The Chasing Iamb

The Plot
Mahatma Gandhi wrote two letters to Adolf Hitler addressing him as “My Dear Friend”, suggesting he mend his ways. All manner of narratives could have addressed this historical Ripley’s Believe it or Not item. The one chosen is college-circuit drawing room tragedy. Gandhi walks about. Hitler rants as the Reich collapses. Indian National Army (INA) soldiers run about hungry and angry. Eva Braun tries to Make the Best of a Bad Situation.

-10 For Being An Unintentional Parody. But plus three for having greater ambitions than Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey, the historical blunder freshest in our memories.

-5 For Letting Nikita Anand As Magda Goebbels talk in English. This cast pretending to be German was weird enough without Nikitaji asking her troubled husband (Nalin Singh) in penetrating accents: “You mean traitors?”

-8 For The Badly Patched Plot Strand about INA officer Balbir (Aman Varma) missing his wife, remembering their Happy Holi times and their disagreement about Gandhian ways

+5 For The Astonishingly Retro Soundtrack full of clanging emphases and maudlin strings. Thankfully, Bollywood has done away with the orchestra-as-metaphor.

+10 To Neha Dhupia for playing a fun-loving Eva Braun who smokes, dances and sort-of kisses Hitler without looking stupid.

+3 For the line:Eva Braun tumhari saali hai. It may inspire a David Dhawan film.

-5 For Hitler’s Sudden Discursion on Marxism, capitalism and national socialism. It has the strange twang of King Henry telling Thomas More that his ideas are too utopian.

-5 For The Inexplicable Couple saying goodbye (fatally) next to an unmanned cannon. Where are they and why are they the most idiotic cannon fodder ever?

+10 For The Crazy Maggi Noodles Interlud with the arrival of the Goebbels children and the woman who chirpily offers them “phataphat khane ka intezaam”.

+5 For The Scene In Which Albert Speer, the Third Reich’s architect, apologises to Hitler for not following his orders to destroy all the infrastructure. This scene gives you a hint of the ambition with which this film was conceived.

+2 For The Boring Bureaucracy of the wedding.

You understand that we don’t think women can only make ladies-type films. Understand also that we don’t have problems with ladies-type films. Ah, so now all that hedging has been done let us ask this question. Why didn’t anyone tell us Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara is a chick-flick?

This is a movie that has all the hallmarks of a chick-flick. It has close friendship, marriage, dappled leaves, sunsets and landscape shot like Lancome ads, long shots of moony-faced infatuation, a male character who knows enough about jewellery to identify a mummy-ring, suit up scenes in front of the mirror, fantastic settings. It has friends who will intervene to make romance happen. It has childhood pacts and superb decor. The clothes are a step below Aisha but definitely a presence.

It manages a feat that Sarah Jessica Parker and the entire SATC franchise could not manage. It made a Birkin bag an almost full-fledged character. Like classic chick flicks, the settings are clean, shiny and sensual. Like classic chick flicks, the protagonist (Hrithik in this case) is transformed by love, not merely checking off ‘love interest’ as a plot requirement. (No, Delhi Belly, go stand in your, grimy, boyish corner now)


In many ways ZNMD is better than many new chick flicks. Unlike recent Hollywood romantic comedies (also known as ways to make Katherine Heigl more hateful) the protagonists are not subjected to gross public humiliation. It does not centre around a star that necessarily makes the heroine’s best friend look bad. (Aisha was a very baffling in this aspect because it gave everyone except Sonam Kapoor fun things to do).

Of course, the very best way in which this movie beats classic chick flicks hollow is one that bends the Bechdel Test. The Bechdel test is generally a three-step, foolproof way to decide whether women have an active presence in a movie. Are there at least two women in this movie? Do they talk to each other? Do they talk to each other about anything other than a man? Big fail on all counts. Katrina Kaif is very likeable and even Alison Bechdel would think she is cute on a bike but this is not a movie about Katrina, the Spanish chick or even Kalki Koechlin. But the handy-dandy Bechdel would actually be misleading in this case. This is a movie for women viewers except that the protagonists are all male.

The women sitting next to this writer certainly didn’t need any convincing. They gasped, they sighed and they sank into the joy of the objectification of the three best looking men in Bollywood. Acres of bare chest. Lingering shots of brown, male nipple. (some terrible haircuts but let’s ignore that). Rajesh Khanna may have wanted Pushpa to stop crying but Hrithik has never looked as beautiful as he did when he was wet and teary, as sad as the Little Mermaid. Do you really care that Katrina Kaif and Kalki Koechlin did not have self-actualisation?

Now you can decide that this is a terrible political travesty because what is this film industry which has Saif Ali Khan playing a Dalit and men edging women out even in a chick flick. Or you can settle into an experience as close to a spa as cinema can get. You can almost smell the aroma therapy. You know Zoya did.

The Plot
Amy (Kalki Koechlin), unhinged by childhood trauma, moves to Mumbai from LA with her rich family. She befriends KC (Gulshan Devaiya) and debauch company, an angsty bunch with money to spend. One night, they accidentally kill some people. Then the rest.

-5 For Anurag Kashyap’s Grim Face issuing statutory warning about drugs and alcohol. Please.

+5 To Amy For Refusing To Wear Those Salwar Kameezes. No wonder she feels disturbed.

-10For The Endless Foreign Film-Style Shots: pausing objects mid-fall and the annoyingly retro entry of mystifyingly angry cop Arvind Mathur (Rajeev Khandelwal).

-5 For The Squeamishness Most Of The Supposed Bad-Asses Display during truth or dare. Oh Amy, you are so much badder than them even in your Girl, Interrupted phase. You at least joke about Tanya’s rape.

+6 For Zubin’s Casually Tossed Of ‘Suck my dikra’.

+1 Because You Are going to need all the points you have later. We won’t even bother deducting for the scene in which KC in a Hummer struggles to beat an Audi in a race.

-6 For Amy Saying her father will send her to a convent if she behaves badly. Get thee to a nunnery, LA girl. Sure. Even Madhur Bhandar - kar is more up-to-date.

+7 To Arvind Mathur for using the corpse of the kidnapped tourist as protection against bullets. First surprise in the whole film.

+2 For Mathur’s Autorickshaw kick. Meet Mathur, president of the Meter Down campaign.

-8 For The Random shifts in perspective. Mathur is running into the church to save the day but we suddenly see glimpses of the cuckoo house inside Amy’s head. Salim-Javed would brain you with a television for such sloppy story-telling.

-10 For The Worst denouement in recent times. Why is Malvankar (Raj Kumar Yadav) getting the stick and the lecture from the police force for trying to make a quick buck from idiots? Because the police force is noble or corrupt? Who knows. Pavan Malhotra as police commissioner swings between playing Rakesh Maria and one of the Borgias so that’s no help. Watch out as Malhotra struggles to say maa ki aankh.

The Plot
A gang of little boys live in a housing society, their lives largely unruffled until young Fatka arrives. Fatka cleans cars for a living and only has a dog Bheedu to love. The boys hate him until they love him. But by then the housing society bans him and his dog (thanks to an evil politician). Now the kids must fight to keep their two new subaltern pals.

+10 To that super-senti,Surf Excel ad placed just after opening credits, in a classroom setting making you worry that this is the pap you are going to be watching for two hours.

+10 For making the preoccupations of children largely believable: annoying dogs, boring adults, being routed in cricket, bizarre nicknames, the grossness of milk.

-5 For losing a grip on the children’s dialogue swinging from pert to creepily adult and back. Fatka particularly talks in the insane ‘apun-bole toh’ retro tapori-Creole that invokes not Munnabhai and when we were young but Anil Kapoor and when your dad was young. Though it does get a little bit funny when the other kids pick up the lingo from him.

+7 For The Moment when Fatka is told that he should join the cricket team because the colony team is missing a bowler.His response — Toh main kya nachun? — is one that Che and Marx would have approved of. Bring on the revolution and let it be full of tough little 10-year-olds.

