunities opening elsewhere.
#
Now there is a whole word to screen kind of a thing which Mami runs, which if you go has a
#
film bazaar going on. And a lot of people who have got nothing to do with screenplay writing,
#
nothing to do with film writing, are having their books going into these and they are having an
#
active engagement and a face to face like an interface happening with filmmakers, with producers.
#
And people are looking out for stories elsewhere also. So it's not that it's not happening.
#
People are getting picked up from YouTube for their acting skills. They are getting picked up
#
from their influencer media videos that they are posting. So I think that technology in some way
#
has democratized in the sense that now it is not some casting director sitting who will make sure
#
or it is some guy who's a middle man somewhere who will make sure that you will have access to.
#
If you are good, you would get noticed. Technology allows you to do that. But you should also have
#
the imagination to figure that out as to how do I reach the table? If you do not have the imagination,
#
if you lack that. I mean, few of the people who have come out in the industry right now as
#
filmmakers, they started off making YouTube videos. They had no backing. They had no production
#
house to stand behind them. They were not hailed as prodigies to some great filmmakers. They
#
possibly didn't have the opportunity to work as an AD with some great filmmaker. They just observed.
#
They understood what filmmaking is, what editing is intuitively. And then they went on to create
#
something on YouTube. And slowly and slowly, they are making some great films.
#
Like who? I think Randeep Jao made Cora. Oh, okay. He started on YouTube. I mean,
#
he started off with a smaller film with YouTube. And look at the craft that he has shown in Cora.
#
Cora is absolutely amazing. Yeah. So I'm saying that it is really your application.
#
There is no limit to it. You can break through. You can read somewhere. Yes,
#
there will always be gatekeepers. I mean, I'm also an outsider in that sense.
#
It's not that I have a pedigree. I don't have a family behind. I don't have godfathers sitting
#
here. But if you have in you and if you have the imagination to use that, you will be able
#
to kind of find your way somewhere. Yeah, sorry. I really don't have anything to add.
#
Yeah. So no, no, I absolutely agree with you. And in fact, I'm really enthusiastic about the
#
directions a creator economy is taking. And I think the gradual sort of dissolution of gatekeepers
#
and the redundancy of gatekeepers is something that I see in other fields. I think it's not so
#
much yet in the audio visual medium because of the capital costs involved, but eventually I think
#
it'll be there. The next question I want to ask you is about something that again, I see
#
technology as an accelerating force in which is the evolution of taste. Now in a different
#
context, I remember I had done an episode last year with Samit Seth and Yash Banage,
#
who own the great restaurants Bombay Canteen and O'Pedro and now Veronica. And one interesting
#
thing they pointed out was, you know, seven or eight years ago, when they were experimenting
#
with new dishes at O'Pedro, the dishes were so different to the existing conventional stuff out
#
there that there wasn't easy acceptance. But today they are completely accepted. You know,
#
that taste evolved really fast. And that niche did not exist. You know, if you were to,
#
if they were to go to a market analyst and say, okay, I'm going to do fusion food of this sort,
#
what is a tam? What is a total addressable market? It would be minuscule because there was no one
#
like that. But it's almost like they created that niche or they enabled that niche to find itself.
#
Similarly, I think that must at some level be your trajectory and thinking aloud at Dasan Goy as
#
well. Because when that starts off, if you are going to go to, say, an MBA in a suit and say,
#
okay, should I do this? And the answer would probably be no, because what is a total
#
addressable market? Who's going to come and listen to stuff in, you know, a half dead language,
#
etc, etc. But you made it work and found an audience and got a lot of love and made it
#
commercially viable as well. And what we have also seen is that there is probably over the last few
#
years an acceleration in that evolution of taste because viewers are now exposed to entertainment
#
from everywhere, world cinema from everywhere. You know, movies show some great films. I mean,
#
there are great films to see on all the OTTs, frankly, if you look out for them. So tell me
#
a little bit about your sense of how taste has evolved, both in the context of doing something
#
like Dasan Goy and even otherwise as a filmmaker and actor, when you see the trajectory of the
#
arts and entertainment industry. I mean, see, I really can't take credit for Dasan Goy in the
#
sense that I was not the guy who started it. But it's true, I joined it very soon, very early.
#
And a lot of the popularity is because of the shows that we did and people got attracted to it.
#
And one of the things that I understood was that it is tied to our very basic nature to
#
find something new. So our curiosity and our nature for thrill to find something new,
#
that is so deep in us that every time you are able to bring out something,
#
whether it's a culinary taste or whether it's a performance art or whether it's filmmaking or
#
whether it's story writing or whether it's some management practice, whether it's some
#
new way of attracting tourists, whatever you create, the moment you create something new,
#
something different, something alternate, something which allows people to get a thrill
#
of something which is not in the purview of their experience, people get excited about it,
#
they would get attracted to it. Because whenever you're doing a market survey,
#
you're basically doing it on the basis of what is already available. But how can you assess
#
something which is not available, which is not there, which doesn't exist? Nobody can kind of
#
tell you, but you can also you can just have a probing kind of a thing. How would you react
#
to something which is new? But unless and until you actually create it and present it to people,
#
you will not know what the reaction to it will be. But because of our innate nature to experience
#
thrill, to flirt with something new, if you are able to create something which meets that need,
#
people will come to it. And I think that exactly what happened with Dastan Goi is
#
that storytelling, which was like a lost art, which people thought is too archaic and is not
#
there relevant to our times. We are moving towards virtual reality, we are moving towards video
#
gaming, we are moving towards interactive cinema. What would this kind of a thing do? And suddenly,
#
bang, it comes in and it's so much so that it's a movement now, so much so that there are so many
#
people doing Dastan Goi today that I don't even know who they are, or what they are,
#
where they're coming from. I've had no interactions with them. And the beautiful part of it is that
#
some of them don't even know who I am. Or if they know, I don't know. I mean, but I think they don't
#
even know who I am. So which is good, which is great. I mean, I run into people who would tell
#
me that they've seen a Dastan Goi show, but they have no idea who I am. And then somebody would
#
introduce me to them and they would say, Okay, but have you seen that guy's Dastan Goi show?
