No direction home: Chauthi Koot

(Spoilers abound)

“As the sun, far in the West, slid behind the tall trees, my heart too started sinking heavily.

I would look at the watch, wonder about the speed of the bus, look at the bus driver and at the spreading darkness outside. While I was trying to gauge the feeling of fear and worry writ on Jugal’s face, seated toward my right, he flashed a smile in return.”

This is how Waryam Singh Sandhu begins his short story "Chauthi Koot" (The Fourth Direction). It’s also how Gurvinder Singh begins his film of the same name, based on this and another Sandhu story. In the original text, it takes several pages before we learn why the narrator and his friend are so worried. Singh stretches those pages into a supremely tense opening passage. Two men, both Hindu, are desperate to get to Amritsar. They overcome the protests of a guard and barge their way onto a train.

Once inside, they freeze. Two of the men sitting in the compartment are sardars. Though the word “militant” hasn’t yet been mentioned in the film (which is set in Punjab in the 1980s), we can tell that the newcomers are wondering if they’re staring at one, or two. As the train rattles along and the men eye each other warily, the stage is set for something to happen—an explanation, perhaps, or a stand-off. Then, with a simple “A few months earlier…”, we find ourselves watching a completely different story.

It’s a bold move, yanking the viewer out of a narrative that finally seems to be getting somewhere and dropping them cold into another. Even more audaciously, the film’s almost over by the time we return to the first story. Yet, one can see why Singh has structured it so. If the opening passage is a question, the extended middle segment is an answer—of sorts.

Joginder lives with his family and his dog, Tommy, in a village that’s under the twin grip of militancy and the military. One night, Tommy’s barking brings separatist fighters to their door. They threaten Joginder and tell him to kill the dog (the barking might alert security forces). The next day, army men, working on a tip, ransack the house. Yet, Tommy won’t stop barking at night. It’s clear what Joginder must do, but when he does deal with the problem, taking a shovel to the dog, it’s still a shock.

This moment will most likely end up determining what you feel about Chauthi Koot. For me, it was as if Singh located all the hopelessness and desperation of the times in a single act of inhumanity. There are powerful reasons for Joginder to do what he did: the twin visits have shown the very real threat to his and his family’s lives, and the loyal but irrepressible Tommy is clearly beyond silencing. It’s undeniable that Joginder loves the animal, calling him sher and puttar. Does his affection for his pet make his actions all the more indefensible? Perhaps, but the alternative—letting Tommy bark night after night, inciting the already riled-up militants—is also untenable.

Joginder’s actions reminded me of a decision taken at a similarly tense moment in a film that couldn’t be more unlike Chauthi Koot. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), an exploration of race relations in New York’s Bedford–Stuyvesant neighbourhood, reaches a fever pitch during an argument at Sal’s Pizzeria. Matters escalate, and the police end up choking a young black man to death. As the stunned crowd realises what’s happened, the film’s mild-mannered protagonist, Mookie— who works for Sal—grabs a garbage can and sends it flying through the shop window. This starts a riot, and the pizzeria is burnt down.

It’s been 27 years, but Lee probably still gets asked if Mookie did the right thing. The answer I’ve always heard him give is that this particular question is usually posed to him by white people. A young, unarmed man is dead. What’s a pizza place—one covered by insurance—compared to that? But for viewers, it isn’t that simple. We feel attached to abrasive but kindly pizzeria owners like Sal, and boisterous dogs like Tommy. We see the brutality and wonder if it might have been avoided, even though it cannot compare with the larger brutality that surrounds these incidents.

Whether Joginder did the right thing is something viewers will have to decide for themselves. As with his first film, Anhey Ghorey Da Daan (2012), Singh gives us fragments and leaves us to figure out the whole picture. As I walked out of my second viewing of the film, it struck me that the two men had walked screen left to right in the beginning, and right to left in the end. Is this a comment on the futility of their journey? Is the mention of Operation Blue Star, the Sri Lankan civil war and racial strife in South Africa in the same radio broadcast significant? It really depends on what you see, and how you see it.

Chauthi Koot is less elliptical than Anhey Ghorey Da Daan, in which details of plot and character were handed out so sparingly that the film was ultimately easier to admire than feel any emotional connection to. In his second film, Singh is content to provide a little more information, though his filmmaking style is still spare, quiet, fixated on minute detail. The sound design (Susmit Bob Nath), music (Marc Marder), art direction (Priyanka Grover) and cinematography (Satya Nagpaul) blend into one another so beautifully that at times it's difficult to separate them. Some moments that are so precise they’re breathtaking: a tiny bird balancing on a stem in the early morning fog; a startled chicken flying into the frame when a gun goes off.

All the elements come to a head in the film’s one set piece. A religious convoy comes by Joginder’s village and asks for directions. In the next scene, we’re travelling with them as men and women on tractors and trucks sing about ancient battles and drinking the blood of enemies. As their voices gain in strength, shots are fired into the air and shouts of "Bole sau nihal" ring out. The procession come to a halt and, in an astonishing overhead tracking shot, we zip across the length of the convoy, stretching for what seems like a kilometre. The scene ends in chaos, with the police arriving and telling everyone to disperse. There are so many elements embedded in this scene—the martial traditions in Sikhism, the pairing of religious fervour and violence—that one could spend hours picking it apart. Yet, like the film, it’s most powerful when experienced as an unsettling, vivid whole.

This piece appeared on the Mint website.

Sairat: Keeping it real

(Wrote this for the Lounge website a couple of days after Sairat released. A close reading of the film, so there are spoilers.)

In an interview with The Hindu, Nagraj Manjule spoke about the linguistic subtleties of the word “sairat”—Marathi for all-consuming passion or obsession, and the name of his new film. “The word can have both positive and negative connotations,” he said. “For you, it might imply freedom of thought, liberation and progressive ideas but to another person, it could mean sheer wildness and recklessness.”

Though Manjule’s films are built on progressive ideas, recklessness tends to have the upper hand in them. His first feature, 2013’s Fandry, was about a lower-caste boy infatuated with an upper-caste girl who goes to his school. In one wrenching scene, the boy and his family chase after a pig as the villagers gather around and make fun of them. The film ends with a stone hurled at the camera, the consequences of which are unspecified, but almost certainly dire. The warning was there for all to see: Manjule was unafraid of following his stories through to their logical, unhappy conclusion and hurling these conclusions at us, the audience.

Though Sairat is also about a lower-caste college-goer, Parshya, in love with an upper-caste girl, Archie, its initial stretch bears little resemblance to Manjule’s first film. Our first glimpse of Parshya—mid-leap, staring sideways at the camera, as if itching to break the fourth wall—encourages the idea that this is a commercial film, with all its attendant suspensions of disbelief, and not a bare bones indie like Fandry. Had Sairat ended with Parshya and Archie on the run, having escaped her politician father’s goons, it would have been a fairly standard, if uncommonly charming, film about how young love overcomes all obstacles. The first hour and a half is close to wish fulfilment—gutsy heroine, sweet-natured hero, selfless friends and enemies who can be outrun and outwitted.

But when Sairat returns after the break, it’s a very different film. If the earlier half was about the impracticality of passion, the latter half reminds us that for love to survive in the real world, practical considerations are of the utmost importance. In Mani Ratnam’s Alaipayuthey, remade in Hindi as Saathiya, viewers were shown what happens when the excitement of new love is replaced by the real business of making a life together. Manjule’s film is even blunter, turning a commercial musical comedy, swooping camera movements and all, into a kitchen sink drama. Ajay-Atul’s buoyant music is replaced by silences that weigh heavy on the characters, and on us. Archie, so decisive in the village, becomes withdrawn, and the hitherto unsure Parshya takes charge. The film begins to ask questions we don’t want answers to, like whether Archie, who’s used to a comfortable life, will stick it out with her husband in a slum. There’s a huge fight, and though it’s eventually resolved, Parshya comes close to hanging himself. As the contrite lovers embraced, I noticed the very deliberate framing of the scene, with the noose hanging down beside them. It felt like a warning.

Looming in the back of my mind as I watched Sairat were memories of Ek Duuje Ke Liye and LSD: Love, Sex Aur Dhoka, part of a small group of films that remind us how, nine times out of 10, tradition will snuff out free love in this country. I was also reminded of Michael Haneke’s unremittingly bleak Funny Games. Though Sairat may seem miles away from the cold brutality of that film, both derive their sting from the way they play with audience expectations—raising hopes, dashing them, then raising them again. After Parshya’s near-suicide, Manjule compresses the couple’s next few years into a montage. He finds work in an auto service shop, the factory she works at promotes her, they have a child together, and life seems impossibly happy. Impossibly.

Parshya and Archie’s toddler walks in on his unsteady bare feet and finds his parents lying on the floor, exhausted but happy. They hug him and say, you’re going to meet your grandfather. A couple of weeks later, they’re in Archie’s home in the village. Father and daughter have made up, and son-in-law has been accepted as part of the family. There’s a quick song, then end credits. And the audience gets up, says, phew, that was a close one, he almost killed himself.