-6 For making the politician an automatic dog-hater. This is not Cruella de Vil who wants the dalmatians to make a hip outfit. This is assembly-line villainy. Frankly, dog-hating is the biggest Mcguffin in this film. The kids start out hating dogs too. And for no real reason.

+5 For not resorting to hopeless sentimentality and twisty manipulation and sticking to a little sentimentality, a little manipulation and decent pacing.

+4 For the invisible presence of Salman Khan through the incredible subtext: such as the shirt-removing macho 10-year-old child labourer Fatka. We get it man, you made this movie. It's all good.

+4 For the plot point involving the feminine- voiced man first known as Googly and then as Manisha (and the moral lesson of how being different is okay). Nicely done.

+2 For The Chaddi Revolution which was good, silly fun, we thought. But then we are very biased.

THE INTERN is sniffy. When she was hired, she’d thought Ekta ma’m was going to ask her for ‘creative inputs’ into the TV shows. She isn’t at Balaji Telefilms to do “just this”, she gestures vaguely at the office around her with Facebook-weary hands. Does she watch the shows? No! She is horrified. “I keep telling my sister. How can you come home from work and watch them? These shows are for aunties.” What does she watch? Roadies. Reality shows.

A little later, two young TV writers enter the common room. For the next two hours, the plainly dressed men earnestly discuss how to establish a new character’s attributes without making her too simplistic. They’re speaking in Hindi, writing in a mix of Hindi and English, stroking their chins, looking limpid. There’s none of the cynicism that makes the average non-viewer smirk about saas-bahu shows — that enormous meteor shower that Ekta Kapoor created before she turned 25. Those shows changed television, fashion, weddings and claimed a giant space in our popculture history.

To those who haven’t met her, Ekta is a parody — just like her shows are to those who haven’t watched them. Her multiplying rings with soaring gemstones, her many gods, her easy success, her sexual orientation, her cell phoneflinging tantrums, her obsession with astrology and the letter K, her jogging with a phone-toting retinue — everything has become as legendary as her show’s aesthetics. In the vast plains of online fan forums, viewers address complaints directly to an omniscient Ekta — “Ekta, I didn’t understand this part. Why did the vampire bite Pia?”

Wedged between a huge executive desk and a wide sideboard blurred by god paraphernalia, Ekta says, “I used to be a human being. Now I am folklore.” At 35, she combines her infamous bluntness with a kittenish voice. A few years ago, she took to wearing a gemstone that she says helped with her temper. Before you can start wondering if any male producer in Bollywood ever worried about his temper, she adds with a grin, “It helped only 40 percent though.”

Ekta is the face of the production house she runs with her mother Shobhaa Kapoor. She’s been at it for 17 years now. But since 2008, there’s been a new regime of streamlined budgets at Balaji under Puneet Kinra, the group CEO. Ekta herself has welcomed the iron shoes Kinra wears to prevent Balaji from floating off in a swirl of zardozi. Just as importantly, there is now more senior management to ease Ekta’s burden, if she so wishes — which is still a matter of debate inside Balaji — of signing off on every last detail on every last show.

The old habits are interesting to watch. The entire seven-storey building is galvanised from the ground up when Shobhaa Kapoor’s car is spotted down the street. Whiteboards listing the week’s tasks also list ‘Jeetuji’s trip to Hyderabad’. Ekta’s movie star father Jeetendra is promoting the group’s next film Ragini MMS. When writers talk of Balaji investing in their writers, of Balaji refusing to change scripts to please the channel suits, they gesture unconsciously in the direction of Ekta’s office. “You will know when she is here,” the intern says wanly.

THIS IS the room where underconfident writers come to die. Kapoor’s meetings are often protracted and chatty. Working with her requires you to recognise when she shifts gear, and then business is suddenly concluded in a concentrated 10 minutes because she knows what she wants. Ekta’s nose for what viewers will like is formidable. Smriti Irani, star of Balaji’s flagship Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, remembers the 25- year-old Ekta Kapoor insisting on casting her in the face of much opposition, saying, “This is my Tulsi.” And later agreeing with Irani that she should cry as she wanted — face-distorting, ugly tears — not the glycerine prettiness the director wanted.

Her intuition is partly shaman. It is partly an endless interest in details. Althea Kaushal, writer of Balaji’s hit vampire teen show Pyaar Kii Ye Ek Kahani, says, “The thing about Ekta is this. You throw her a plotline and she gives you inputs. A month later if you haven’t incorporated her inputs, she’ll spot it right away. She’ll remember exactly what she told you in spite of having meetings all day long. That’s scary!” This is the same Ekta who jokes about how she was once an undereducated couch potato. She’s somehow turned the two traits of a TV addict — a fragmented attention span and obsessiveness — into a creative dynamo.

When media critics first caught sight of the young woman making those shows that appalled them, they must have paled more. Her orange-tikka’d religiosity was going to take the country back into the Dark Ages, they warned. Ekta has always been unapologetic and amused by this nervousness. A nervousness her parents share. “They are religious, not spiritual,” says Ekta. “They do pujas and all but they worry about me. They keep saying, you are so young. Why do you go to temples?” She adds, “Astrologers keep trying to meet me, they think I’ll fall for anything. I’m not stupid, I think through things. [But] in the astrology world, I am Mallika Sherawat.”

Ekta talks with delicious, sensual enjoyment about alternately seeking passion and calm on her pilgrimages, saying things like: “Tirupati Balaji and I have a bond. When I go to suprabhatam, I get sucked in by his aura. I love him.” Or “Kamakhya is wonderful.” Or “Ajmer Sharif is very calming. Soothing. I prefer the Sufi saints to the Hindu ones.” She speaks with the same thick relish about everything. Of her favourite goddess Kali, she says, “She rides a wild boar because it’s the wildest animal. She feels a little remorse only when she has her foot on a man’s head.” She adds with a smirk, “So she is feminine too.”

Her parents may not get this desire for spiritual uppers and downers but they are, by all reports, workaholics like her. Milan Luthria, director of Once Upon a Time in Mumbai, admires Ekta for being the rare producer who’ll pitch in when the director is alone and beleaguered. He talks fondly of Ekta and her parents for being able to do long hours, endless trips and casual stopovers in small towns. All three combine enormous drive with a gift for being relaxed. “They are happy. It’s rare,” he says.

Which perhaps explains why Ekta never tries to present a picture of Happy Families to the public. She and her mother have raucous fights at work, knowing that when they get home the fight will have to be (and can be) dealt with. Some years ago, she moved out but ended up moving back home in a few months, saying she was too dependent on her mother to run her own household. Ekta says candidly that she and her actor brother Tusshar Kapoor give each other a wide berth to keep their relationship stable.

ONCE, 35 of the top 50 shows on air were Balaji Telefilms creations. Then in 2008, everything went pearshaped. Star Plus, the network that had bought all her shows, decided to take Ekta’s iconic Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi off air. An outraged Ekta sued the channel unsuccessfully and the show’s eight-year glory run — 1,800 episodes — ended in a hiccup.

Ekta had adored the idea of producing a Mahabharat that focussed on Draupadi’s dealings with the Pandavas as modern relationships. Her Mahabharat on 9X had perfect bodies and a colloquial idiom, but some audiences mumbled it was too realistic and not BR Chopra, others complained it wasn’t realistic and not HBO. It failed, along with the channel.

Meanwhile, audiences were spurning saas-bahu shows for the charms of reality TV and shows about rural girlhood. Balaji was reduced to having just four shows on air in 2008. The new flock of shows like Balika Vadhu that came then frankly surprised Ekta, who says about them, “Forget getting into them, I didn’t get them. Child marriage and women beating their daughters-in-law. I’d never seen anything like it.” Balaji announced a net loss of Rs 14 crore for the quarter ended March 2009. It was as if the evil vamp had wormed her way into the heart of the family and thrown Ekta out.