#
Have you seen that guy's Dastan Goi show? And I say, Yes, yes, I've seen. So I mean, in their
#
context, there is no hierarchy of Dastan Goi. It's a form which is there and a lot of people do it.
#
And you're also just one of them who's doing it. So in that sense, it shows the success of this art
#
form, that it got democratized, it became widespread, it has many practitioners now,
#
so much so that it is not hinged on who started it and who popularized it. It has become like
#
whoever wants to do it right now. And I think that is the true great success of it. And in the sense
#
that today, so many people are doing it. But I think a lot of it is really, really about innate
#
instinct to experience something new. Yeah, and that whole policy of looking at what is
#
already there, there's a great quote on it by Aaron Levy in the context of startups, where he
#
once said, quote, sizing the market for a disruptor based on an incumbent's market is like sizing the
#
car industry of how many horses ever in 1910. Yeah, stop good, you know, and it's, it's kind of
#
exactly that. I want to also ask you about something that I admire you deeply for and that many people
#
I know admire you deeply for as well, that at one point, your partner and one of the pioneers of the
#
revival of Dasan Goy was accused of sexual assault. And the lady in question reached out to you to
#
tell you about it. And many people in the circles of that individual, you know, close ranks behind
#
him, and they made all kinds of excuses for him in the close ranks. And I mean, I found it utterly
#
distasteful, I said so at the time, and I said so again and again. And what I really admire was that
#
despite being a friend of his, despite the fact that your commercial interests were tied up in
#
continuing that partnership with him, you took a stand on a matter of principle for a woman you
#
knew much less. And you said, No, it's about principles. And this is crossing a line. And it's
#
gone too far. And you took that stand. And for that, in a sense, within that community, there
#
were many people who were no longer, you know, friends with you and etc, etc. And I want to kind
#
of ask about that, because I remember even from the outside, I wasn't an insider in any way, I
#
didn't know any of the protagonists involved, even peripherally. But just looking at it from
#
the outside, I was like, fuck, that is an amazing thing to do. I noticed that. Because who would do
#
that? Your instinct always is that you find an excuse for your friend, he's always been good to
#
you. Your incentives are aligned towards closing ranks, and you would not be the only one. So many
#
people in that circle close ranks, and it really becomes easy to do that. The woman was a foreigner,
#
she's from outside, what can she do? You know, but you didn't do that, you stood up for that. So,
#
you know, tell me a little bit about, you know, what were the dilemmas you faced? What went through
#
your mind? How did you come to that decision? Like, I know that you knew that there would be
#
costs to pay for it. And you did it. So just tell me if you can talk about it.
#
I think the bottom line was that I can't run away from myself.
#
Once you've been, it's like when you tell somebody, don't tell that to anybody. And that knowledge is
#
so, I mean, when it sits inside you, the dynamics of that just takes over and compels you to go
#
ahead and say to somebody, even though you've been warned that don't tell it. It was the same kind of
#
thing that eventually the question was about, I have to live with myself every day.
#
How do I want to live with myself for the rest of my life?
#
Is the cost of what I'm going to face vis-a-vis the cost of living with myself, which is greater?
#
And I felt the cost of living with myself is greater. I don't want to give up that.
#
I don't want to regret that I had a chance to do something right and I did not.
#
It's not my truth. It's for the court to decide. But for me, the truth was that somebody
#
confessed to me. And that's what I was asked to depose. Were you the person and was this confessed
#
to you? And my truth was yes. And I felt that if I lie at this time, this is not going to sit well
#
with me. This will destroy me. This is completely the opposite of everything that I believed in.
#
So I think I had to stand up for her and I had to stand up for what I believed in,
#
no matter what the cost is. Because I think in hindsight, I think I can sleep well
#
and I can live with myself.
#
And just to get my listeners up on date, the court, he was eventually, I think, first convicted and
#
then acquitted by the court, which essentially said, quote, unquote, a feeble no may mean yes.
#
And I was just so horrified. I don't need to know the details of that. After I read a judgment,
#
which says a feeble no may mean yes, because the judgment itself says that she said no. And
#
you know, that didn't matter to the court and that didn't matter to him. And it's just outrageous.
#
And what it also reveals to me, and this is something that I feel deep, this quiet about,
#
and I have seen this in other contexts around me, across camps, across left, across right, across,
#
you know, people who claim to be for markets, but not really, people who claim to be for liberty,
#
but not really, et cetera, et cetera, is that many people will pay lip service to principles.
#
But actually, they're just tribal, they're part of a tribe. And they might for a while be part
#
of a tribe where you kind of agree with all the principles. But then when it comes to a conflict
#
between the tribe and those principles, you know, they will go for the comfort of the tribe,
#
and they will turn their back on the principle. And I feel that happened here. And this is,
#
of course, a case of elite Delhi liberals, you know, sort of closing ranks behind one of their
#
own and being completely hypocritical. It has also happened elsewhere. It has also happened on the
#
right. For example, many people supported Modi at one point because they said, oh, he'll bring us
#
free markets, et cetera, et cetera. And they continued supporting him when he did just the
#
opposite. And I find that ghastly. I find the intellectually honest course which some people
#
took is just to say that, you know, hey, we made a mistake. He didn't do it, you know. But you double
#
down because you've chosen a tribe. And then once you've chosen a tribe, all your talk about
#
principles is just lip service. You don't really care about principles. You care about that tribe.
#
You care about signaling within that tribe and raising your status within that tribe.