This is the ending we’d want. But we know it isn’t the right one. There’s something wishful about a headline that reads “Eloping lovers welcomed back by parents”. “Inter-caste couple hacked to death by family” is far more realistic. What is truly shocking isn’t the way Sairat ends, but the idea that a film like Sairat could end this way. All those songs and dances, the bravado and hope, is revealed to be an elaborate smokescreen, a way to reel audiences in, to lull them into complacency. Then, just like that, Manjule snaps his fingers and says, wake up.

When you can’t say @#%*

In October, writer-director Kanu Behl appeared in a sketch video by comedy collective The Viral Fever. Censor Qtiyapa shows Behl bringing his first film to a “Pre-censor Board”, where directors such as Hansal Mehta and Vasan Bala tell him that all this cussing and extramarital sex just won’t fly. We love your film, they say. Just clean it up.

Like all good satire, Censor Qtiyapa cuts close to the bone. A couple of months before the sketch released, Behl went before the actual censor board with Titli. The film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival and travelled the festival circuit from Chicago to Hamburg. Behl, however, knew that this would mean little to the Central Board of Film Certification and was prepared for the eventuality of cuts and an A-certificate.

The first interaction, with the CBFC’s examining committee, started off well. “They told us, we really like the film, it’s one of the best we’ve seen of late,” Behl says. The committee told Behl that they wouldn’t recommend any cuts—a significant victory, for Titli is disturbingly violent in parts—but that he would have to take out “all the language”. The makers were aghast—that would come to some 70 cuts. They decided to appeal to the next stage of the CBFC: the revising committee. That discussion was along similar lines—the committee members loved the film, but there were guidelines to follow. Finally, a compromise was reached. Three scenes with an inordinate number of expletives were identified; Behl offered to remove the expletives from one altogether and reduce the cussing in the other two “by 50%”. He could keep the rest.

Just when Titli seemed to have got through fairly unscathed, it came up against the immovable object that is Pahlaj Nihalani. A producer of commercial melodramas in the 1980s and 1990s, Nihalani took over as CBFC chairperson in January 2015, after his predecessor, Leela Samson, and nine board members quit, citing “interference, coercion and corruption”. Summoning the film-makers to his office, he told them that the decision of the revising committee was invalid, that there was no such thing as reducing invective by 50%. (In an ideal world, one would agree.) He offered them two alternatives: Submit the film to the revising committee again or incorporate the committee’s suggestions for the three scenes and remove all the other expletives. With a release date looming, the film-makers had to agree to the latter.

Behl wasn’t the only writer who faced this sort of humiliation last year. These last 14 months have seen an unprecedented amount of censorship, much of which has centred on the language used in films. In a scenario where an unofficial war has been declared on words, consider the plight of those responsible for these words. What does it mean to have exclamations, sentences, entire scenes you’ve written ripped out by a committee that’s following guidelines dating back to when 'saala' was an unpardonable insult? Are screenwriters today starting to second-guess themselves whenever they put anything mildly offensive on paper? Are they becoming, like in that TVF sketch, their own pre-censor board?

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In June of 1930, Donald Bradman, then 21 and playing for the first time at Lord’s, made 254. This innings would go down in cricket history for its utter chance-less mastery of an attack. Bradman himself regarded it as his finest knock. “Practically without exception every ball went where it was intended to go,” he wrote in Farewell To Cricket, “even the one from which I was dismissed”.

Once in a while, when the planets align and the literary gods look down benevolently, writers get to feel the same way: Every word goes where it is intended to. Good writers are compulsive rewriters, modifying, embellishing, agonizing over their choice of punctuation, syntax and tone. But once they’ve finished fiddling and are satisfied with the results, they like all the words—not just the ones that make them look smart or funny, but the little half-thoughts and interjections and grunts that are, in their heads at least, the bedrock of their characters’ personalities.

For screenwriters—who, quite often, must protect their vision from producers, financiers, directors and the demands of the market—the idea of a hard-won final draft is even more important. “From a writer’s point of view, it’s a deliberate act of putting certain thoughts, certain philosophies, certain points of view on paper,” says Juhi Chaturvedi, the screenwriter of Vicky Donor and Piku. “It’s not random, ki galti se likh diya toh kaat do.” I heard the same thing from writer after writer—that pretty much everything on the page is there for a reason. Which is why it hurts when they are told, as they so often are by the CBFC, that they cannot use the words.

Chaturvedi has a reputation as a writer who can say what needs saying without raising the hackles of the CBFC. In May, Piku sailed through the censors untouched, even the scene where Amitabh Bachchan declares that his daughter is not a virgin (the same word was almost deleted from 2014’s Finding Fanny, another film starring Deepika Padukone). A few years earlier, Vicky Donor became the first Indian film—the first mainstream film, at any rate—about sperm to open in theatres across the country. Today, Chaturvedi says, she isn’t sure whether a film about a remarkably fertile sperm donor could even be made, let alone passed.

Though its name was changed from the Central Board of Film Censors in 1983, the CBFC has never really thought of itself as a ratings body. Relying on the exhaustive and often vague guidelines of The Cinematograph Act of 1952, the board has always been keen to cut, mute, reduce and blur, even when it has rated the film as “A”. Certain topics have always been, and continue to be, verboten: religion, caste, nudity, excessive violence and anything that might irritate the government in power. As a result, there’s never a time that someone or the other isn’t feuding with the CBFC. But all things considered, language seemed to be one area where things were loosening up.

This process began in 1996, when Bandit Queen landed on Indian screens with its Molotov cocktail of an opening line: “Main hoon Phoolan Devi, behenchod.” It continued through such disparate films as Hyderabad Blues, Omkara, Ishqiya, Delhi Belly, Paan Singh Tomar and Gangs of Wasseypur. By 2014, it looked like film writers might soon be able to take language for granted and start pushing other kinds of boundaries. Then, in January 2015, Samson resigned, Nihalani took over and immediately began with his mission of washing Indian cinema’s mouth out with soap.

From the start, Nihalani made no bones about the kind of moral approach he would like to see in Indian films. Asked by The Hindu whether he thought people might accuse him of being conservative, the then newly appointed CBFC chairperson said: “I don’t mind being called that if I have to serve the nation. You have to take care of the new generation, on whom the future of the country depends.”

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“I can see it has started affecting me. It has started affecting people around me—the directors I’m working with, producers, my writer friends. You still fight and stuff, but in your head, whenever you’re writing something, you think, yeh toh kabhi pass nahi hoga. And then you think, do I want to go down this road?”

I’m sitting in Sudip Sharma’s study, listening to him wonder aloud whether the CBFC’s actions over the past year are driving writers to self-censorship. In a sense, Sharma is perfectly placed to talk about the current state of affairs. NH10, a film he wrote about a Gurgaon couple stalked by a group of homicidal Jats, was one of the first to bear the brunt of the new board’s stricter rules regarding language. Sharma described meeting the examining and revising committees as a “fascinating process, provided it isn’t your film”. “A lot of bargaining takes place,” he says. “You actually find yourself saying things like, ‘Okay, if you’re removing the slap, leave saali.’”

NH10 was eventually released with 14 cuts, a list of which one can find on the CBFC website. It wasn’t just the spoken word the board had a problem with. A key scene has Anushka Sharma staring at the word 'randi' scribbled on the wall of a bathroom stall. Sudip Sharma and director Navdeep Singh were initially asked to blur the word. They protested, arguing that the scene was integral to the film’s structure (there’s an echo, with 'raand saali' appearing on another wall towards the end). They were eventually allowed to “reduce the visual by 50%”—apparently, a glimpse won’t engender the same moral corruption that a longer look might.

Why does Nihalani end up getting blamed for a decision like this? One reason could be his visibility; more than previous chairpersons, he is regularly in the news, defending the board’s verdicts. It could also be because, according to several people I spoke to, he’s made himself an essential part of the certification process. While his predecessors tended to avoid involving themselves on a regular basis, only intervening when the film in question was especially controversial, Nihalani is, by all reports, more than happy to be in the thick of things. In May, board member Nandini Sardesai told The Telegraph that the chairperson was clearing the big releases himself instead of allowing the board to do so. Several people, writers and otherwise, told me that while the members of the revising and examining committees were usually sympathetic and open to discussing cuts, the chairperson just wasn’t someone you could reason with. One person recalled how, during a meeting, Nihalani told him: “What do you new film-makers think of yourselves? I’ll tell you how films are supposed to be made. Just wait and see what kind of films will be made in the next two years.” (Despite multiple attempts to reach Nihalani by text, email and phone, we received no response.)