The channels who didn’t anticipate this new wave condemned them as regressive, but Ekta is humbler and says, “I felt it was a gap in my experience that this rural reality was not something I knew anything about.” And suddenly it clicks. However anachronistic, those zardozi family dramas were, in the end, urban. They were about urban joint families that Ekta had watched as a stealthy outsider. They were as urban as the young people for whom Balaji is making movies today.

And as TV will teach you, you can’t keep a good woman down. Balaji is now more professionally run — and profitable again. Today, it has four shows on air — all youth-centred with an individualistic ethos. Pavitra Rishta is the top show in the country, while Pyaar Kii Ye Ek Kahani has the highest ratings on Star One. The TV business is chugging along, but Ekta says she’s more energised now by her films division.

Above the heads of the restless intern and the earnest writers, Balaji’s films division is a place of efficient people with thin, gentle smiles and hair in thin, gentle spikes. Balaji Motion Pictures produces stylish mainstream aspirants like Once Upon a Time in Mumbai and Shor in the City. More interestingly, the films division’s ALT brand is gathering attention for edgy films like Dibakar Banerjee’s Love, Sex Aur Dhokha, this week’s Ragini MMS (a horror date film) and soon Dirty Picture (a biopic about Silk Smitha).

This is not the wild swing in taste that Ekta watchers claim it to be. It is, in fact, consistent with her focus on urban storytelling. Ekta has added up two facts since 2008: 1) Young urban viewers do less and less appointment TV viewing and prefer to download shows or set aside weekends for movies. 2) There is urban life outside Mumbai. She recounts her happy surprise at attending cool house parties in Chandigarh and meeting articulate young people in Guwahati.

PhD theses and newspaper columns keep condemning TV shows as regressive and anti-women. They don’t get the radical appeal to viewers in their making women protagonists central, even if in slo-mo. Ekta has made no secret that the men on her shows are merely eye candy. In a 2007 episode of Koffee With Karan, she fake-leered her way through a description of casting cherubic Hiten Tejwani and the suave Ram Kapoor for different age groups of her women viewers. “Indian women are not worrying about ‘Why’d you say that to me at dinner?’” she told Johar. “They’re worrying about their in-laws.” The critical contempt hasn’t been towards Ekta’s shows, it’s been towards the minutiae of women’s domestic lives.

She laughs at silly allegations that her films are all about sex. “Today, no one needs to go to the movies to watch sex. You can download any amount of porn for free. Movies need to talk about young people’s lives in the language they use. About relationships. Money. Sex.”

The culture has changed in the 17 years Ekta has been at work. We are equally at ease with mata ki chowkis and dirty weekends. She observes with pleasure how, increasingly, Indians are now more comfortable in their skin. In the end, this is what is most attractive about Ekta — her desire to live in multiple worlds and let others do the same.

The Plot
Billionaire Kabir Malhotra (Anupam Kher) summons a drug dealer, a Thai prime ministerial candidate, a British journalist and a Bollywood star to his Greek island for mysterious reasons. He knows something about each of them. High jinks ensue.

+ 10 for creating bollywood’s first malayali protagonist neil menon (Abhishek Bachchan). This following Bollywood’s first Ladakhi protagonist (Phunsukh Wangdu of 3 Idiots) is a big thrill for our multiculti heart. He is bored, neurotic, feels huzun in Istanbul and reads Murakami, making him utterly convincing. A tired minus three for revealing he is only pretending to be a Malayali because by then we have given up.

- 5 for line after line of farhan akhtar’s translated-from-english dialogue. (Our favourite: Latin zubaan mein ek kahavat hain. Cui bono.) Minus two for those that seem to have been written by Abhishek Bachchan — a mysterious Chelsea football segue.

+ 6 for the shameless aspirations of the script. Agatha Christie meets Ludlum wannabe meets CSI meets us howling in laughter. Of course, the billionaire must say, “I’ll see them in the library” to his secretary as if it is Downton Abbey and discuss wine as if it is the Travel and Living Channel.

- 10 for creating an op ramsay (Boman Irani), a politician so useless he is unable to tell a reporter where his funds come from. He also dies because of a single sting operation. We miss omnipotent, shark-loving grand villains like Shakal from Shaan.

+ 5 to Kangana and Shahana for playing policewoman and journalist/lost daughter in ways that don’t embarrass anyone in a thriller with holes in the plot so big you could put a few Greek islands in them for safekeeping.

+ 5 to the pretty face of Sarah Jane Dias We feel bad pointing out that an exotic dancer without a posterior is no exotic dancer. However, she was nice to look at during her Monte Carlo sweater ad style romance with Abhishek Bachchan.

+ 5 for the most awesome updating of Indian technology optimism. Witness the British investigators conducting surveillance across countries in a way God would envy.

- 10 for the Kabir Malhotra has a twin number. Oy, mastermind, why didn’t you just bump off your rich brother? Why toy with our tiny minds? And most mysteriously, Kabir Malhotraji, whatever were you planning with your assembled menagerie on the island? What was the Game?

To know why Shah Rukh Khan is a superstar, all you have to do is rent Dulha Mil Gaya (Trinidad, Fardeen Khan, enough said). His 15-minute cameo lifts the 2010 movie out of purgatory and gives it one of the most romantic gestures in Bollywood history, a middle-aged millionaire who gets up early so when his girlfriend is awake, he can focus on her. To know what we really want from superstars like Shah Rukh Khan, unfortunately you need the good fortune to see an off-screen performance.

At the recent India Today Conclave, among such enormous crowd-pullers as Sarah Palin and Narendra Modi, there was no question that SRK was still the headliner. With extreme seriousness, he read a lucid speech largely about the business end of Bollywood. No sentimental anecdotes, no stories about his mother or his love for home-cooking—a tune so familiar in celebrity speech that after a while you only see lips moving.

What was intriguing was what came later—a high voltage act of a man who knows that no one really expects him to say anything intelligent, that he would be congratulated for developing a thought. Through the speech and the Q&A session, he calibrated his needle-sharp wit.

He began ironic and self-referential but these gags cracked not a smile out of the well-heeled gathering. When he casually tossed out a few in-law jokes he got the easy guffaws. The weighing of the crowd’s expectations was visibly fine-tuned down to what level of vocabulary a Bollywood actor is expected to use without drawing attention to himself as a ‘serious’ person.

So when SRK used the word ‘frisky’ to describe himself, a split second later he followed it up with an ingénue’s disclaimer—half sly, half-sexy. ‘Frisky? Is that the right word?’ Marilyn Monroe would have been so proud.

No one expects truth-telling in question-answer sessions of conferences—whether big or small. We all know it is a ritual. But what if someone refuses to play along? For every time that SRK said something banal, such as his children making him happy, there were also plenty of hair-pricking moments when he said almost talking to himself—such as his mood swings making the whole family unhappy. Not a reaction from the crowd. How do you know when you are a superstar? When you tell the truth and people only hear lullabies.

Of course the clown is sad, that is how the story goes. But the session ended with a heart-stopping moment. It was as if the naked emperor—knowing his citizens are all sycophants—announced he has no clothes, he will have no clothes, and he is turning a nudist, damn you.

The final question. An organiser asked, “We are all dying to know. Is there still a six-pack under your shirt?” SRK responded to this familiarity with a practiced revelation of his flat, brown stomach. The crowd—as they say—went wild. They also went deaf. So they chose not to hear what he said to the person who asked this last question. “This interview can continue if you like. I can show you what a Muslim looks like on the inside.”

Who does SRK have more contempt for? Himself or the people who love a cipher? He’s never going to tell. As the session broke for tea, the crowd murmured in satisfaction of having been entertained, pigeons convinced the cat had danced for them.

The Plot
Tashi (Imran Khan) lives in a grimy room with friends Nitin and Arup. His girlfriend Sonia (Shenaz Treasurywala) accidentally becomes a mule for diamond smugglers. Through a series of unfortunate events, the smugglers (Vijay Raaz and others) get Nitin’s stool sample instead. The boys are now on the run. Tashi’s risk-loving new pal Menaka (Poorna Jaggannathan) gets mixed up too. Happily.