#
And I saw that happening. And I don't necessarily want you to respond to this either if you don't
#
want to. No, it's a very primal thing. Basically, it's coming from a very primal survival instinct
#
because when we were hunter-gatherers, the only way we could survive was being in a collective,
#
being in a tribe. And thus, when you were in that collective space, you knew that you can survive
#
longer. You knew that you can survive well. So being exiled from a tribe was a punishment
#
even greater than death. Because if it's death, you finish. You're gone. You know, it's death and
#
now it's over. But when you're exiled, you don't know how long you'll have to survive. You don't
#
know how you'll have to fend for yourself. You don't know how painful the death will become.
#
And that was scarier to people. So somewhere, it's kind of coded in our DNA that exile is a
#
greater threat than death. And that's why it's an instinct that when it comes to choosing a tribe and
#
choosing something like a principle, most people would go for the tribe because it's about survival
#
because somewhere it's genetically coded in us that exile is a greater threat, is a greater
#
punishment than death. And that is the reason why strongmen are able to take control of society.
#
That is the reason why bullies are able to rule. That is the reason why a fewer number of
#
perpetrators are able to perpetrate that kind of violence and a larger number of silent majority
#
is not able to stand up because everybody is just afraid that if I speak out, if I stand out,
#
there would be nobody standing behind me and I would be singled out. And that would be
#
a more painful kind of a death than actually meeting your normal death. So it's that reason.
#
It is the security of the collective which pushes us in these kinds of scenarios to go with the tribe
#
rather than be singled out and being pilloried for that, for your decisions. So I think it is
#
a very anti-human instinct to go against a tribe. And it requires a certain kind of understanding.
#
Why I should go against the tribe or why going with the tribe is detrimental to everything that
#
we are trying to do. Wise words. Let's get back to happier subjects such as your film career.
#
So tell me about that because that also seems like a very interesting shift where
#
you are in the world of theatre, you're doing well, you're acting with, you know, great people,
#
great repertory, traveled with Habib Tanveer and so on. And then you're doing Dasan Goyal,
#
you've done such great work with that. And you're sort of king of those little hills.
#
And the king of little hills. I like that. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be insulting.
#
No, no, no, I'm not taking it as an insult. And then cinema. So tell me about how that came
#
about because, you know, I imagine like 40 years ago, when there was only mainstream,
#
you may not have bothered. But I think in a sense, opportunities did open up in really
#
interesting ways. And so tell me a little bit about that landscape. And what was your
#
journey in films like? Like at one level, then I guess you are also learning a certain kind of
#
acting all over again, because theatre acting is quite different from film acting. And like you
#
pointed out earlier, even learning how to act for a wide frame as opposed to a close up is
#
so different. And I'm just going to, you know, look at all your acting and once again in films
#
that you turn and just try to watch you closely.
#
So tell me about that journey.
#
Yeah, so film, after a certain point, acting in theatre and acting in Dastan,
#
film just happened, you know, deeply life was being made, and I became a part of that. And
#
while I was doing that, Aamir Khan and Kiran asked me that would I like to audition for a
#
part in their film Dhobi Ghat and I did that. And before that, before I know I'm, you know,
#
Rajat Kapoor asked me to audition for a part in Aaku Dheki and I had that. And before I knew I had
#
three films, you know, on screen. And three good films and with very interesting cameos in all
#
three of them, which kind of, you know, got noticed by people. So in that sense, I didn't
#
have a struggle to get into cinema like most people when you are an outsider. I just got three films
#
in my lap. And before I knew I was three film old. And that's when I started getting, you know,
#
offers for working in films. Because I think that's when people started noticing me that
#
I'm also a screen actor and I can act on screen too. And when I started off, I had no idea of
#
what cinema acting is. I was pretty lost when I first started acting in cinema because I was so
#
used to stage and the orientation on stage that I was completely thrown off track with the camera
#
because I had just no orientation with the camera. I didn't know. I kind of trusted the director and
#
just did what I was asked to do. But to have that sense of how the camera is capturing you,
#
where the camera is, how to perform to the camera without being obvious that you're performing to
#
the camera, that only started coming in me when I was doing Aakhudheki. So it was only by the time
#
when I did my third film, I started understanding what camera acting is. I started understanding
#
that it's tied with the edit. You need to understand the edit. You need to understand
#
the screenplay. Did you sit with the writer and the director? No, I did not. It's just that
#
you're observing and you're kind of starting to understand that what is really making a film is
#
the edit table and what shot will get selected in and what shot will go into it. And if you are not
#
performing the best shots to your strength, chances are that you will be chopped out or shots with
#
weaker performances will go in. And that would, even though whatever your talent be, would make
#
you look pretty bad on screen. So it was only by the time I did Aakhudheki that I started getting
#
a little hang of what film acting is and how it is different from stage acting. And then also
#
the way things were panning out in Delhi, I was getting a little disgruntled with the scenario
#
there. And also when you reach a certain age in your life, suddenly morbidity, hospital,
#
health insurance, aging parents, growing up children, these things kind of start
#
factoring into your life. You don't think much when you're in your 20s and your 30s.
#
So I felt that maybe I should move westwards and I should kind of explore more cinema and screen
#
work. And of course, cinema and screen work is more paying. So I landed here and I landed here
#
in 2014, October. I had a film offer to write and I was writing and acting in a film at that time.
#
So there were two projects in my hand, which I figured out can kind of pay my bills for next
#
five, six months. And I was pretty hopeful that by that time something else will come.
#
So I just came here. And when I came here, I was very clear about it that I will not
#
sit for things to happen. If things are not happening, then I know I would do what I know,
#
which is theater, which I would continue doing theater. So I continued doing theater. I continued
#
creating plays. I continued performing those plays. I continued also acting in other people's plays
#
because that was the best way to learn as to how other people are doing theater in this city.