The CBFC guidelines are vague enough for a chairperson to impose his or her own value system on the decision-making process, if so desired. Nihalani has made it clear in interviews that he isn’t comfortable with the idea of on-screen cussing (“Normal civilized people don’t abuse the way we see in films”); violence (“The violence can always be suggested without bringing it on screen”); nudity (“People are paying money to watch [Sunny Leone]. How can there be tolerance for all this?”); and anything remotely connected to homosexuality—which has manifested in particularly indefensible ways. Early on in his tenure, the word 'lesbian' was muted in Dum Laga Ke Haisha. More recently, in an unprecedented move, the board slapped the trailer of Aligarh with an “A” certificate, which meant it could only be played before other A-rated films. When asked about this, Nihalani said that the subject of homosexuality wasn’t for children or teenagers.

Amazingly, this wasn’t even the strangest CBFC decision concerning Aligarh. In a couple of scenes, the central character, a gay professor, is shown yawning and dozing off in court. According to the film’s writer, Apurva Asrani, they were told to shorten these scenes as they constituted, in the eyes of the CBFC, contempt of court. “It’s not even a ‘tareekh pe tareekh’ scene, where the character is challenging the court,” Asrani says. “He’s sleeping because he’s just been harangued and he’s lost his house.”

For sheer strangeness, though, this is surpassed by a recent decision by the examining committee to deny a certificate to a Gujarati film called Jivan Sathi. The reason, according to a letter from the committee to the producers, is: “The end of the film shows bigamy, which is not as per Hindu Marriage Act.” Even if this were a reason to deny a film a certificate, it shows the board’s double standards. Kis Kisko Pyaar Karoon, in which the popular TV comedian Kapil Sharma plays a man with three wives and a girlfriend, was cleared for release in September.

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Whether this particular censor regime is resulting in large-scale self-censoring by writers is difficult to gauge. One might have to wait a little longer, for films written in the Nihalani era, in order to see whether themes and modes of expression have altered significantly. The writers I spoke to all felt differently about whether their own writing was being affected. Sharma was one of the few who openly admitted to fallout; after his experience on NH10, he went back to a script he had written when, as he put it, the mind was free and without fear, and made changes to it, “taming it a bit, scaling it back”. Asrani, on the other hand, said that what he had faced with Aligarh made him even more determined not to compromise. Behl confirmed increasing signs of self-censorship in the film community and said that while his first concern was to “let the film flower fully and be what it wants to be, there are more fears now, because you know what can or will happen. I try and not think about it. But it does play on your mind.”

Often, it isn’t so much about being driven to self-censorship as working in an atmosphere of vague, constant unease. Screenwriter and comedian Varun Grover says that he often feels the censors are over his shoulder, watching him as he writes. At the same time, he also feels that the censorship situation in India—pre- and post-Nihalani—often forces him to come up with writing solutions that are better than the more explosive ones he might have otherwise gone for. He gives the example of a memorable line from Masaan, in which an inspector tells Richa Chadha her life is over. “I might have written tumhari zindagi toh jhaant ho gayi hai, but it wouldn’t have been passed. So I came up with tumhari zindagi toh condom ho gayi hai, which is a better line.”

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Chaturvedi talks about the disappointment that the current board does not seem to take milieu or context into account before muting language. “In certain environments, you can’t have sophisticated, well-spoken people,” she says. “Go to Assi Ghat in Benaras; you’ll see that everyone there abuses—men, women.” A week after this conversation, I found myself in the office of Chandraprakash Dwivedi, a CBFC board member who, coincidentally, happens to have directed an as-yet-unreleased Varanasi-set film called Mohalla Assi. Dwivedi, best known as the director of the National Award-winning 2003 film Pinjar and for his role as Chanakya in the 1990s TV series of the same name, joined the CBFC at the same time as Nihalani. It was his March 2015 letter to the chairperson that, when leaked, was the first indication that there were members of the board who weren’t comfortable with the list of expletives (including 'bastard', 'rakhail' and “double meaning any kind of words”) that Nihalani wanted banned from all films.

It’s unlikely Mohalla Assi would be passed by the very board Dwivedi is a member of. Though there’s only a patched-together trailer online—one which Dwivedi disavows—the footage seems to confirm Chaturvedi’s observation that one could go down to the ghats and come back with one’s dictionary of abuses radically expanded. Though he reserved comment on the film, Dwivedi says he and “other like-minded members” had raised the issue of context as far as strong language was concerned in the second board meeting. “Per se, we are not against abusive language,” he told me. “It cannot be a blanket ban.”

In Dwivedi’s estimation, one of the biggest problems with the CBFC is that an inordinate amount of power ends up concentrated at the top. “The guidelines are framed in such a manner that it leaves a lot of scope for the chairperson to exercise his rights,” he says. “But that also makes the entire process futile, because the decision is not by majority. There are nine members (in the revising committee), and if one member disagrees, it is referred to the chairperson. Now, it is the chairperson’s interpretation, his wisdom, to say yes or no.”

There is, as Dwivedi points out, and as Nihalani tried to while being lambasted by Arnab Goswami on Times Now (“I’ve been waiting for you for a long time,” the anchor crowed at one point), an option for film-makers unhappy with the CBFC’s decisions. They can approach the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal, a statutory body set up under a retired judge. Films submitted to the tribunal when they had not been cleared by the censors range from MSG: Messenger Of God to Park Street, a film on a rape that took place in a Kolkata neighbourhood in 2012. Increasingly, this is becoming a go-to option for directors and producers with little faith in the CBFC. Recently, the producers of Vikram Bhatt’s Love Games went to the FCAT after the CBFC ordered them to make 18 cuts. The film was cleared. There are also unconfirmed reports that the Ekta Kapoor production Great Grand Masti is likely to go straight from the examining committee to the tribunal.

Even the writers I spoke to seem to regard the FCAT as a more viable option than the CBFC grind. Behl says he would probably take his next film straight to them. “We had considered going with Titli, but the release had already been pushed, so we decided against it,” he says. Grover agrees, saying that taking a film to the tribunal makes it seem like more of a “serious case”. Of course, there’s always the chance that the FCAT will deny the film a certificate, as it did with Porkalathil Oru Poo, a film about the rape and murder of a journalist by the Sri Lankan army, or The Textures Of Loss, a documentary on the impact of violence on ordinary Kashmiris. The only option then left is to go to court—a risk few producers or directors are willing to take.

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Right now, almost everyone has their hopes pinned on a committee appointed by the government to review and recommend changes in the functioning of the CBFC. The presence of Shyam Benegal at the helm has raised expectations; the director has made it clear that he is no advocate of censorship. The committee even asked the public to send in recommendations—more than 6,600 mails were received through a website called Save Our Cinema. Yet, many forget that in 2013, a similar committee was set up under retired Delhi high court judge Mukul Mudgal. The report, which is available online, recommended, among other things, a more nuanced film classification system and clearer guidelines as to the appointment of regional officers and “advisory panel” members (who form the bulk of the examining and revising committees). As is often the case with expert panels constituted in this country, none of its recommendations were implemented.

In the end, all everyone’s asking for is a little respect: writers and directors from the committees that decide their fate; board members who find their decisions undermined by a single nay vote; possibly even the chairman, struggling to maintain the sort of moral absolutism that young film-makers today just don’t relate to. A little predictability would be nice as well: In the past few months, Spectre had its kissing scenes shortened, while The Danish Girl was released with frontal nudity. The sooner all concerned know exactly what they can’t do, the sooner they can go about trying to do exactly that.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

The man who almost wasn't there

This piece was supposed to be a focused interview in Mint Lounge. It ended up a long form feature in Mint on Sunday, under a different title and with a lot of unnecessary paragraph breaks.

Even if you haven’t seen Bajrangi Bhaijaan, you have probably heard of the Chand Nawab scene. A reporter for a Pakistani TV channel stands on a busy railway platform and tries to deliver a “piece to camera” about people visiting their homes for Eid. However, his flow is repeatedly interrupted by people who keep wandering into the frame. Though it comes bang in the middle of the most commercial contemporary setting possible—a Salman Khan film—the scene has something of the spirit of classic silent comedy, where the set-up, more than the punchline, is everything.

There’s an awful cam print of the scene on YouTube. When it starts, you can hear the people in the hall cheer. It’s a Salman Eid release, but everyone’s thrilled that Nawazuddin Siddiqui is finally on screen. Their faith is repaid in full by the actor, who more or less takes over the second half. Though they are being taken through one of the friendliest Pakistans ever committed to film in India, the audience still needs a guide, and Siddiqui is the perfect person for the job. His asides are brilliantly laconic—he silences a burqa-clad Khan up with a casual “Phir boli, Begum?”—but he can also shift the tenor of a scene from comedy to pathos with less apparent effort than his co-stars, Khan and the young Harshaali Malhotra. I have heard more than a few people say that the film really began for them once Siddiqui turned up.