+10 To Abhinay deo for somehow making , almost-impossible return to a decent, well-paced movie after the so-bad-itwas- surreal disaster called Game.

+10 To Akshat Varma for the largely relaxed dialogue in which four-letter words are merely the affectionate, social lubricant that greases the moderately competent script. This is the first time we have seen Hinglish working well.

+7 For Kunal Roy Kapoor’s Nitin: who is comfortingly furry and grouchy like a big bearded Oscar from Sesame Street. You have to agree when he says the red car looks like a donkey f**ked an auto.

+10 To the brilliant soundtrack. we are almost tempted to violate our deeply secret arithmetic formulae to give it more points.

-6 For the shit and flatulence. sure it was ‘integral to the plot and the script demanded it’ but we are old and grouchy.

+5 To the gangster gags breadstick, paper bag and all. We will soon be sick of the Tarantino-meets-Guy Ritchie variety of villain but not when Vijay Raaz says ‘chup kar Barrister Vinod’ with such barely controlled vitriol.

+8 For menaka smart, funny, slightly self-destructive and the go-to-girl when you are on the run from the mob. We would give her points for not looking like any heroine we have seen in years. Wish she had better lines though.

+7 For allowing Vir Das to be slight and neurotic. His interactions with his boss are forgettable but crown him with rubies for his oral-pleasure giving Disco Fighter fantasy.

-10 For the most lazily plotted denouement we have seen since Game. How ridiculous is the boys strolling out of the hotel after the shootout scene?

+7 For Imran Khan, who does a good job though his character is a cipher. Why does he go from being sort of a slacker to sort of a hero? You are never told. If only he could smile convincingly. Unclench, boy, unclench.

TAM-BRAM GIRLS of Vidya Balan’s generation were brought up to be neat but not vain, to be presentable but obsess about work. It is only incidental that Vidya, 31, unlike other girls of bilingual Palakkad descent, is not conquering the world of statistical modelling or dreaming miles of code. It is incidental that her adolescent dreams were not of topping IIT-JEE but of becoming an actor. It is incidental she took her work ethic to Bollywood rather than Infosys. How is Bollywood to know that where Vidya comes from, idiosyncrasies are ignored if you can get the job done. For that you would have to know her provenance — maamis who think nothing of riding motorcycles, buying autos for running errands or going alone after ‘office’ to the December Season.

Here is young Vidya in 2005, standing next to director Pradeep Sarkar after her memorable debut in Parineeta — a classic, self-assured beauty in a heated, period setting. Sarkar is talking enthusiastically about her performance for the excited television cameras. Vidya is unsmiling and silent. It was an astonishing event for the absence of girlish giggles Bollywood heroines develop to distract from their inherent toughness. Vidya seemed destined for big and important things then. But after Parineeta, her career was a bit of a PR disaster, punctuated frequently and almost exclusively by malicious reports of her clothes and weight. Like hounds who had heard an whistle audible only to them, the press suddenly decided that Vidya was both fat and badly dressed. And by dint of sheer repetition, this woman, who is destined to be good-looking even when she is 80, was no longer palatable. It was a great moment of mass hypnosis. And her movies of this period were largely forgettable too.

However, that season seems to have passed. More recently, the public gaze has been retrained towards her elegant Sabyasachi saris and Vidya is called preposterous things like ‘the brand ambassador of the national dress’. And before ‘behenji’ — that deathknell of sexual appeal — could be sneakily catapulted at her for her saris, Vidya shimmered into Abhishek Chaubey’s Ishqiya (2010). As a small-town woman wreaking havoc on a pair of conmen, she played a raucous lover to the younger man, smoky temptation to his uncle. An adult woman with mature motivations — central to the plot and played by a self-assured actor.

It is strange that Vidya was ever considered for the behenji category by the media because she has brought a powerful sexual charge to her roles. Her pairing with Madhavan in a series of Airtel ads in innocuous domestic settings had television viewers rapt with its potential for wild monkey sex (any minute now!) in a way that many big budget movies can only aspire to. The frilly kittens to whom we have become almost immune to seeing on screen lend themselves to harmless ‘sexy’ labels. Perhaps grown-up, erotic power is too close to the skin, easier to experience for viewers than it is to write about for reporters.

In 2011, when we meet in a Delhi hotel on a very frozen, very early morning she is warm, replete with good humour and shorn of make-up. She moves about restlessly on a sofa but still no giggles. Only an occasional deep belly laugh. She tells funny stories about herself, leaving in the perverse, unflattering bits about her childhood in Mumbai or her teenaged career in television. “I was so fat as a child, I would sit on the road and refuse to walk.” Or “I used to be so macho as a teenager, I’d refuse the production company’s car so I could go home at night by myself. When my father came once to Film City to pick me up one night, I felt so violated I didn’t speak to him. Poor thing, all the way from Goregaon to Chembur.” Or “I used to practise all the Ek Do Teen moves with my sister’s skirt tied around my head. But I also wrote to Satyajit Ray after he won the Oscar, asking him to cast me. I was just greedy.


PHOTO: REUTERS

Movie roles took a surprisingly long time to come to Vidya, considering she had been in television and ad films since she was 15. Her indulgent, middle-class parents — father in middle management, mother a homemaker — had thought it was a passing fancy, only pausing when she auditioned for a Malayalam movie. This was the first time they had a real sense of the fire in her belly. She actually did mean to work in the movies. However, Malayalam films were deemed appropriately intelligent and tasteful so they didn’t pause too long. But this first venture was to spiral into a series of disasters. Vidya’s first movie was the ninth collaboration between superstar Mohanlal and filmmaker Kamal. When the movie was shelved midway, the hitherto successful team looked around for someone to blame and there was the pretty young heroine ready to be labelled a jinx. Six other filmmakers in the south ‘unsigned’ her. Back home in Mumbai, Vidya suffered. “My self-esteem was shot to pieces. I’d heard so many things said about the way I looked and my acting.” So when Pradeep Sarkar said to her, “Aye ladki, one day I will make a movie with you,” she was politely sceptical.

Parineeta made her, but for years she suspected that it unmade her. From the beginning the very vain, very conservative world of Bollywood found Vidya a bit of an oddball. Her unusual debut and her own personality had fused together in public perception. “People would keep saying: ‘you are so different, you are like a breath of fresh air’ and I would only hear: ‘you are so different’.” She was unable to decide whether this was a description or a warning, given the rain of other advice. “There is constant pressure to not be an individual. A heroine is supposed to sing songs, dance, do four scenes, not ask questions about the character. For the first time in my life, there were people telling me how I should behave all the time. And I buckled under the pressure. I was not acting anymore. I was trying to be another Vidya Balan. And the lack of conviction showed in everything. In the movies, in my life. On top of everything else, there were fashion bloggers reporting if the nailpaint on the second toe of my left foot was chipped.” She hints that her love life took a hit at this period as well. “People tell you — don’t tell anyone you are dating. Or how do you know this man is interested in you because you are a star? Or I would share some excitement about a relationship with a friend and it would be in the papers the next day. Now I know better than to listen to anyone. I know I am not going to be seeing someone who is in awe or shock. My relationships are between me and the man I’m seeing.” She peters off, “Of course, one is young. There is desire…” She begins to say more and then pauses, “Perhaps I should just stop with ‘desire’!” And howls with laughter at her twee choice of words.

Luckily, she says, her identity crisis passed quickly. Clarity largely came from her older sister Priya who Vidya shamelessly eulogises to anyone who will listen. Priya (until recently the head of the ad agency, Lowe Lintas, Delhi) had written to Vidya when she did her first audition: “Retain yourself, do only what you want to do. And remember cigarettes do not make you more creative.” Though this last bit still makes Vidya guffaw, her sister’s prescience helped her find her moorings again. With Balki’s Paa and then Ishqiya, Vidya was back in the game. She stopped listening to any advice about movies and remembered that even on the sets, she functioned best by feel — not by looking at the monitor to review her last take.