#
And it's always a great leveling exercise. When you are a producer, director yourself,
#
you're the boss. So the opportunity to learn kind of reduces. That window kind of shrinks.
#
But when you are working with some other one, you are just another actor, like
#
one of the actors in the troupe. So it gives you a great opportunity to have this upside down kind
#
of a view. And you're looking at what other directors are doing, what other producers are
#
doing, while I'm trying to find out work in cinema. And as it happens in the city, nobody is
#
working, nobody is welcoming you with work on platter. Same thing was good for me. Nobody was
#
really waiting for me. But in some sense, my struggle was slightly different than other people's
#
struggle that when I came here, I was not an unknown entity. So much so that a lot of people
#
actually thought I used to live in the city. So when people realized that I've just shifted,
#
they were pretty surprised because they've seen me perform in Bombay. And they kind of thought
#
that I live in the city only. And so in that sense, I had an advantage that I didn't have to
#
really introduce myself. I didn't have to really struggle as a nobody in this city. Wherever I
#
would go, whatever conversations will happen, people would know who I am. So that kind of
#
acceptability and respect was always there when I walked into rooms. So the first two years,
#
there wasn't really much happening. An odd film here, an odd film there. But when 2017 came,
#
that's when things, after two, two and a half years, things started moving. More work started
#
coming. Not necessarily the kind of work that I would want, but there were interesting cameos
#
and good films which were enough to sustain me and keep me going while I continued doing my theater
#
and evolving my theater. And then by 2018, the OTT came in. And the OTT, when it came,
#
it was a whiff of fresh air. It did open a lot of opportunities for actors who were not stars,
#
actors who were not really kind of making their name in the film and were getting cameos like me.
#
Because suddenly the economy of OTT was such that it was unsustainable to have more than two,
#
three stars in your web series. And the long format of storytelling required necessarily
#
the focus to be on some six, seven, eight primary characters. So when you have six, seven, eight
#
primary characters in a story and you can only afford a couple of stars in that, the rest five,
#
six will kind of go to actors like me, which meant that we had longer work. We had more time
#
as actor to spend on a character and to kind of show our acting jobs as to, you know, we're there.
#
So that happened. And just when I felt things were taking off, you know, when Bout of Blood had come
#
and Taj Mahal 1989 had come and there was a lot of appreciation, COVID happened. And it just slowed
#
down everything. And suddenly all that advantage was lost for eight months. You had no work.
#
Nothing was happening. No shooting was happening. And when post eight months later work resumed,
#
I got, you know, I again got good roles and I got some great series to work in and some great
#
offers. Some of them are still waiting to get released. Some of them did release like Bombay
#
Begum did release. So, and then again, COVID too happened, which again meant for five months,
#
we were again out of action. So it was a strange time to live in because just when you thought you
#
were breaking through the ceiling, you get throttled and you know, you have to lie low.
#
And then again, you take off and again, you get throttled and then again, you take off. And then
#
I have, I've been working continuously for a couple of years now. I think the last big
#
COVID was really 2021. I mean, we had Omicron wave in January 2022, but it was short-lived and
#
it wasn't really enough to kind of stop work. But all of the work that I've done, I'm waiting and
#
I'm waiting for that to release. And I'm hoping that when that comes out, things would start
#
looking positive. Can you tell us about some of your upcoming releases that you're excited about?
#
Well, I can talk about one, which is a web series called Crime Beat,
#
where Sudhir Mishra is the showrunner. And it's a very interesting crime story where I'm playing
#
a newspaper editor. And then there are a couple of more web series which are still in the post
#
production mode. So I don't know, because the producers have not really revealed
#
anything about that in the market. So I'm kind of bound by contract. And yes, there are a couple of
#
things I'm waiting. I'm in the process of negotiation. And if they work out, then yeah,
#
they'll be exciting projects to look forward to and to work in. Marvelous. Can't wait to keep
#
following your work. And all this time, you've also been active in storytelling, you continue
#
to do theatre and all that. Tell me about your Khoshubba repository, for example,
#
what led you to kind of do that? Like you earlier mentioned that one of the things that you really
#
liked about Habib Tanveer was his repertory and how that kind of inspired you. But having your
#
own repertory is also a big leap because it's like a chef starting a restaurant. You might like
#
cooking, but there's no guarantee that you can run a restaurant. Yeah. So what happened that
#
there was this phase that initially I did a lot of theatre with lots of theatre directors.
#
And then I got into Dastan and I got like big time into Dastan. And basically when you are telling
#
a story, you're a storyteller. You basically remain yourself. You're not really playing
#
characters. You play to your own strength of being yourself. And I started missing out on the
#
opportunity to play characters. And as an actor, you love, you want to play characters. You want
#
to play something which is not you. So I started missing that out. And one of the things that I
#
thought at that time was that maybe I can have my own theatre company finally, this whole dream
#
for the last 10, 12 years that I've had, maybe I should start that now. So in 2012, I opened
#
after kind of working, after being like a freelancer actor and a storyteller for some
#
13, 14 years, I decided that now I should open a repertory company of my own. And I did my first
#
play in 2012, which I kind of produced and directed. And since then, yeah, we've been
#
on. And this year in September, we celebrated 11 years of Hoshruba repertory at Prithvi Theatre. We
#
had a week of our retrospective of our plays happening at Prithvi. And I didn't realize it,
#
but the new play that I opened on Sahil Ludhianvi at Prithvi was our 11th production. So it's 11th
#
production in 11 years. So I thought that was pretty cool. And yeah, I mean, in the sense that
#
the thing that you were talking about, maintaining your artistic integrity and your aesthetic sense
#
and then hitting a commercial success. And I think finally, I have that in the play I made on Sahil
#
Ludhianvi in the sense that whatever productions I've had in past, they were appreciated, they do
#
get appreciated, and I do get audiences. But somehow, you know, people clubbed it in the sense
#
that people saw it as a niche kind of a theatre. This is Dhanush Hussain's theatre appealing to a
#
particular set of people. It wasn't breaking that mask kind of an appeal, which, you know, I would
#
see with other productions by other theatre company. And I would see that people would come, some would
#
like it, some would not like it. But it would get identified with me as this is my kind of theatre.