That someone like Siddiqui is eliciting cheers at all is a bit of a miracle. He should, by rights, have risen to “character actor” and stayed there, like Raghubir Yadav or Deepak Dobriyal. Many of his films have had limited releases; some, like Dekh Indian Circus, have never been seen by the public at all. Yet, by some twist of fate, he has become a leading man. This is in part due to his choices: after his career-making turn in Gangs of Wasseypur, he has balanced arthouse projects like Miss Lovely with more accessible non-mainstream fare like The Lunchbox and occasional forays into commercial cinema (Kick, Bajrangi Bhaijaan). But his popularity with the public, which extends from indie aesthete to small-town cinemagoer, is also a measure of the man—viewers look at him and see someone who is an outsider, self-made, relatable.

The timing of Siddiqui’s rise to fame has also been fortuitous, coinciding with a moment of visible ascendancy for indie cinema. Put in plainer terms, Siddiqui is the face of independent and left-of-mainstream cinema in this country. His career began in earnest with Peepli [Live] in 2010—though some will insist that it all started with that scene in Black Friday (2004) in which he is being interrogated in a jail cell, his desperation palpable in spite of the distracting, lurid red lighting. Since then, he has appeared in Paan Singh Tomar, Kahaani, Gangs of Wasseypur, Miss Lovely, The Lunchbox and Badlapur—some of the most challenging, innovative films to emerge from India in the past few years. That list might have included his largely unseen films Monsoon Shootout (which went to Cannes but hasn’t released here yet) and Liar’s Dice (which screened at Sundance and had an extremely limited release in India in 2014).

Then there’s the merely good and not-that-great stuff that he has enlivened with cameos and supporting turns. In Talaash, his turn as the streetwise Tehmur enlivens the otherwise dour proceedings. In Chittagong, he finds time amid the chaos of the freedom movement to awkwardly fall in love. He was scary in Aatma, and an entertaining borderline psychotic in Kick. And his bravura performance as a struggling actor who is given a brief moment in the sun (a theme that must have resonated with him) elevated Dibakar Banerjee’s segment above the other three in Bombay Talkies.

***

When we met Siddiqui, he was busy doing interviews for his latest release, Ketan Mehta’s Manjhi: The Mountain Man. The film tells the real-life story of Dashrath Manjhi, a villager whose grief moved him to carve a path through a mountain over 22 years. It has been a couple of years in the making. Mehta, who came up during the parallel cinema movement, shot the movie in early 2013. It was then embroiled in legal wrangles, and is only seeing the light of day now. Siddiqui was offered the role in 2012. Gangs of Wasseypur hadn’t released at the time, and he was only beginning to get recognized because of his roles as the scarily intense Intelligence Bureau officer in Kahaani and the local journalist in Peepli [Live] who develops a crush on the big-city reporter. Still, he was hardly a household name at the time.

How Siddiqui went from unknown quantity to movie star is one of the more improbable success stories in Bollywood. He was born in 1974 in Budhana, a village in Uttar Pradesh. His father was a farmer, and Siddiqui grew up with nine siblings. In a 2012 interview to DNA, he said: “In my village, only three things work: gehu (wheat), ganna (sugarcane) aur gun.” He moved to New Delhi after college; his first job there was as a watchman. He developed an interest in theatre and enrolled at the National School of Drama, graduating in 1996. He worked in Hindi theatre for a while, then moved to Mumbai.

The decade that followed was a hard slog. Siddiqui worked in TV, in B- and C-grade films, in cameos and bit parts. Breaking into the Hindi film industry without any connections or benefactors is tough enough, but to do it as a swarthy, ordinary-looking guy was almost unthinkable. But he kept at it, turning up for a minute here, a few seconds there in films like Sarfarosh, Shool (sharing a scene with future Gangs of Wasseypur and Chittagong co-star Manoj Bajpayee) and Munna Bhai MBBS. Gradually, the roles started getting meatier. That decade of struggle—highlighted in every Siddiqui profile ever written—keeps him on his toes even today. “It was difficult to keep up the effort when nothing was happening,” he said. “Even today it’s difficult to believe that things worked out. When people say I’m a star, I don’t believe it.”

Manjhi was a challenge for Siddiqui, because unlike nearly all the other characters he has played, this one was based on an actual person—someone who was quite well known by the time of his death in 2007, and more so after the TV show Satyamev Jayate dedicated a segment to him. “You have videos of the man, you have people who knew him,” Siddiqui said. “So, I had to become him physically, understand his mindset.” In preparation for the role, he met Manjhi’s son, daughter-in-law and fellow villagers. “They would tell me how he was larger than life, how he used to say everything loudly. I based my characterization on what they said.”

It was a difficult shoot. Mehta had decided they would shoot in Manjhi’s village (Gehlaur in Bihar) and in the neighbouring rocky terrain. This meant camping at Gaya overnight, waking up at three in the morning and travelling for a couple of hours to reach the village. To add to everyone’s worries, the area was known to have a Naxal presence. After concluding what he described as “the toughest shoot of my life”, Siddiqui had trouble detaching himself from the character. He took off by himself, travelling to places like Sam in Rajasthan to clear his head. He likes to travel, he said, especially to places where people don’t recognize him. When I asked him if that happened less and less nowadays, he just smiled.

***

When we met Siddiqui, it had been two weeks since the release of Bajrangi Bhaijaan. Kabir Khan’s film had already passed the Rs 100 crore mark; it has since grossed an astonishing Rs 600 crore worldwide. For Siddiqui and Manjhi, this was perfect timing. “I feel happy because my smaller films coming up will get more of an audience now,” he said. I asked him if he had seen a noticeable increase in his following after Kick—his first film with Salman, in which he extended the tradition of indie actors playing masala-film villains. “Definitely,” he deadpanned. “Working with Salman should have this advantage at least.”

Siddiqui was careful to give credit for the Chand Nawab scene—based on a real-life video that went viral—to the film’s director. “It was Kabir’s idea,” he said. “He had seen the video and decided to incorporate it in the film.” Keeping in mind the complexity of the scene, with all those moving parts, Jaisalmer station had been booked for the entire day. Shooting started at 9am. An hour later, they had wrapped up the scene. The first take was perfect. “In the film, you have the end bit, but we actually shot the whole thing,” said Siddiqui, referring to the original video, in which Nawab’s agony is prolonged over five minutes. “It was a very difficult scene. You had to be very sure of when you were to forget your lines and start over. I must have seen that video a hundred times at night. When I did it in the morning, I had seen it so much that it got done in one take.”

Seeing a video a hundred times over might sound like an exaggeration, but in Siddiqui’s case, it is probably true. When he gets a script, he says he tries to internalize the dialogue until it seems like the words are coming via the character, not a screenwriter. “One should go to the line through the character,” he said. “You should see their lifestyle in the way they speak.” In several of his films, it may seem like he is ad-libbing, so offhandedly are some of the lines delivered. This isn’t the case, he said. “The easier it looks on screen, the more hard work goes into making it so.”

Siddiqui had been cast by Kabir Khan once before, back when he was still a bit-part player. The film was New York (2009), which examined the fallout of 9/11 from the perspective of Indians living in the US at the time. Siddiqui played a man who is wrongfully detained and tortured on suspicion of being a terrorist. Curiously, even in that film, the highlight of his performance is a piece to camera of sorts. For nearly two minutes, he describes the horrors he was subjected to in jail, slowly breaking down, moving Katrina Kaif’s interviewer (and, most likely, the viewer) to tears. In a recent TV interview, Khan said that people used to come up and ask him whether that actor in his movie was an actual 9/11 detainee. More importantly, this brief scene—along with his appearances in Black Friday (made in 2004, released in 2007) and Firaaq (2008)—meant that directors had also started asking, Who’s that guy?

***

Siddiqui’s first film this year, Badlapur, was an illustration of the sort of creative risks he is willing to take. It is safe to say that very few roles like this have been attempted in Hindi cinema before. Escaping with his partner after robbing a bank, Siddiqui’s Liak throws a young kid from the car they have hijacked and shoots the mother. And he shows no particular remorse when the father confronts him in jail. Director Sriram Raghavan said he had Ratso from Midnight Cowboy in mind while writing the part, but even Dustin Hoffman didn’t have the scales loaded against him to the extent that Siddiqui does here.

For a while, the film looks a straightforward revenge story, like Raghavan’s own Ek Hasina Thi. But something strange starts to happen. As the father, Raghu, is increasingly warped and curdled in his plans for revenge, Liak becomes—almost imperceptibly—more sympathetic. You see him attempt a prison break, which is comically foiled. He ages. He turns philosophical. He is diagnosed with cancer. By the time he is released, the audience is at least partly on his side. It sets the stage for a gesture of forgiveness that is one of the great endings in modern Hindi cinema.

Over the phone from Lonavla, where he was conducting a film workshop, Raghavan said that the handling of this very gradual shift was something that he and the actor had discussed at length. “It was tricky,” he said. “It wasn’t like we decided that this was the moment where he would start changing.” Siddiqui felt the same way. “The transformation is supposed to be so smooth that you don’t know when it is happening. The change should be in the back of your mind—always in the background.”