SHE HAD remembered what she was there for: a bid for posterity. And she says this in so many words. Ask her why other young female actors are not staking the same claims, fighting for better roles and scripts and she has a considered answer. “Everyone’s attention is so fragmented now. People don’t have the time, energy, faith to invest in any one thing and see it through. Everyone wants to be a celebrity and make sure they have at least their two seconds of fame.”

The good thing about fragmented attention span is that it is easy to reinvent yourself. And Vidya, happily for her, is only amused by the new guff about her being an ‘Indian’ beauty. In No one killed Jessica, she played Raj Kumar Gupta’s version of Sabrina Lall: a quiet woman whose life is brought to a standstill by a senseless murder. Her next role is the diametrical opposite — Vidya stars in Dirty Picture, a biopic of Silk Smitha, the vamp whose life was just as configured by tragedy. Smitha was of the lower lip-biting, silver-tasselled skirts and headdress-wearing vintage, the kind of star once described as cabaret dancer, what the Bible imagined as a ‘fleshpot’. It boggles the mind to imagine a simmering Vidya or any anaemic Hindi movie achieving that level of, well, dirtiness, but stranger things have happened.

Kiran Rao, 36, is a week away from the release of her first film Dhobi Ghat. The Mumbai office she shares with husband Aamir Khan is in a state of silent, controlled mania building towards the promotion of the film. Rao enters the room, a slight, composed person and almost immediately leaps upon a side-table to adjust the blinds of the window. Having fixed the light to her satisfaction, she descends on the sofa. She speaks and listens with poise and fierce concentration. Edited excerpts:

What was the first film you watched that made you think that you’d want to make one yourself?
My parents in Calcutta were not big cinegoers. There was a club we used to go to that showed films, very doodhbhaat films. So I was pretty film illiterate when I applied to Sophia’s in Mumbai and Jamia. I didn’t know what exactly in the arts I wanted to do. I used to write. I was very excited about fine arts but I realised that it wasn’t my forte, working with my hands I mean. I played an instrument and drew. But when things happened I’d reach to write. I didn’t reach to write. I wasn’t sure whether it was film or photography or writing. I was at Sophia’s for two months before I moved to Jamia. In those two months, I saw very good films, and they were pretty basic like Battleship Potemkin; that was the first film that I watched. I felt like, oh, now we are talking. And because it was a silent film, it was much more powerful. It’s known for the montage. But I liked the music and infrequent titling. I liked the use of image, music and words in that old way. I thought that this was something I can do.

Every artist has a sense of her lineage in the art. Who is your imagined ancestor in cinema?
I’d love to say Sergei Paradjanov because I love his films. And Ghatak. I don’t imagine that what I’ve made is anything like them but that’s the lineage I’d love to imagine is mine. I’ve seen my bit of film in the past 10 years. However I’m still much more influenced by music than films actually. I played the piano for 20 years and stopped. Now we’ve got a piano but I don’t play anymore.

You said somewhere that your social life is about finding the next concert to go to. What is it that music does for you that the visual stuff and even the writing doesn’t do for you?
There is something about music that puts me on an island of myself. It sort of encloses me. Music is a very emotional experience, and you get very involved with what I’m listening to. For me, the perfect moment was the one moment accompanied by the perfect song or the perfect track.

You have a private soundtrack in your head?
Well yeah but not that much any more. I feel kind of sad but I’ve lost touch with music a little bit in the past five years or so of hectic work in Bombay. Music was a constant companion. I’ve lived on my own since I was 18 and I also lived in a girls’ hostel for a very long time. The first year I lived in a room with five other girls. Your bed and your headphones gave your independence from life, from the bustle of the hostel. I used to take my little Walkman to bed and constantly listen to music. But I also reached a stage when I wasn’t finding anything new or path-breaking. I went through pop, classical music, jazz, punk, then the big door opened into EBM. I found electronic music and explored it to death. But after that there has been no new frontier at some levels I feel slightly disconnected to music. I have somehow not found something that excites me in the past two years. I have gone back to classical music.

Your idiom is not Bollywood but here you are making your first film in the heart of Bollywood. What constraints do you feel Bollywood faces?
I’ve had a non-relationship with Bollywood. I was marginally snobbish about it. I watched all kinds of other cinema but didn’t think to watch Bollywood. Whatever I saw didn’t really interest me. Until I had to do a paper on Rangeela in Jamia; Looking at Rangeela through an academic lens was an important thing for me to do in film school. I grew a little respect.

It was funny and engaging and in a strange way naive. I had to come down a level to appreciate very simple things about it. Little funny things that someone said, or a moment… not overthought. It felt much more simplistic, elementary. Then I wrote papers on Govinda’s Gambler. I began to see the differences between different kinds of films in Bollywood. I think that is one of the difficulties that Bollywood faces. Not just about being taken seriously but also in being seen as creating something fresh. My attitude towards Hindi cinema was oh it is going to be the same old thing. I think that’s the cross Bollywood carries. Though I haven’t watched enough films in the past few years to know whether that has changed significantly. I only watch movies that pop out at me and say, “Come watch me.”

So the viewer expectation is one of no change rather than innovation.
Exactly. That’s the constraint that BolIf you look at Tamil cinema, there are new things happening every year: new actors, new directors, new producers. There’s a lot of energy. Stories are very good. Even if it is about the same old thing, someone angry about the system or whatever the hell it is. I’ve not particularly seen anything quiet and moody - everything has a violent edge to it and there are some strange tropes about women.

But it just feels like something happening there that is not happening in Hindi cinema. I’ve tried to understand it. Asked people about it. There are lots of factors. Tamil cinema entertains one or two states but it is reliant on people who speak that language. People don’t watch it subtitled. You don’t rent Tamil DVDs.

Also there is a strong cinema going culture and films have a chance to run and recover in the long run so Subramaniapuram, which has new actors, nobody knows who the actor is, but it still runs. They have more single screens than multiplexes, which is a big factor in the kind of films we. Because exhibition is the final frontier. So if my film is running in a multiplex where it costs them Rs 10,000 per show. To make Rs 10,000 per show you need to have at least half-full house.

My kind of film might only get a 100 people, not 300 or 400 people. When it’s a single screen, it doesn’t lie on the same line, because you rent the cinema. I can take the risk of renting a cinema for four or eight weeks. Knowing that through word of mouth, even in the third or fourth week people might come to see my film. After a wave of a Kamal Hassan film is gone, my film would be still around for people to watch. So there’s a chance for different stories, new actors. It’s something about the whole system, not just the filmmakers and the kind of films they make. When I look around at colleagues in the film industry, they’re very individualistic and very intelligent people. But it has not translated into the idea that Bollywood is fresh. Maybe the past year or so we keep seeing these blips in the graph and we say, oh it’s a good year for independent films. It’s also about how much time, money and importance we give to writers.

I think you have something there when you talk about understanding the audiences. With Tamil cinema, the audiences stretch to Singapore or Kerala but you know who your audience is.
In Bollywood it becomes very generic. The curve becomes flattened. The culture and the language becomes flattened… That is what’s has given rise to so many different kinds of films in the country. It is really exciting. Apparently there are people making films in Mythili, films made in Rs 50,000 and DVDs goes to video parlours and recovers the money spent. That is how it has to be. We are too diverse a people to expect one size fits all. Hollywood has done it but the culture of the West is fairly flattened out. But here each language has its culture. I am excited not about independent cinema but about individual cultures coming out in film. We have so much going on but the fact that Bollywood has had to make films for everyone has made it even out large swathes of experience. Content becomes about broad strokes, not the particular.

You were saying about writing.
I feel we should have more… perhaps writers’ labs. It’s very difficult for filmmakers, for production houses to accept the work. We get tonnes of stuff we have to wade through. And there’s no constant. This is the other thing about Tamil films. There is the whole culture of doing your time as an assistant. In the Hindi films it’s too easy. You became an assistant in no time. I became a first AD after one film. During my first film they were making me do first AD work. If you are smart and you can pick up filmmaking techniques you can go straight away and make a film.