#
So it will appeal to a certain set of people, but it will not appeal to everybody. I felt that.
#
And forever it was my struggle to kind of not compromise on what I'm doing,
#
but create something which will have a wider appeal. And when I got a chance to create a play
#
on Sahil, and I did not think in terms of commercial success or something, but I just wanted to make a
#
good play, something that would work, would show his life in a more 360 degree complete kind of a
#
view, and bring out the charisma and the enigma of the person on stage so that everybody who comes
#
and watches the play becomes curious about Sahil Ludhianvi and goes out and find out the man and
#
kind of gets invested in the man. And when I opened the show in Prithvi this September,
#
15 days before the play opened, it got sold out. You know, it had such a buzz, and that put a lot
#
of pressure on me. The economists in you should conclude from that that the ticket prices were too
#
low. No, it was the most expensive play in the festival. But if it sold out 15 days in advance,
#
it was clearly too low. So there was a lot of pressure on us, but when the play opened and when
#
people came to watch it and the reactions we got after the play, I felt there was a universal
#
applause for it. You know, it kind of appealed everyone across sections. And I finally thought,
#
like one of my friends, she said to me that after years of art cinema, you finally cracked the box
#
office success. So I was very happy to hear that. And possibly we would be doing the play in January
#
at NCPA. And I'm hoping I'll get the same kind of response. I'll definitely come and see it. And
#
this reminds me of what I often, you know, when I start my webinar, where I talk about Shakespeare
#
with my writing students, I'll often begin by reminding them that Shakespeare was, you know,
#
you think of him as high literature today, he was a box office superstar of his day. He was Yash
#
Chokra plus Steven Spielberg, and he produced great art. And so it is possible to do and clearly it
#
is possible to do in the current time as well. Tell me also about storytelling because I was
#
reading up on Kitsay Bazi. I was completely fascinated by that because it speaks to my
#
earlier question to you earlier in this conversation about accessibility. And it seems that the formula
#
that you found with Kitsay Bazi was to tell great stories without compromising the way it was told,
#
but also to find this innovative way of making it accessible to a much larger audience. You know,
#
so tell me a bit more about how your thinking of that evolved and how it worked out.
#
So when the whole Dastangui fiasco happened and I had moved to Mumbai and I in some way decided not
#
to perform storytelling ever again, I thought I would just stick myself to regular theater and
#
cinema. And then in 2016, I took a break and I was in the US for a month and a half,
#
purely I was taking a break. And I went there and a few people got to know that I'm in the US and
#
they requested me to come and do Dastangui. And I said, I don't do it anymore. But there was
#
insistence and they said that you shouldn't stop doing it for whatever experience you've had,
#
because it's a great form and you're good at it. And it would be a loss to audiences. And I said,
#
okay. So till then I've not performed by myself. I performed always with a partner. So I said yes
#
and I took the challenge and I was in Detroit and I flew to San Francisco and I performed there.
#
And within 10 minutes on stage, I realized I have everything, you know, even though I've not
#
performed for a year or something now, but really it hasn't gone out of my grasp. It's there.
#
And then I started thinking about it and then NCPA reached out to me. And NCPA had this
#
annual theater festival called Center Stage in December. So they reached out to me and they said,
#
we would want you to perform something in our Center Stage Festival in December,
#
and this was December 2016. And I started thinking what should I perform?
#
And then the idea of expanding the storytelling came. I said, why not? Why just Urdu?
#
Why not stories in other languages? There are other languages and there is great literature,
#
both oral and published in these various languages. And people would be missing out on
#
these. I mean, why should I just restrict performing in Urdu? So I thought that let me push it and let
#
me have people perform. At that time, I had somebody who wanted to perform a Malayalam story
#
and somebody wanted to perform a Marathi story and somebody wanted to perform a story in Sanskrit,
#
actually. And I started thinking as to, let's have that. Let's have these stories in these languages.
#
But now the next challenge that arose for me was how would I make a story in Malayalam or in
#
Marathi or in Sanskrit accessible to my audiences? So I started thinking. And that's when I came up
#
with this formula as to why don't I break the performance into sections where some sections
#
are performed in the original language, which is Malayalam or Sanskrit or Marathi, and some
#
sections are performed in Hindi or English depending on the performer's comfort as to what
#
language they want to perform in. And the division of the story I did that was that whatever were the
#
plot points which tell you how the story is proceeding from point A to point B, all those
#
sections of the story, I kept it in the British language. And whatever are the descriptions,
#
I kept that in the original language. So even if you do not understand the original language,
#
you don't get the Malayalam part of it or you don't get the Sanskrit part or the Marathi part,
#
the one that is being said in Hindi or in English, which is giving you the plot point,
#
the basic run of the story, you will be able to figure out as to what the story was about
#
and what did the story actually say. And yet at the same time, you would be able to hear the
#
original language in which it was being written. And I thought that this way I can balance out
#
both the accessibility of the story and the novelty of listening it in the original language.
#
And then I also freed the storyteller from the stage. And I said, you don't have to
#
keep sitting like me and perform as Dastan goes perform. You do whatever you want to do. You want
#
to dance, you dance, you want to play an instrument, play an instrument, you want to walk around,
#
you do that. I said, I open the stage for you. So you don't have to do it as Dastan go perform.
#
Whatever facilitates your story, if dancing facilitates, do it, if singing facilitates,
#
do it, if playing an instrument facilitates, do it. Whatever you want, I'll help you with.