Siddiqui was Raghavan’s first choice for Liak; coincidentally, the character was initially named Nawaz. Initially, when he was told about the film, Raghavan couldn’t tell whether Siddiqui “loved it, hated it, or even understood it”; the actor confessed that he was worried whether audiences would accept his character or end up despising him. But he accepted the role, and Raghavan soon realized that he had found the right man for a tricky part. “I had given him the freedom to try things out, throw a line. Most of the time, he would surprise me. I was seeing Liak come alive.” Later, director Ramesh Sippy told Raghavan that he felt viewers were reacting to Siddiqui the same way they had reacted 40 years earlier to Gabbar Singh in Sholay.

During our brief chat, Raghavan mentioned something that seemed to speak to the self-effacing nature of Siddiqui’s fame. When asked how the actor was on set, Raghavan said: “He is invisible. Before the scene, I would look around and say, ‘Where is Nawaz?’ He would be standing there, two feet away.” This is entirely believable, not just because Siddiqui is slim, slight and quiet, but also because he is no one’s idea of what a movie star looks like. But he looks very much like a small-town gangster, a struggling actor living in a chawl, a villager taking out his grief out on a mountain—the kind of characters one rarely used to see on the big screen. He could well surprise us and play an urbane city-dweller one day, but for now, it’s enough that he is touching a chord through his explorations of ordinary lives so often ignored or airbrushed by Bollywood.

Masaan: Review

Trains, both metaphorical and literal, are at the heart of Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan. They are a surprising metaphor for the stirrings of first love. As two young people fall in love, a beautiful couplet unfolds on the soundtrack: “Tu kisi rail si guzarti hai/ Main kisi pul sa thartharata hoon”. Like the locomotive that ran past fields of kash in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, train are also symbolic of escape. It’s no coincidence that both Devi (Richa Chadha) and Deepak (Vicky Kaushal)—the central figures of Masaan’s parallel story strands, each looking to escape Banaras and its limitations—find jobs working with the railways.

Trains also contribute to one of the gentler moments of heartbreak in the film, which won two awards in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. We already know that Devi wants to leave her home in Banaras, find a job worthy of her qualifications and escape the moral censure of her father, Vidyadhar (Sanjay Mishra), a former Sanskrit teacher, now a pandit at the city’s holy ghats. She gets a job as a ticket seller at the railway station, informs her father she might move out. But one day, over lunch, her sweetly plainspoken co-worker explains that of all the trains coming to the station, only 28 stop, while 64 pass through. It’s easy to come here, he says, but it’s difficult to leave.

This is not what Devi—or the audience—wants to hear. The odds have been stacked against her ever since the opening minutes, when her maiden romantic tryst with her boyfriend at a motel is broken in on by the police. The boyfriend panics, locks himself in the bathroom and slits his wrist. Instead of hushing things up, the police officer in charge tells Vidyadhar that he must come up with Rs.3 lakh—a sum way beyond his means—to prevent a video of his daughter turning up online. Vidyadhar—conservative, shattered—takes his frustration out on his daughter, asking her why she brought shame upon him when he “let her free, like a boy”. Devi lashes out at him at well, accusing him of contributing to her mother’s death.

As Vidyadhar scrambles around for money and Devi gathers up the shards of her dignity, another, seemingly lighter story unfolds. Deepak, a young college student in a family of professional cremators, meets Shaalu (Shweta Tripathi). She lives in a nicer part of town, and her surname—Gupta—indicates that her caste is a lot higher than his, in a city that really cares about such things. As the already-fragile relationship between Devi and her father frays, Shaalu and Deepak become close, a progression played with delicate humour by Kaushal and Tripathi.

By the end, you feel like you know these people very well: Vidyadhar, trying, failing, and then trying again to be a good man; Devi, whose mortification gives way to righteous anger; the small-town coquettishness of Shaalu and Deepak’s inability to keep whatever he’s feeling from registering on his face. Even the smaller roles are beautifully etched out—Devi’s railway station colleague (played by Pankaj Tripathi) is as loving a parody of a small-town government official as I’ve ever seen.

Masaan doesn’t strive for effect—it achieves it by degrees. No one stands out, but everyone does an outstanding job. Grover’s screenplay has a depth of observation and a sense of timing that point to his twin careers as lyricist and stand-up comic. Cinematographer Avinash Arun comes up with the same unfussy, simple compositions that marked his own directorial debut, Killa. Indian Ocean contribute three evocative songs (the score, by Bruno Coulais and them, is over-insistent). The performances are near-perfect: Mishra tortured and prickly, Chadha tamping down her natural combativeness until it’s no longer possible, and Kaushal making a supremely confident debut. And in his first film, Ghaywan (who assisted Anurag Kashyap, one of the film’s producers, on Gangs of Wasseyur) sees that everything comes together simply and movingly.

I don’t think there was any great need for the two stories to intersect—it’s one of the few times the film makes a decision that’s a nod to convention and not something that deepens our understanding of the characters. (One could argue, on the other hand, that the idea of sangam (confluence) is teased throughout the film.) Yet, apart from this, hardly anything happens that’s inconsistent with the film’s world or its elegiac tone. This could have been a film about gender rights, caste and small-town corruption, but these issues are only acknowledged to the extent that they affect the characters. We’re wrapped in their lives, and like any great film, we’re anxious for the future well-being in the end. I left the hall thinking not of pandits and funeral pyres, but of sooji ka halwa as atonement, of a young boy desperate to dive for coins, of red balloons loosed into the night-time sky.

This review appeared in Mint.

Amit Trivedi: King of the 10%

When the line-up for last year’s NH7 Weekender was announced, there was one name that caused a small but definite flutter. It was the inclusion, in a festival known for its indie leanings, of someone who has composed nearly all his music for Bollywood movies. Yet, there it was: Amit Trivedi to headline the Dewarists Stage. After seeing his set during the festival’s Pune leg, Lalitha Suhasini, editor of Rolling Stone India, fired off a worried blog post. While admitting that Trivedi was a “fantastic composer” and that some 8,000 people turned up to listen to him, she lamented: “If anyone ever needed more proof that Bollywood reigns supreme, then it was here.”

When I asked Vijay Nair, head of Mumbai-based event and artist management company Only Much Louder, which organizes NH7 Weekender, why the festival lent its stage to a film composer, he argued that Trivedi was almost like an independent musician in Bollywood. “Even if kids are into rock or electronic music, (Trivedi’s) the one person whom they like. You can see that his influences come from outside Bollywood. He was an easy choice.” There’s a cellphone video from Trivedi’s Pune set that is up on YouTube, a performance of "Ha Raham (Mehfuz)" from his first film, Aamir. I wouldn’t have bet on any crowd—let alone an indie fest one—knowing the song, but everyone is clapping in time, singing along, swaying to the music.

Is Trivedi that giant circus tent under which music fans of different feathers can gather? It’s true that he’s the first composer since A.R. Rahman to appeal to a broad swathe of music listeners while maintaining the integrity of his sound. Metalheads can thrash about to "Emotional Attyachar" and "
"Dilli". Mainstream rock fans can sway to "Aazaadiyan" and "Kinare". More experimental listeners can wrap their heads about genre-bending soundtracks like Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana. And for those who desire nothing more than a dance-floor-ready Bollywood thumper, there’s "Gal Mitthi Mitthi Bol" and "London Thumakda". Trivedi has worked with Bengali influences in Lootera, and Gujarati in Kai Po Che! Sometimes, it’s all done within the space of a song. "Badri Badariya", composed for MTV's Coke Studio, moves seamlessly from rock to Rajasthani folk to jazz scatting.

Trivedi’s pre-eminence in the industry today is so complete that it’s easy to forget that he’s only been doing this for some eight years. That’s nothing in the life of a Hindi film composer: Shankar-Jaikishan worked together for 20 odd years, R.D. Burman’s career spanned more than three decades. Even Rahman, Trivedi’s hero, has nearly completed a quarter-century in film. Will people be humming "Shaam" 20 years down the line, the way they still do "Chhoti Si Aasha"? It’s impossible to say, of course, though of all the composers working in Hindi film at present, 36-year-old Trivedi seems to have the best shot at longevity.

*****

I met Trivedi on a miserable Saturday afternoon at his studio in Andheri (West), Mumbai. He’d been working since morning, and was now in a meeting with lyricist Irshad Kamil. As I waited, I looked around the room and noticed framed silhouette drawings on the wall. They turned out to be scenes from Mozart operas. My mind jumped to an ill-advised comparison—Trivedi as tuneful Mozart to Rahman’s blustery Beethoven. But this juxtaposition seemed to fall apart as quickly as it suggested itself: neither Rahman’s nor Trivedi’s music lends itself to such simplistic categorization. It further disintegrated when Trivedi said that the panels were a gift and that he wasn’t a particularly devoted listener of Mozart.