In the Tamil film industry the director has 10 assistants, the assistant who is the junior most is just doing things like transcribing, writing ideas, editing drafts, he doesn’t leave the office. When you’ve done your time working on the whole film as a third or fourth AD do you get to come to the sets! By the time you are on the sets with the director, you know not just film techniques, it’s about knowing the language, writing which scripts work, which ideas work.

Did you miss that sort of grounding?
Everyone at that age is too impatient. You think you know everything. When I came out of Jamia I was like, “I am making a film by 2000.” I came to Bombay thinking I’ll do a little bit work then I’ll go make my own films. I didn’t want to make a Hindi film. I knew that the only way to get experience on a film set is to work on a Hindi film. It wasn’t that I should go apprentice. I didn’t know any director, the only director I knew in Bombay was Subhash Ghai. I’d never seen a film of his. So I wrote to Subhash Ghai. He might have a letter from 15 years ago. Dear Mr Ghai, My name is Kiran Rao and I would love to work for you. I faxed it to him! I didn’t even go to his office. I of course never heard from him.

I became super confident, and within two weeks I got a job because I had to pay my rent. I was too impatient. When I finally started working on a film, I was like hold on, you’ve to learn all this stuff.
And living in Bombay is also very hard. In the first seven years of living here, I dabbled and wrote but the pressure is far more than realise. I was doing advertising so I thought I will have time to do this. It doesn’t happen. Life just gallops along. And you get more greedy. I was a pretty good AD. Work comes along. I was living the good life. I had all the amenities. Was living alone, car, amenities. I had what I wanted to be happy. Slowly writing just took a backseat.

Terrifying…

Very scary. Also I didn’t think I had a good idea. What I was writing wasn’t good enough. Finally when I started working on this film I started feeling there is something here that is engaging me. I had an idea that was worth it. It took me a while.lywood faces. It’s something I think about a lot. It’s not that people in the film industry are all the same so why do they make the same kind of film? I think it’s a sort of responsibility that Bollywood carries to entertain such a large mass of people.

If you look at Tamil cinema, there are new things happening every year: new actors, new directors, new producers. There’s a lot of energy. Stories are very good. Even if it is about the same old thing, someone angry about the system or whatever the hell it is. I’ve not particularly seen anything quiet and moody - everything has a violent edge to it and there are some strange tropes about women.

But it just feels like something happening there that is not happening in Hindi cinema. I’ve tried to understand it. Asked people about it. There are lots of factors. Tamil cinema entertains one or two states but it is reliant on people who speak that language. People don’t watch it subtitled. You don’t rent Tamil DVDs.

Also there is a strong cinema going culture and films have a chance to run and recover in the long run so Subramaniapuram, which has new actors, nobody knows who the actor is, but it still runs. They have more single screens than multiplexes, which is a big factor in the kind of films we. Because exhibition is the final frontier. So if my film is running in a multiplex where it costs them Rs 10,000 per show. To make Rs 10,000 per show you need to have at least half-full house.

My kind of film might only get a 100 people, not 300 or 400 people. When it’s a single screen, it doesn’t lie on the same line, because you rent the cinema. I can take the risk of renting a cinema for four or eight weeks. Knowing that through word of mouth, even in the third or fourth week people might come to see my film. After a wave of a Kamal Hassan film is gone, my film would be still around for people to watch. So there’s a chance for different stories, new actors. It’s something about the whole system, not just the filmmakers and the kind of films they make. When I look around at colleagues in the film industry, they’re very individualistic and very intelligent people. But it has not translated into the idea that Bollywood is fresh. Maybe the past year or so we keep seeing these blips in the graph and we say, oh it’s a good year for independent films. It’s also about how much time, money and importance we give to writers.

I think you have something there when you talk about understanding the audiences. With Tamil cinema, the audiences stretch to Singapore or Kerala but you know who your audience is.
In Bollywood it becomes very generic. The curve becomes flattened. The culture and the language becomes flattened… That is what’s has given rise to so many different kinds of films in the country. It is really exciting. Apparently there are people making films in Mythili, films made in Rs 50,000 and DVDs goes to video parlours and recovers the money spent. That is how it has to be. We are too diverse a people to expect one size fits all. Hollywood has done it but the culture of the West is fairly flattened out. But here each language has its culture. I am excited not about independent cinema but about individual cultures coming out in film. We have so much going on but the fact that Bollywood has had to make films for everyone has made it even out large swathes of experience. Content becomes about broad strokes, not the particular.

There must have been many expectations and stereotypes about your current position as Aamir’s Wife. Capital A, Capital W. What helped you make that transition from being a private person with so much confidence?
When I first started seeing Aamir I was thoroughly amused. I thought “I’m seeing a film star. Me. It’s hilarious.” My friends laughed. I never felt woah, so cool. When I used to read about myself I used to laugh. Such a bad picture. Or they would ask me, “Why do you wear glasses all the time?” There was a story quoting a bystander at the Goa film festival saying, “Oh look that’s Kiran Rao, she wears glasses so she must be intelligent”. It’s fodder for great fun.

How did you deal with the expectations of people in the film industry?
I’ve never given a hang about what everybody wants me to do. I refuse to wear a gown or carry a designer bag. I think I was really fortunate to have had a really great childhood, to have parents who weren’t over marriage or forcing us to do anything, and they had a lot of influence on us in a good way. So I think when I finally decided for establishing as Aamir’s wife, I was still quite confident that I would retain my own personality. It has always been more of a challenge for me to prove things to myself. Even this process of making a film, scores of people over the ten or twelve years, where is your film? For me, the comments have always annoyed me but I knew that I couldn't do something unless I knew that it would work for me. To find my voice. That is what’s driven me. Through this whole film-mad culture.

When you entered Bollywood, was there something that caught your eye, amused you, surprised you?
I had worked with film people so it wasn’t that new. But I’d grown up in an English-speaking world so I think the particular language and culture of Hindi-speaking people, the “ji-ji” of the film world. Very formal. I have always used first names, even for directors. So I had to get used to it. I told myself if I was part of a particular culture, if I laughed at it I was being a snob. Aamir’s family is like that, very polite. It is actually quite endearing but when you're outside it, when it’s alien you're just laughing about it. It used to seem like lip service but I see it more objectively.

Has there been any moment when you did feel eclipsed?
I am fairly opinionated and I find that when we go to gatherings of high-level people or even general gathering. It's fairly natural that everyone is only interested in what Aamir has to say, which is something that I guess in the beginning used to annoy me. Because a lot of things lots of people were saying I did not agree with. But no one was interested in my point of view (laughs). So I had to clench my teeth and make notes.

Actually you are expected to look pretty. That is all you are expected to. You are expected to go to social functions looking decent so that on his arm he has someone who is well put together. Not a role I am excited to play. First, they were not interested in talking to me. Second, they want me to be one nice set-piece. That eclipsing bothered me. It took me a while before I realised, “Listen, I’m not sure if I want to share my opinions with these people in any case.” I wasn’t sure whether they were worth my time. So I used to go along and be ha-ha. Usually I’d find other people who are also left out who are much more interesting than the famous people.

And in the beginning I was just a girlfriend. Girlfriend, the status is pretty grey. They are not sure whether they are supposed to respect you. Because you might be dumped. In a short while. That little grey area was also a little tough for me to navigate. You don't feel like you're actually running the house though you are. It is something women who are not married must go through everywhere. Men never feel it. If you are a man with a girlfriend, automatically you are entitled. But if you are a woman unless you are married there is a certain lack of legal status. It’s bizarre.

We didn’t want to get married until we wanted to. I didn’t want to do it for the status, for the tag. I didn’t want the respect that status would confer on me. That was not what I was here for. Aamir is completely respectful. He treated me like his partner.