#
So when that happened, I felt I need to give a more generic kind of title to this production.
#
I can't really call it a Dastan because it is really not Dastan. And that's when I thought of
#
the title of Kassa Baazi because Baazi basically means to place a bet or to play something.
#
And Kassa is like a story. So it's basically like playing with stories. That's what Kassa Baazi
#
becomes. And that's when I thought of this title that we have a multilingual
#
kind of a storytelling platform and we call it Kassa Baazi. And within Kassa Baazi, I perform
#
Dastan, whereas everybody else performs whatever they can from their language.
#
And how was it received? Very well, very well, very well. I mean, post COVID, it has slowed down
#
because a lot of actors went away and I also didn't get chance because I got busy with other
#
acting and screen assignments. And I would go back to it because I again have people who
#
want to work with me. And I would go back and I would divide this whole thing. But I had some
#
great shows with people telling stories in Malayalam, in Bangla, in Marwari, in Haryanmi,
#
in Punjabi, in Marathi. I mean, at least in these languages, I had storytellers perform.
#
So it was very, very satisfying to see stories in Haryanmi, Marwari, Punjabi, Bangla, Marathi,
#
Malayalam, Hindi and Urdu. I mean, at least eight languages we performed under the Kassa Baazi banner.
#
And now I would push again and get people to come with more languages and more stories.
#
Amazing. You know, in the break, in one of the many breaks we had, you were talking about how
#
you say no to so many engagements. And I said, hey, thank you for coming here. And you were like
#
that, you know, I feel awkward talking about myself. What is the point? And I tried to make
#
the point that look, it's for me, somebody talking about themselves on my show is not an act of
#
self-aggrandizement where they're putting themselves out there. It's more like a public service.
#
And I mean that really genuinely that you leaving a sliver of yourself for the world to take in,
#
and it just adds a layer to everyone's knowledge and experience of the world.
#
And I think that's a big deal. So thanks a lot for that. But just because I'm saying thanks,
#
doesn't mean the episode is over. Because I know you have a poem on this subject also.
#
So I will ask you to read it out. And after that, I would really love it if you would read out
#
work that is dear to you either by you or by others.
#
Yeah, I mean, the thing you mentioned about sliver of public service. I mean, it reminds me of this
#
Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben. And again, Agamben is slightly problematic for most people.
#
But he said he made a great observation about who is a contemporary. What do you understand
#
who is a contemporary? And one of his contentions was that in every era, there are few events and
#
personalities which completely overshadow everything in that era. They are so illuminated
#
that they blind everything in the brightness of their existence, whether it's an event or
#
whether there are certain personalities in a certain epoch. And that bright light, that
#
illumination coming out of them blinds so much so that people miss out on other smaller events
#
happening in that era. And he says the contemporary is a person who sees through
#
that light a sliver of darkness and is able to shift the light on that sliver of darkness.
#
And I think that's really what art needs to do. That's where art becomes transformative.
#
That's where you shift people's access by some degrees, is that you necessarily take
#
the focus onto that something that's slipping through the cracks. And you say that this is it.
#
This is what is being missed out. This is the unheard voice. This is the suppressed voice.
#
This is what we're not looking at. This is what our era is missing out on. And I think that
#
becomes very important when we talk in terms of what is our art, what is it that we want to do,
#
what is the kind of work that I want to do, what is it that we,
#
whose story we are trying to tell, and what stories do we want to tell.
#
And that thing you mentioned about a sliver of reality.
#
Yeah, it's that conversation about my feeling,
#
my impulse to quieten down and to not really so much speak, then to observe, then to
#
hear other people out, then to listen to what other people have to say.
#
That has increased over the years, especially post 2014 when I shifted to the city.
#
The anxiety to be in the rat race and how to get out of it, to an extent where I don't really have
#
anything to say. And there's this poem which I wrote, which is called, Grace is Poetry.
#
Grace is poetry. To kill the urge to be eloquent,
#
and to become a registry of all that's unsaid, is to rewrite a great poem every time.
#
Beautiful, beautiful. Just lovely. And you said sliver, so I remembered a poem with random word
#
association, but one of my favorite poems by Kay Ryan. Have you read her?
#
Yeah, she used to be America's Poet Laureate. And there is this poem called Train Track Figure,
#
which, of course, I'll link for you.
#
There is this poem called Train Track Figure, which, of course, I'll link from the show notes
#
also, but let me read it out now. Train Track Figure by Kay Ryan. Imagine a train track figure
#
made of sliver over sliver of between car vision, each slice too brief to add detail or deepen.
#
That could be a hat. If it's a person, if it's a person, if it's a person,
#
just the same scant information, time to supplant the same scant information.
#
Wow. Wow. Time to supplant the same scant information. Wow. What a line, man.
#
Indeed. And now back on you. I'm not reading out anymore. Now it's all over to you.
#
There is this poem by Noonmium Rashid. It's called Andhakabadi,
#
the blind junk seller. And it is such a great metaphor for who we are and especially for who
#
we are in this city, Mumbai, where everybody is trying to sell a dream, where everybody
#
has a narrative to sell and everybody wants somebody to buy that narrative.
#
And this poem so beautifully shows that. It's called Andhakabadi. Noonmium Rashid is one of the
#
pioneers of modern Urdu poetry, was a contemporary of Faiz Ahmed Faiz. And I think he passed away in
#
the early 1970s. So it goes like this.
#
Subhote chowk mein jaa kar lagaata hoon sada.
#
Khab asli hain yeh naqli?
#
Yoon parakte hain ki jaise unse barkar khaadaan koi na ho.
#
Khabgar mei bhi nahin. Suratgar e saani hoon bas.
#
Haa, magar meri maishat ka sahara khab hain.
#
Mai phir se lagaata hoon sada.
#
Muft le lo muft yeh soane ke khaab.
#
Muft sunkar da jaate hain log.