Trivedi hasn’t had the easiest year so far. His latest, Guddu Rangeela, doesn’t seem to have made much of an impression. But the big blow was his other release, Bombay Velvet, Anurag Kashyap’s gangster film set in 1960s Bombay, which seemed to have perplexed the public at large. There have been jazzy songs in Hindi movies before, particularly in the 1950s with C. Ramchandra and Shankar-Jaikishan, but this is perhaps the first Hindi film soundtrack to be entirely predicated on jazz. Even this had to be filtered through a Bollywood sensibility. “Jazz has no audience in India,” Trivedi says. “The music of Bombay Velvet is me adapting that which is not ours. I had to make sure it didn’t sound superficial, but also keep the film industry in mind.” What’s unfortunate is that this is one of Trivedi’s most satisfying albums, with impassioned belters like "Dhadaam Dhadaam", slinky torch songs like "Mohabbat Buri Bimari" and the O.P. Nayyar-aping "Sylvia". Perhaps the balancing act itself was his undoing—too Bollywood for jazz fans, too esoteric for regular cinema-goers.

It isn’t surprising that Trivedi feels gutted by the drubbing the film received. His involvement with the project goes back to 2009, when Kashyap handed him some jazz CDs and a sliver of an idea. “A lot of time has gone into it, a lot of labour,” he says. “But when the film doesn’t work in totality, everything sits down.” He says this has happened with him once before—the soundtrack suffering because the film didn’t connect—with Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana, a lesser-known Trivedi offering that blended rustic Punjabi folk, Ennio Morricone-ish backing vocals, drum and bass, and the least celebrated Yo Yo Honey Singh cameo ever ("Kikli Kalerdi"). “Nobody had heard about him at the time this was recorded,” Trivedi chuckles. “We never knew he would become a superstar one day”.

*****

I wonder if anyone who knew Trivedi before he was a film composer guessed that he would be a superstar one day. He grew up in Santacruz, Mumbai, the son of Gujarati parents, neither of whom was particularly musical, though Trivedi does credit his mother with introducing him to a lot of “good Gujarati music”. Film songs were not played in the Trivedi household, only bhajans, kirtans and lok geet. This changed when, around the age of 13, he heard Rahman for the first time. “I heard Roja, Thiruda Thiruda, Humse Hai Muqabla,” he says, a sudden spark enlivening his thoughtful, soft-spoken manner. “They blew my head off. I was like, what is this? We don’t make music like this in India.”

How did Trivedi go from listening to Rahman to being called the next Rahman? He insists that there was no grand plan. “The first instrument I ever played was an electronic disk that I borrowed from my neighbours when I was 13,” he told FT Magazine in 2013. “Honestly, I have no idea what you’d call this thing. All I know is that it was round and when you touched it, it played different notes, sort of like a keyboard.” He got a little jazz and Indian classical training, but mostly taught himself. He listened to Boney M., R.D. Burman and Michael Jackson and, later, Pink Floyd and The Beatles. He was composing by the time he was in class X. In college, he gave background scores for a few stage plays. By the time he graduated, he’d decided music was his calling.

His first recorded work was as a keyboardist and arranger for Om, a fusion band he formed in 2003 with Shriram Iyer, Amartya Rahut and a couple of others. The band did release an album but was never more than mildly successful, and its members gradually drifted apart. Trivedi worked in advertising, composing jingles and scores, and as a freelance composer supplying tunes to pop singers like Abhijeet Sawant and the band F4, which comprised former participants of the TV show Indian Idol. “I never thought of being a Hindi film composer,” he says. “I didn’t think that the kind of music I wanted to do, Hindi films would ever be ready for that.”

Luckily, he was about to meet someone who would build up a reputation for doing things Bollywood wasn’t ready for. Shilpa Rao, a playback singer whom Trivedi knew well and had worked with before, introduced him to Anurag Kashyap, who by then had already directed Paanch and Black Friday—both hugely controversial—and the Kafkaesque No Smoking. Trivedi didn’t specify what he made Kashyap hear in those initial meetings in 2007; the Sawant and F4 tracks that survive online are pretty undistinguished, so it might have been his own demos. Whatever it was, it worked. Kashyap told Trivedi about a film he was planning, a modern-day version of Devdas set in Delhi.

Dev.D’s soundtrack was, for many listeners, the first Roja moment since Roja. I remember hearing the soundtrack when it released in early 2009 and wondering—much like Trivedi had when he first heard Rahman—what on earth is this? Trivedi’s first release was actually Raj Kumar Gupta’s Aamir (it was recorded after Dev.D, but released earlier, in June 2008), but while that had seemed like an interesting experiment, this sounded like a statement of purpose. It ran contrary to all that was prevalent and popular: as Trivedi reminds me, at the time he was making the album, Himesh Reshammiya ruled the charts. It was unusually long, with 18 tracks, and dizzyingly eclectic, from the trip-hoppy "Saali Khushi" to the bouncy pop of "Yahin Meri Zindagi" to the heavy metal charge of "Emotional Attyachar". Most people at the time assumed that they’d only use about half the songs in the film, but that wasn’t the case. All 18 were featured in their entirety. What’s more, the music seemed to embed itself deeply into the narrative—at certain points, take over the function of the narrative itself.

*****

If there’s one aspect of Trivedi’s music everyone agrees on, it’s that he has a knack of finding the right song for the right situation. Lyricist and singer Amitabh Bhattacharya, whose witty, evocative turns of phrase one most often finds attached to Trivedi melodies, says he thinks of his friend as a “film-maker’s composer”. “Amit understands the tone of the film very well,” he adds. “His music somehow becomes synonymous and resonates with the world of the film. He has that rare quality of not just creating songs which will become blockbusters but capturing the true essence of the film he’s working for.” Sometimes, both happen. When Trivedi was doing the background score for Wake Up Sid (the songs were by commercial favourites Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy), director Ayan Mukerji asked him if another song could be introduced somewhere. Trivedi looked hard at the script and saw an opening. The result was the wistful "Iktara", a huge hit and a perfect encapsulation of the romantic confusion that Mukerji’s characters found themselves experiencing at that point in the film.

Trivedi says he insists upon seeing the script, or at least hearing a narration, on all his films. “When I know the world of the film, it helps a lot. I go very deep into the characters’ headspace, their thought process, the chemistry between people. So I have to think about music from a very cinematic point of view.” He gives the example of his climactic anthems, something of a Trivedi trademark by now.
"Aazaadiyan" from Udaan and "Kinare" from Queen—both of which start off slow, pick up pace halfway through and end up in full-throated Springsteen territory—have a common structure, he says, because the films in question have similar climactic sequences, involving characters slowly building up the confidence to leave their past behind.

Sometimes, the film’s milieu is a bigger influence than the structure of the screenplay. I had always wondered if the glockenspiel that Trivedi used in "Sawaar Loon" was a tribute to "Main Zindagi Ka Saath Nibhata Chala Gaya". Turns out it was: Lootera director Vikramaditya Motwane and Trivedi wanted to pay tribute to early masters like S.D. Burman and Jaidev, and this was the easiest subliminal link from a 1961 Dev Anand-film to a Dev Anand-referencing film set in 1950s West Bengal. On the other end of the spectrum is his work in No One Killed Jessica. Director Raj Kumar Gupta wanted a song to kick the movie wide open, something that reflected the in-your-face nature of Delhi life. Trivedi came up with Dilli, a thrash metal number that’s still the most extreme thing he’s recorded.

*****

Trivedi has been responsible for 25 feature film soundtracks till date. Like most Bollywood composers past and present, he tends to form partnerships with directors: he’s worked thrice with Gupta and Kashyap, twice with Motwane and Vikas Bahl. Yet, he differs from popular contemporaries like Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, Vishal-Shekhar and Pritam in his choosiness. He seems to prefer, even seek out, a certain kind of film: slightly left of mainstream, story-driven, not entirely indie but never out-and-out “masala”. He says he likes working with writer-directors, a distinction few other composers are likely to have considered. He received dozens of big-budget offers after Dev.D. He turned them down. Till date, none of his films have starred any of the three Khans.

Trivedi takes things like directors and script narrations seriously because they influence the kind of music he gets to produce. “In India, music that sells the most is either love songs, heartbreak songs, party songs or item songs,” he says. “This has been the template for years. But with films like Udaan or No One Killed Jessica, where there’s no love story, no chance for an item song, this rules out that 90% chunk, and brings in that 10% kind of music.” Collaborating with open-minded directors means that he’s able to push the envelope more often. Once, while working on Ishaqzaade, he was asked to come up with a score for a short promo director Habib Faisal had cut. The visuals were particularly pacy, and he had the idea of matching their speed and then suddenly dropping the tempo, Skrillex-style. Faisal heard it and, to his credit (in a making-of video, he admitted that it was like “factory sounds” to his ears), asked Trivedi to use the effect in a song. That’s how Aafaton Ke Parindey, Bollywood’s first dubstep track, was born.
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Of course, there’s an obvious downside of working on films that take risks. Trivedi feels that, when it comes to subjects and approaches that are alien to audiences—Bombay Velvet, for instance—the failure of the film can take music down with it. “This isn’t an in-your-face hit song like 'Baby Doll', this is music created for the narrative. If the situations don’t connect, when the film goes flat, the music will not work.” The failure of a film he’s involved with hurts him more than criticism of his music, he said. “Bombay Velvet was a huge blow. After this, nothing will affect me.”