Where did he learn his attitudes to women?
I don’t know! He didn't even finish college and he was not like highly educated. I think it's entirely self-taught. His parents are polite, elegant, lovely people. He didn’t come from a super-liberal family but they were liberal enough. He has close cousins. But I think much of it came from reading. From when he was little. Even now you can’t get his head out of a book. It’s also growing among a lot of women. Two sisters and his cousin Nuzhat. He is very close to her. Nuzhat and Mansoor (Khan) are very strong personalities; both his sisters are very lovely. The family is lovely. His mother he completely adores. There is a genuine love for women. There is no special treatment. No doors will be opened. If you are not handicapped you can open your own door.

In 2009, you went through a miscarriage. How did it change you?
It was very hard. And I don't know, I still feel like I haven't fully come to understand the loss. It was a long-drawn out process. It didn’t come on suddenly. Physically it was hard. Sometimes I’m almost surprised that I could get over it. I’m really grateful we have the bounce back quality, that we can get over it. Grow new memories, heal. If one couldn’t get past it, it would be like death. Living death. The fact that I could within a day or two be comfortable and talk about it to people, being relaxed about it. Grief would always be there obviously, but you can also put it in a context of life, you feel like there is more.

YOU CAN go watch Love, Sex Aur Dhokha, Dibakar Banerjee’s set of three short interconnected films, and get excited about sex and video cameras. Surveillance and voyeurism have been hotbutton themes in the art world for a while. And it may seem like popular culture is now following in sweaty excitement. Or you could ignore the camera and sexual transgressions because LSD is signalling a much bigger shift in our society.

Look closely. The film insists you do. But what are you going to do with what you have seen? The Quakers, and their spiritual descendants, Greenpeace, believe that to prevent sin, the virtuous need to bear witness. Superficially, this seems the same as the filmi heroine saying ‘Chhod do. Koi dekh lega’ — someone might see us doing what we clearly enjoy doing. Philosophers will tell you that the Quakers are all about guilt and the heroine’s squeal is about shame. It is this question of shame — a shame rapidly evaporating in our society — with which LSD engages. A runaway couple with a video camera, a romance that unfolds before a supermarket CCTV, a dancer and a journalist who plan a sting together — through these short encounters, LSD tells us we don’t care anymore if anyone sees us doing what we are doing.

And so what is to stop us from doing anything? Bollywood’s new directors have been edging towards this insight with noir, with political cinema, with comedy. Filmmaker Dibakar Banerjee has hit dead centre leaving you with an unsettling cinematic experience.

In his previous films, Khosla Ka Ghosla and Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! Banerjee lay open the pious, greedy Indian middle-class clutching its possessions to its collapsed chest. He has been sympathetic, not to say sentimental, about the aspirations of the poor. Sympathetic because he believes the middleclass will prevail, still prating niceties. In LSD, a much darker world emerges in which even the middle-class has time only for a few pieties before baring fangs.

In the first short, Banerjee evokes two classics. One, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (DDLJ), that beloved cotton-candy edifice. The second is an equally beloved sex tape from Karnataka. Banerjee’s protagonist is a film student who falls inevitably in love with the heroine of his diploma film, a tribute to DDLJ. His attempts to charm her brute of a father is inevitable too. The couple run away and get married. As they hide out in a hotel room they look shyly into the eye of their constant companion, the video camera, and say, “Thank you Adi Sir.” This is perhaps the most eerie moment in the film. This is Banerjee reminding filmmaker Aditya Chopra of his legacy of whitewash. Before Chopra, Hindi cinema had plenty of villainish fathers, albeit cartoonish, and destined for a cartoonish routing. However with DDLJ, Chopra taught us to believe that the brutish father, if dealt with tact, will eventually give his approval. In real life, 15 years after DDLJ, families continue to murder their sons and daughters who stray. Banerjee takes the trajectory of the villainish father to its logical end. The young runaways are hacked to death in one of the bleakest sequences of Indian cinema.

BANERJEE’S SECOND cinematic reference is Mysore Mallige, a video made by two lovers a few years ago. Shot over several days in a hotel room, it somehow leaked on the porn circuit where its romantic air earned it a cult following. Mysore Mallige’sunwitting star with her oldfashioned beauty was a revelation to the sensitive and to the jaded. Here was a girl enjoying her nudity and looking affectionately at the camera eye of her lover. Was she for real?

Sexual liberation is the happy byproduct of this age when we don’t care who is looking. LSD’s characters, like all of us, seek sex for all kinds of reasons: for pleasure, comfort, grief, power and money. In the second short, the supermarket boy longs for his supermarket girl. But by the time he gets her, his world has shifted and he is looking over her supine body shamelessly into the camera. Sex may be good with this kind, spunky girl but the tape made without her knowledge would pay off his debts. Who would judge him for making a quick fortune?

Someone said of Banerjee’s digital format with some contempt: shoot anything on video camera and it looks real. But the aesthetic did allow Banerjee to populate his film with non-star bodies. Real here does not equal ugly. The girls in LSD, trying hard to not be ‘a behenji type’, are a little underfed, a little underage, all fragile. And then there are the men, especially in the supermarket short, who have either successfully begun to see these bodies as merchandise or are struggling to do so. LSD’s celebrated ‘look’ does not eclipse its pitch-perfect dialogue. If you were watching LSD in the hall and wondered at the endless nervous laughter from the audience, be assured it is because the movie captures the way we speak without Bollywood’s customary caricature. But it is a wordless transaction in the final short that will remain the longest with you. The dancer stands before a bank of mirrors in hooker chic. In Dev D, Anurag Kashyap’s Paro was memorably asked whether she touches herself. Here the dancer’s hand lingers slowly over her crotch. Besides her stands the sting journalist, her new friend. He is moustached, bespectacled, a fossil in his unadorned plainness. But next to him it is her globalised body that is as strange as a Martian. He must have imagined her touching him the day before.

It is also in this final short film that LSD reveals its real quest most plainly. Its protagonist tells his TEHELKA-like tale of having paid the price for a sting too well done. And now he is being pushed into the role of a blackmailer. Can the seeing eye of his hidden camera still tell the truth or has it too been subverted? Banerjee does not grandstand. Instead his agenda emerges in innuendo about stings, the emphasis on the word ‘tehelka’ used over and over as a common noun. Via the crassness of the television producer he refracts the middle-class discomfort with sting journalism. This discomfort is not with surveillance or voyeurism or with the intrusiveness of new technology, as people claim. The middle-class has taken joyfully to watching the inappropriate: weddings for money, seductions for TRPs, catfights, lies, schoolgirl sex MMSes and shows like Emotional Atyachaar in which fidelity is tested on air.

None of this viewing makes the middle- class squirm but they must have a few days ago when Teesta Setalvad screened afresh the TEHELKA footage of the Gujarat sting — as the story of Narendra Modi and the SIT gains heat. Stings make the middle-class twitch as if a faux pas had been committed. The sting hurts, not because it is new, but because it is a prickly remnant of an old social contract that we keep hoping has lapsed. Go ahead and look at me if you must but who are you to ask that I be ashamed?

YOU MAY ASSUME that Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani‘s hill station sets are so patently fake that irony is intended. But once you get past that, the film is for most part easy viewing, if rather overlong. From its comic strip opening credits to the last frame in which Prem (Ranbir Kapoor) chastely pecks Jenny (Katrina Kaif) on the cheek and chortles, Ajab is consistently fun for a ten year old. Prem (Ranbir Kapoor) is a sweet wastrel, focussed only on getting starcrossed lovers together. When he eventually meets Jenny (Katrina Kaif), he has to deploy a lot of that ingenuity for himself. A frame in which the Happy Club boys are luxuriating in sloth particularly makes you wonder why this film was not sold as a summer blockbuster for kids.

But Santoshi has always had an attractive sense of humour — not just in the Master Gogo and omelette ka Badshah-filled Andaz Apna Apna. Damini’s Meenakshi Seshadri was one of the few heroines of that decade with good lines, but the vastly underappreciated insanity of Lajja is where to look for Santoshi’s turn for irony. In the midst of melodrama, you realise the one-armed thakur is the villain and the low-caste daku is the good guy. When the thakur’s other arm is chopped off, one can only applaud the excess.