#
Chubke se sarak jaate hain log. Dekna yeh muft kaita hai koi dhoka na ho.
#
Aisa koi shoobda penha na ho. Ghar pohach kar toot jaa hain ya pigal jaa hain yeh khaab.
#
Pak se kahin aur jaa hain. Ya hum pe koi sehar kar de hain yeh khaab.
#
Jee nahin. Kis kaam ke aise kabari ke hain khaab.
#
Aise nabeena kabari ke hain khaab.
#
Khaabon ke pulinde sar pe rakkar. Mu bisore lotta hoon.
#
Raat dhar phir barbaraata hoon.
#
Le lo matse inke daani.
#
So it's like one of those iconic poems.
#
I mean I didn't understand some words but I got the sense of it and you just performed it so beautifully.
#
So it's basically about this blind junk seller who wants to sell his dreams.
#
And every time he goes to sell the dreams people doubt whether his dreams have any worth or not.
#
And eventually he's not able to sell any dreams and he comes back in the evening and basically
#
goes off to sleep snoring and still muttering in his sleep that please buy my dreams.
#
And I find this poem such a great apt metaphor to this poem to the city as to where everybody
#
and how as you know that thing you were saying that you find there's numerous talented people
#
in cafes and public spaces milling around and trying to sell those dreams and well who knows.
#
Someday somebody would see that the blind junk seller has great dreams to sell.
#
Wow I hope you're not referring to yourself as a blind junk seller.
#
Let's say that you are at a table with four other people and they are poets or writers you admire
#
deeply and they could be dead they could be alive whatever it is your dream table for perhaps your
#
last meal or it's right to mob it but it is your dream table and each of you the four of them and
#
you have to recite a poem each. So go for it name the people and recite a poem by each of them and
#
one by you or more by you if you want or is that too many I don't want to place so much of a burden
#
on you. No no there are all kind of poets and there are all kind of poems. You pick the number
#
you pick the poem. But I've been in a space where I've been dead in the sense that you know so I
#
saw a dream once and I saw that my dad and I we are in a penthouse and I'm I've just kind of woken
#
up and I'm sitting at the edge of this fabulous huge king-size bed and I see that my father is
#
going around with the plumbers and the electricians kind of fixing minor things in the penthouse and
#
he's instructing you know like get that switch right and get that you know fix fix that thing
#
out there and I'm looking and I'm like wow what is this penthouse and how did dad manage that how
#
did he manage it and and I and I kind of look around and I say dad this is a great place
#
I mean you're gonna have so much fun so my dad turns around and he says really you think you'll
#
have great fun here I said yeah all my girlfriends would love it when they would come to this
#
penthouse and then my dad just very poker face turns around says well for that your girlfriends
#
have to be dead first. Wow. So basically I was dead and I was in paradise with him. Yeah yeah
#
what a great last line yeah yeah wow. So yeah I mean like now that Ranbir Kapoor's animal is coming
#
I've also had a very complicated relationship with my father.
#
Do you dream about him often? Yes and I wrote this poem which
#
actually got published in this anthology that came out on the 75th year of Indian independence and
#
about Indian English writing basically about you know the contemporary Indian ending writers so I
#
think Sudip Singh he edited this and and a British publisher published it and converse it's called
#
converse. I'll link all these from the show notes anyway so the listener can find them easily.
#
The Conjurer of Meaning part two. The poem. Wonderful poem.
#
when I locked gaze with dad minutes before he died.
#
I plunged into his eye pools tailing the disappearing light chasing the myth of my father
#
through veins and nerves through his brain's crevices till we reached the cranium.
#
Just when he was to step into another dimension he turned swiftly and said chase your own fiction.
#
So yeah so this poem kind of got a lot of appreciation and got published in the anthology
#
and also in the yearbook of English poetry 2022 and yeah so this it kind of comes out in this
#
multiple ways. Beautiful beautiful. And yeah coming back to what you were saying
#
one is Noon Mim Rashid Diyanda Kabari that I recited and I love Kaleem Ajiz and he has a very
#
conversational style of of saying his ghazal.
#
Madh bura usko kaho garche wo achcha bhi nahi wo nahota to ghazal mai kabhi kehta bhi nahi.
#
Baraha guftagu hoti rahi lekin mera naam.
#
Baraha aksar guftagu hoti rahi lekin mera naam usne pucha bhi nahi maine bataya bhi nahi.
#
Dosti usse nibha jaye baahut mushkil hai.
#
Dosti usse nibha jaye baahut mushkil hai apna do wada hai uska to irada bhi nahi.