*****

This March, Trivedi appeared, for the third year running, on Coke Studio, with a new song. It was called "Teriyaan Tu Jaane" and featured the electrifying Nooran sisters, who sang Rahman’s "Patakha Guddi" for Highway last year. When the video went up on YouTube, several comments alleged that the horn arrangement was similar to the “Chaand ki main choodi pehnawa” melody line from Trivedi’s Gal Mitthi Mitthi Bol (no one seemed to care that the guitar riff was cribbed from "Roxanne"). I don’t know if Trivedi saw these comments, but if he did, they probably brought back memories of the time when he went online and found that he was being called the next Anu Malik. An orchestral movement he had written for a Lootera track, "Shikayatein", was similar to Rachel Portman’s theme for the Anne Hathaway-starrer One Day. Trivedi says he had no idea that One Day or its theme existed, describes the similarity as “bad luck” and says he even wrote to Portman’s people clarifying his position but received no response. Even today, he seems a little shocked at how virulent the public reaction was.

This might have been the one time when the public turned on Trivedi. A couple of his albums (Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu; Aiyyaa) have been clunkers, but all in all, his has been a very consistent career: Dev.D soundtrack and Iktara in 2009, Udaan and Aisha in 2010, No One Killed Jessica in 2011, Ishaqzaade in 2012, Kai Po Che! and Lootera in 2013, Queen in 2014, in addition to appearances on Coke Studio and MTV Unplugged—and that monstrously ear-wormy "Hello Honey Bunny" jingle for telecom brand Idea.

When you’re being called the next Rahman, though, consistency may not be enough. It’s been a while since Trivedi’s done anything that’s truly out-there—a lot of his music tends to inhabit a tuneful middle ground. The last time he caused a truly seismic change was with Dev.D, whereas Rahman has done this at least a couple of times during his career (as did Sneha Khanwalkar in 2012 with her Gangs Of Wasseypur soundtrack). This is why Bombay Velvet is important—it may not be Trivedi’s best-received work, but it shows that he’s up for the challenge. Motwane, one of Trivedi’s favourite directors, feels he might still be exploring his range, and that his future work was likely push in directions not attempted before. “Amit has no ego,” he says. “He’s totally open to any kind of feedback. He likes to be pushed.”

Trivedi is currently working on Shaandaar, a “destination wedding film” by Vikas Bahl, and Abhishek Kapoor’s Fitoor, an adaptation of Great Expectations set in Kashmir. He’s also doing the soundtrack for Abhishek Chaubey’s Udta Punjab, which he describes as “very trippy, urban, edgy, lots of attitude, lots of rap”. He’s planning to release a non-film album sometime in the near future, though what it will sound like or whether he will be doing all the singing is undecided. Though his resonant voice has featured on nearly all of his albums since Aamir, he considers himself a “kaamchalau bathroom singer”. What seems to be exciting him most, however, is the prospect of finally meeting Rahman in person. “When that happens, I’ll be the interviewer,” he says.

There’s one story that remains to be told. While composing for Bombay Velvet, Trivedi realized that the showstopper, "Dhadaam Dhadaam", would require something special from the singer, Neeti Mohan. Instead of giving her the song right away, he spent time getting to know her. One day, he told her that he wanted her to sit locked in a dark room for an hour, think about tough times she had been through and how she had soldiered on. It was only when she emerged that he gave her the music and asked her to bring the feelings going through her head in that room to the song. Her performance—bruised, soaring, cathartic—was a high point of the soundtrack and the film. So if it seems at times like it all comes very easy to Amit Trivedi, just remember: He did all this for one song.

This ran as the July 4 Mint Lounge cover story.

Killa: Review

It’s not surprising that the opening shots of Killa are a slow glide down a forest road, a diminutive figure sitting on the beach after sunset, and a young boy coming in from the rain. Nature registers with astonishing force in Avinash Arun’s film. It never just rains, it barrels down. Winds howl. Waves crash. And when the sun shines, the light is clear and touched by something other-worldly. It’s visually impressive, yet it also serves a higher purpose. In a film that’s so focused on childhood and memory, the fierceness of the elements prevents the narrative from slipping into sepia-tinted nostalgia.

Eleven-year-old Chinmay (Archit Deodhar) and his mother (Amruta Subhash) have just moved to a tiny seaside town in the Konkan region. His father died recently, and that’s obviously on his mind, but his biggest problem at the moment is adjusting to life in a small town (his mother requested a transfer from her government job in Pune because she thought the change would do them good). His school life gets off to a rough start: introducing him to the class, the teacher announces that he’s a scholarship-winner, an announcement that does nothing for his street cred. Still, he eventually falls in with charismatic, authoritative Yuvraj (Gaurish Gawade), class clown Bandya (Parth Bhalerao) and their gang.

Killa’s central scene—the clearest example of Arun pitting human drama against the backdrop of nature—takes place when the boys cycle down to an old fort. Chinmay has just beaten the highly competitive Yuvraj and the others in a race. While they’re fooling around, he wanders off to explore the fort. There’s a sudden storm, and he’s forced to take shelter. When he emerges, he realizes that the others have left him and gone. We see him screaming their names, but the wind is so strong we can’t hear the sound.

Was the abandonment intentional? Did Yuvraj have a hand in it? Or was it just bad luck that Chinmay disappeared from view? We’re never fully certain. At any rate, Chinmay reaches home, physically unharmed but emotionally dented. The betrayal seems to unlock the sadness and rage in this hitherto placid boy—he acts out, accuses his mother, who’s dealing with work troubles of her own. For a while, things are stormy. Then the seasons change. The sea becomes calmer. There’s a healing incident involving a drunkard and a boat trip. There are apologies all round. And there’s another upheaval, met with grace and acceptance.

Arun based this, his first film as a director, on childhood memories of living on the Konkan coast. His previous work has been as a cinematographer, and he took the decision—rare for directors—to shoot Killa himself. He has an eye for little details: a crab scuttling across the sand; the spiral of a staircase; a pencil box with compartments that pop out. Killa takes its cue from recent Marathi films about children (Shala, Vihir, Fandry) by resisting sentimentality and instead looking at childhood as a time of great uncertainty and flux. Yet, for all the turmoil, the film has charm to spare. The young cast is wonderful, especially Deodhar and the scene-stealing Bhalerao, and Tushar Paranjape and Upendra Sidhaye’s writing has a relaxed humour to it.

Even as a first-time director, Arun has the good sense not to push scenes into revealing their meaning. Early on, Chinmay and his mother visit a lighthouse, and a guide explains how its light guides ships home. Much later, Chinmay reads aloud a poem about a sailor surviving a storm and finds courage in the image of his mother. The film could have spelt things out at this point but Chinmay just smiles and says to his mom, “Deep, isn’t it?” It’s moments like these, which leaven emotion with humour, that make Killa such a pleasure to watch.

This review appeared in Mint. 

The boy in the well

It was November 2013, and Avinash Arun was in Goa with a rough cut of Killa. The film, his first as director, had been selected for the National Film Development Corporation’s Work-in-Progress Labs, in which directors are advised on how to see their films through to fruition. One of the advisers was British film critic and long-time supporter of Indian cinema, Derek Malcolm. “People said different things; it’s a little long, it’s beautifully shot, there’s nothing in the film,” Arun recalled. “Derek, on the other hand, just said: ‘It will be very cold in Berlin in February’”.

It was very hot in Mumbai in mid-May when Arun told me this story. We were sitting in the Andheri office of Jar Pictures, the film’s producers. As Arun was to find out, it was indeed cold when he travelled to Germany to attend the Berlinale, one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world. The film had entered in the Generation Kplus category, which is dedicated to children’s films. It won the top prize, the Crystal Bear, awarded by a jury of 11-14-year-olds. Earlier this year, a considerably older panel declared Killa the Best Marathi Film at the National Film Awards.

A young boy (Archit Deodhar) and his mother (Amruta Subhash) arrive in this small seaside town. Still coming to terms with the death of his father, he has had to leave friends and family behind in Pune. Not unnaturally, he blames his mother for getting transferred. Yet, as the narrative quietly unwinds, we see him embrace his new surroundings and find a group of friends. There’s a sub-plot involving the mother that gives us a clue to why she keeps getting transferred, but Killa mostly sticks close to young Chinmay as he explores, fights, makes up, acts out; in short, behaves like any normal child.

Like many first-time film-makers before him, Arun mined his childhood for memories. His father had a government job, which meant that the family would relocate whenever he got a new posting. One particular stint early on in Arun’s life had a profound influence. When he was 3, his family moved to Murud, on the Konkan coast, for three years. “The film is about this introvert child who’s out of his comfort zone. It rains all the time, he has no friends. This was my experience.”