#
Then there is Irfan Siddiqui who I think is a great poet and he says
#
Then of course there is the great Ghalib
#
Though the moon's beauty is resplendent when it's full moon
#
But my sun, my own moon, my beloved whose face is like the sun is better than the full moon
#
Bosa dete nahi, dil pe hai har lehzanika
#
Ji mein kehte hai, muftaye tumal achcha hai
#
Aur bazaar se liaay agar toot gaya
#
So Jamshed was this great Persian emperor and he had this goblet
#
And the peculiarity of that goblet was that if you stare into it, it can tell your future
#
But the catch was that you shouldn't be nervous while watching in it
#
Because there was only one of its kind and if it breaks then you've lost it
#
So everyone who would hold it would be so nervous that they would not be able to see their future
#
But that was the thing that if you want to see your future, you stare into the goblet but you shouldn't be nervous
#
And Jamshed means mitti ka jam, mitti ka goblet
#
What Ghalib is saying is
#
Aur bazaar se liaay agar toot gaya
#
Saghare jam se mera jamshed achcha hai
#
Whatever you get without asking, the pleasure is doubled
#
Be talab de to usme mazaa sewa melta hai
#
Bo gada, that fakir, that mendicant, jusko naa ho khu-e-sawaal achcha hai
#
Aur unke dekhe se jo aaj aati yeh moopar raunak, wo sumajhte hain ki bimaar ka haal achcha hai
#
Aur hum ko maloom hai jannat ki haqiqat, lekin dil ke khush rakne ko ghalib yeh khayal achcha hai
#
Let me just decide a couple of more for you
#
So this is Sahil Udhyani
#
Ki deri saanson ki thakan, teri nigahon ka sukoot, dar haqiqat koi rangi shararat hi na ho
#
Mai jisey pyaar ka andhaas samaj baitha hoon, wo tabasson, wo takallon teri aadati na ho
#
Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle
#
Everything I do is stitched with its colour
#
I actually share this poem with my writing students to illustrate
#
The power of an image and the power of sure don't tell
#
That you don't need fancy adjectives or you don't need to be verbose
#
That you can just make an emotion so powerful with just this one image
#
And then wahi lehja hai, magar yaar teri lafzo mein, pehle ek aak si jalti thi, bujha di gayi kya
#
This is Irfan Siddiqui's poem
#
This was by a writer, Dr. Abdul Wahab Sukhan, he's a contemporary writer
#
I love this couplet, whenever I see a good couplet I kind of jot it down
#
That is the great part about poetry, it kind of sums up such complex things in such few words that it's unmatchable
#
Like this Madan Mohan Danish ka ek shir, kya sitam hai waqt ka
#
Kya sitam hai waqt ka, is door ka, har aadmi, hai tu ek kirdar, par apni kahani ka nahi
#
The summing up keen sentiment of in the long run we are all dead
#
I love this Faseem Barelvi poem
#
And that's true, that's true
#
Well more or less this is there, maybe I can just give you a couple of more
#
This is called a plain landscape
#
In order to exist, you must be on earth, on a plain landscape, rooted at a spot from where it seems all earth does is converge to your being, to your standing still
#
The sky is a very giant, caught on the wrong foot, shedding a load off his shoulders
#
In order to exist, you must be on earth, on a plain landscape, with no shallow pits, no open caves, no revines, no rifts, no ridges, no crevices, not even human architecture, no prose, poem or memory, not even a tittle-tattle tale
#
Because to enter, an opening, a doorway or a text means to exit, you're gone, you're ceased to exist
#
It's called plain landscape
#
I'll just recite one more, I don't want to take your time
#
I could sit here all evening, but I think you have an appointment soon
#
And by the way, I know you post a lot of your poems on Instagram once in a while, so that link will be in the show notes for those who are interested
#
Yeah, that's true, this one is called Itihas Ki Kaghar
#
It's true that not all Jews used to hate
#
It's true that not all Jews used to hate
#
Some were opportunists, only with power
#
Some were greedy, only with greed
#
Some were helpless, only following orders
#
Some were trapped in their own delusions, not even believing in themselves
#
Some used to think that the political circle was something else
#
But sadly, at the height of history, all those who didn't hate, all of them are called Nazis
#
Then there was this poem by Kumar Ambuj
#
I basically translated this poem
#
So I'll read the original first and then I'll read my translation
#
So I translated this into English
#
When someone questions, the revolver is emptied on them, all six of the bullets
#
First for their audacity, second for keeping an opinion, third for their death, fourth to ensure their debt, fifth for one's own hatred, and sixth to show one's devotion to the state
#
So I'll ask you to end by a request I make of many of my guests
#
Which is, for me and my listeners, recommend any kind of art, books, films, music, which means a lot to you and which has given you so much joy that you want to share it with the world
#
Sure, there's just one which I wanted to recite
#
My bad luck, I can't find the poem I wanted to recite the most
#
Now my concern is that I've not lost it forever
#
No, but it will be, I'm just not able to find it
#
Yeah, it's called Your Touch
#
I seek your touch like a refugee swimming with land in sight
#
Like a medley of words, close to a poem, wrestling a metrical demise
#
So now my question, recommendations
#
Books, films, music, anything that means a lot to you that you really love and you love so much you want to share it with everyone
#
I would talk about the books that profoundly hit me when I read them
#
One was Milan Kundera's The Joke, which was quite an eye-opener when I read it at the age of 19
#
Then Saul Bellow's Herzog, which I think is essentially one of the greatest novels that I've read
#
I would also recommend Edward Said, almost everything that he has written
#
He's perhaps one of the most colossal thinkers that we've had in the 20th century
#
I would recommend anything by Mary Oliver and Toni Morrison, just read it
#
Also, I would say Step Across the Line, the series of essays by Salman Rushdie
#
Simply inspiring just to read that
#
I would recommend that you should also read almost everything by Mantu and Isma Chokhtai without fail
#
Harishankar Parsai, you should almost read everything that he has written
#
I would also recommend that you should read besides Saul Bellow and Milan Kundera
#
I would also recommend that you basically read
#
Most of the things which John Kenneth Galbraith has written
#
These are the top-of-the-mind kind of thinkers that I have, people that I've read
#
In terms of cinema, I would say Watch Garam Hawa, which I think is one of the greatest films we've made
#
Shatranj Ke Khiladi, almost everything by Satyajit Ray
#
Well, of course, Godfather is there
#
In the long run, we are all old
#
Dua Aakhe Baara Haat, Mandi, Paati, the 1984 film
#
Of course Ghoshla Ka Ghoshla, which I very loved
#
What in recent times I've seen, which has really
#
Yeah, that's good enough
#
Most of the other people would have already said that
#
So Danish, you've spent almost the whole day with me
#
I know you have many useful things to do with your time
#
So thank you so much for this
#
You're most welcome, it was such a pleasure and delight
#
I was very nervous as to what would I speak for six hours
#
But you made it so breezy and so easy for me
#
I just kind of flew by, that's it
#
Thank you so much, my privilege
#
Thank you, thank you so much
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode
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