The film started to form in Arun’s head while he was studying at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune. “Images from the time I was in Konkan would keep coming to me. After some time, I had to ask myself, why are all these things, I saw when I was very young, still following me? It was in trying to answer this question that Killa started taking shape.”

After graduating from FTII, Arun started working as a cameraperson on Hindi and Marathi films. His plan was “to work for a few years as a cinematographer, and if someone likes my idea and I find a producer, I can make my film.” While assisting Anil Mehta on Cocktail, Arun sought out a screenwriter named Tushar Paranjape, whom he knew from his FTII days. He narrated the idea that would become Killa, and asked him if he’d write the screenplay. When Paranjape agreed, Arun asked him to write a 40-page treatment and—sans producer or financier—wrote him a cheque for Rs.10,000.

The next piece fell into place on the shoot for Kai Po Che!, which Arun was again assisting on. The executive producer on that film was Ajay G. Rai of Jar Pictures, who happened to see Arun’s work on a short film by Gul Dharmani called Friday Night. The two of them got talking, and Rai mentioned that he was looking to produce a regional language film. He asked Arun if he knew of anyone with a promising idea. “Mere kaan khade ho gaye,” Arun said. He told Rai that he had this idea that kept haunting him, and began narrating an outline of Killa. Rai stopped him after 10 minutes, called his partner, Alan McAlex, and asked Arun to start again. Two days later, he got a call. He was going to be a director.

Arun decided to shoot the film himself (in Maharashtra’s Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg districts), despite nearly everyone advising him against it. He wasn’t sure anyone else would be able to get the images in his head on to film. He was also convinced of the necessity of a protracted shooting schedule. Though the film took only 28 days to shoot, the production was stretched out over five months. “I wanted to wait for the right light, the right weather,” he says. “I wanted to have that difference. I wanted to have that feeling that time has passed.” The result is one of those rare films where changes in wind, light and scenery register with the force of emotions.

A curious and rewarding trend in modern Marathi cinema is the number of films about (though not always geared towards) children. Killa follows in the tradition of Shala, Balak-Palak and Fandry: its vision of childhood is clear-eyed and unsentimental, and there’s a darkness that offsets the charm of its young players (in particular, the irrepressible Parth Bhalerao as Chinmay’s friend Bandya). Arun didn’t include one of his darkest memories from the time, of being pushed into a well by another child. He was unhurt, but it triggered a fear of water in him, as well as a sense of betrayal that took a while to get over. This incident is transformed into the tremendous sequence at the fort (the titular killa), where Chinmay is left alone in a dark space, looking up at the light, the same way Arun must have been.

If you’re the kind who pays attention to film credits, you’ll see Arun’s name on screen a lot in the coming months. Killa will release in theatres on 26 June. The following month will see the release of two films he shot: Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan, which recently picked up two awards at the Cannes Film Festival, and his biggest project till date, the Tabu and Ajay Devgn-starrer Drishyam. “I didn’t plan all this,” he said. “If I’d thought about it, I don’t think I’d have been able to do it.”

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Sound and fury: Gurvinder Singh's Chauthi Koot

In 2011, Gurvinder Singh made a splash with his debut film Anhey Ghorey Da Daan, which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and won three National Awards. Splash may not be the right word, though—the film was as mysterious and elusive as a ripple in a pond, or a shiver down a spine. His new film, Chauthi Koot (The Fourth Direction), adapted from two stories by Sahitya Akademi award-winner Waryam Singh Sandhu, takes place in a Punjab that’s light years from the mustard fields of Yashraj Films or jocular local hits like Jatt And Juliet. It premieres on 15 May in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, the second Indian film besides Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan to feature in the 68th edition of the festival. Singh talks about making a film on the militancy years in Punjab, and how cable TV helped popularize his first film in the state.

Chauthi Koot is set in Punjab during the time of the Khalistan movement. Do you have any memories from back then?
I was in Delhi then. I was about 10 years old. At the time of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, we were in school. Going back in the bus that day, a teacher looked at me and said, “These Sikhs should be taught a lesson.” A schoolteacher saying that! That remark I can’t forget.

What drew you to Waryam Singh’s stories?
I’d read Waryam’s work before. I think his short stories are some of the finest written, and not just in Punjab. It just so happened that after Anhey Ghorey Da Daan, I picked up this book (Chauthi Koot, 1998). I was already thinking about making a film on another story of his, set during the time of militancy. But I knew he’d written more about that period. He himself was affected by it. He was a schoolteacher in a place called Sur Singh. He used to write in the Punjab press against the movement, so he had a lot of threats from the militants and had to go settle in Jalandhar.

He wrote about a curious meeting the two of you had in Canada.
I’d met him in Toronto, where Anhey Ghorey was being screened. I was on the stage post-screening, and strange comments were coming—why did you do this, we didn’t understand the film. I think he got restless because he got up and gave a speech for 5 minutes and then everybody was silent.

His writing has a similar quality to ‘Anhey Ghorey Da Daan’, in that the atmosphere he evokes informs, even drives, the plot…
In a film, you could have one level of narrative going on, but then the mood is creating its own narrative, or the off-screen is creating its own narrative. Art is not just about what you see, but what you don’t show—how it evokes what is unseen. It’s easy to show things, but does it evoke anything outside that? I think that’s the difference between good cinema and ordinary cinema.

People say that my first film is esoteric, abstract. At least in the first viewing they don’t get the links between the characters. Of course, the links are very clear in my head. I want to make a film like a piece of music, which changes depending on the number of times you listen to it.

Did you work on the screenplay yourself?
Yes. I like to adapt. I’m not a writer, but I’m a film-maker and I can imagine how it’ll unfold on screen. And I don’t think I want to leave it up to anyone else to imagine that. Writing a screenplay is writing the film, in a way. And then when you start to shoot the film, it takes a totally different dimension.

My teacher Mani Kaul used to say that what you shoot should have nothing to do with what you write in your script, and what you edit should have nothing to do with what you’ve shot. He said you write scripts to basically raise funding. He used to joke about how he submitted Siddeshwari (1990) to Films Division as a two-page script. He was told that it was too short, so he asked his secretary to type it again with three-line spacing, which made it 10 pages long.

A key element of Anhey Ghorey was its sound mix. Chauthi Koot’s trailer suggests that similar care has been taken in this film. How do you approach this part of the process?
The relationship between the image on the screen and the sound that’s on screen and off, that is for me the most fascinating aspect of cinema. Not many people pay attention to sound, cinema is largely seen as a visual medium. In popular cinema they hardly use any ambient sound. (Robert) Bresson used to use a very beautiful term: relay. He said that like a racer passes a baton to another, the image passes the baton on to the sound, and then back.

The process starts with the script. What you’ve written gives you an idea of what all possible sounds it can generate in the scene. There’s a scene in the film with a procession. The script will say just that—but you know there’ll be chatting and singing, the sound of the tractors and the passing traffic. Sound has to become music, and vice versa. That’s what I told my composer. If it’s music, then it imposes its medium on the cinema.

You and cinematographer Satya Rai Nagpaul have developed a very specific visual aesthetic over the course of two films. Tell us about your collaboration.
I don’t discuss too much of visual scheme beforehand. There’s not much to discuss before we go to the location. We work very spontaneously once we’re there. A lot of directors do storyboards but I don’t use them at all. That’s the worst, they just kill the spontaneity.

With Satya, I normally discuss the lighting, which is the most important thing for me; precise movements and composition we discuss once we take the shot. Now we have a good sync, so he’s able to anticipate what kind of composition I’m looking at, or what will be the angle of the shot. But normally I give him the input of where to put the camera and his job is to create that mood and feeling with light. You can say that I do a sketch and he’s the painter.

Do you show him films as reference points?
I normally don’t show much, but sometimes I’ll share a film or two. Like before this film I shared Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon A Time In Anatolia with him. I feel spiritually close to Ceylan, among the contemporary film-makers. For Anhey Ghorey, I showed him a Sri Lankan film, The Forsaken Land. That film opens with a pre-dawn sequence, which is how my film was also going to begin.

Are you working with a non-professional cast, as you did in your first film?
It’s a mix. This time, the casting was done in Amritsar, so there are a lot of people from the theatre scene there. Amritsar has a very rich theatre tradition actually; it doesn’t travel much, but within Amritsar there are lots of theatre groups, with some very talented people.

Four years after its release, how is Anhey Ghorey viewed in Punjab?
The film has had a lot of influence in Punjab, especially on the young film-makers. Young people are actually learning film-making from it. After it released, it got on to the cable TV circuit. They show it on cable every week. It even shows in the villages. In fact, the people I worked with in the film told me: “When we were making it, we didn’t know the story. We didn’t know what to tell people, so we had to see it again and again. Now we understand the film totally.”

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.