This Disneyfied production has neither the goofball unpredictability of Andaz Apna Apna nor the quiet evil of Lajja. You see mere traces of that interesting Santoshi. Just when you have recovered from the political incorrectness of a muscular troop of ‘attack’ hijras protecting a woman, up comes a sequence in which you have the woman and her Muslim lover thanking Prem for rescuing her from her terrifying Hindu husband. Santoshi then dispenses this couple (in over-the-top 1980s film style ‘Muslim’ clothes) off to Goa! You can hear Santoshi chuckling at this shot in the arm for the love jihad.

The film does have the pie-throwing energy of Ranbir Kapoor. His loosey-goosey charm is perfectly matched by a Katrina Kaif dressed like a Wonder Years girl. Kaif only annoys occasionally when she calls her hero ‘Pram’ like the the 1990s Indi-pop horror Jasmine Bharucha. If family viewing concedes to adult and nonanodyne tastes you may prefer to avoid Ajab and take everyone to a two-hour dastan-goi performance with magicians, violence, frank ribaldry, no concessions to realism and, oh yes, wit.

Published here.

A week ago, a beautiful young woman dining in a small Versova restaurant asked, “Who is Anurag Kashyap? Is he the director of Fashion?” Gasps rose from the crowded table. It was an exceptionally bad place to ask this question since Kashyap was sitting at the same table and all around were the fanatic Passion For Cinema (PFC) bloggers. Vasan Bala, Kashyap’s amiable assistant director from Dev D who had confessed with comic alarm that he had only got 8 out of 10 on a Dev D quiz, had come in for much teasing. For those at the table who saw no shame in knowing the running time of obscure movies, the young woman’s question put her beyond mere mockery, into the realm of legend.

At his quiet Andheri office that morning 36-year-old Kashyap had answered phone calls with demonic satisfaction and frequently hung up laughing. With the release of Gulaal the previous day the process of declaring him a success, a trend begun with Dev D, had taken on new heat and lubricant. Big stars who would earlier never take his calls sent messages asking to be in any new project. A producer called saying that he had taken friends to watch Gulaal to prove that a new Bollywood has arrived. Kashyap said, “I wait a decade for this film to be made and he is the one doing the proving?’” But as the calls kept coming in, even that trace of bitterness seemed to disappear.

Now Kashyap looked startled at the question and then guffawed with hand-rubbing enjoyment. “No, Anurag Kashyap is the director of the Fashion Statement.” The young woman remained serene, unaware of the decade that had passed for him to reach a point where his new-found success could also be mocked, not clawed at.

Kashyap had first exploded into our lives in 1998 when he (and Saurabh Shukla) wrote Ram Gopal Verma’s Satya. He was one of the first script-writers to write a non-Urdu based dialogue. But instead of using a deracinated, functional Hindi in his 20 odd scripts, his tongue was as informed by pulp-fiction superstar Surinder Mohan Pathak as by Prem Chand. When he went on to make films they were unpredictable, layered experiences. The result was cinema as fond of Bob Fosse as Majid Majidi, where the unabashed surrealism of No Smoking was cheek-to-cheek with one of the world’s best chase sequences (Black Friday). Kashyap’s films, are often accused of being dark or incomprehensible but with throwaway gags and rich situations, the comic rages through his work. With cinematographer Rajeev Ravi, a man as silent as Kashyap is loquacious, new visual styles were developed; passion was sniffed out in dingy chicken-coops and Paharganj rooms. In the newest movies, the soundtracks too have been addictive and intelligent.

But no one cared while the angry, whinging Kashyap seemed like bad luck that might rub off. Not in 2004 when Black Friday was stalled by a court order. Not in 2006 when Gulaal was canned after 80 percent of the work had been done. Not in 2003 when Paanch was held back by the censors. He was told he ought to stop making films. Only the most educated film buffs defended him. In the depths of despair in 2006 Kashyap shocked his friends by sending out a mass SMS to everyone in the industry asking for help. No one responded except John Abraham who sweetly bought him a ticket to LA so he could have a change of scene. There Kashyap wrote No Smoking a dark allegory about individualism. Critics laughed at it and called the festival favourite Black Friday (also released in 2007) a fluke. When UTV Spotboy’s Rucha Pathak wrote to Kashyap saying she was interested in his projects, he responded with an angry tirade, so used was he to rejection.

And now suddenly it was uncool to not have an informed opinion about Dev D. Aditya Chopra, whose iconic mustard fields were forever subverted by Paro and her rolled-up mattress, loved his work. Vishal Bhardwaj was so excited by Dev D he wanted to hold a press conference to just talk about it. The Twilight Players of Dev D were mobbed in Punjab. ‘Emotional atyachaar’, ‘Paro, do you touch yourself?’ and the Gulaal mujra have all entered pop culture. UTV Spotboy was inundated with scripts that declared themselves ‘small-budget and different’. But immediately after Dev D, Kashyap told his long-suffering friends that he understood failure, he was not sure what to do with success.

Kashyap has had practice in working past self-pity. His father, who worked for the UP state electricity board, thought he was doing the right thing by sending him to a ‘good’ boarding school. But his childhood is a dark, wide memory of being beaten by schoolmates and sexually abused by adult neighbours. “It made me sexually dysfunctional and frequently depressed,” he says. When he came to Delhi he built muscles and a reputation in college for being violent. “I had no intention of going through it all again.”

A few years ago he finally talked to his family about his abuse. Recently he forced himself to visit his abusers, look them in the eye and forgive them but as a father he is constantly reminded of them. He loves his ten-year-old Aaliya who bosses him around and courts him coyly in the manner of feisty little girls everywhere. “I am so careful about the way in which I touch her,” says Kashyap.

In college he was still insecure about being a Benaras boy. But all around him were magnificent examples of unapologetic living. One night a young woman scandalised the boys’ hostel with her presence. The next morning she wandered into the gossipy mess hall wearing her lover’s shirt and ate a large breakfast. Another woman told a casual letch that she would string his balls up on a tree. She and other women became his closest friends, participants in his quest to know What Women are Like. Bhikku Matre’s wife Pyaari, Paro, Chanda, the androgynous dancers of No Smoking, the women of Gulaal --- within an oeuvre of highly masculine movies Kashyap has given us some fascinating women. In a cinema most afflicted by moralising, Kashyap refuses to sit in judgment. (On everything but taste. He has been known to give his new actors books and movies to see their reactions.)

Though his parents have found it difficult to deal with their restless, casually outrageous son, Kashyap inspires strong familial loyalty in others. Rucha Pathak, Kashyap’s UTV Spotboy producer treats him like a brother, exhorting him to not talk so much, telling him that he should not behave like the world owes him everything, calls him a pain and a delight. Piyush Mishra, veteran theatre actor and creator of Gulaal’s astonishing soundtrack, is convinced that Kashyap is a son from another birth. Mishra was a hero admired from afar in Kashyap’s theatre days. “Some people don’t ask to be let in or knock. They come into your lives as if they have always been there.” In lieu of a fond parent, Mishra is the one who recites stories peppered with profanities and gleaned from Kashyap’s siblings, of the boy who pretended carom boards were movie theatres while other people played house-house, of his stubborn ability to keep saying no politely to the powerful, of his going out of his way to help someone, of his honesty, his loyalty.

Years ago, filmmaker Imtiaz Ali came to his Hindu College digs one evening and found a muscular, bespectacled young man at his door. Kashyap had come in search of Ali because he had heard he was helping cast actors for a television serial. (“He said, “I have a portfolio.” I said, “What is that?”) The serial never took off but they saw a lot of each other because they were theatre-mad. Ali says he remembers vaguely wondering whether he should emulate Kashyap’s focused approach to work. When Ali moved to Mumbai and pragmatically joined an advertising course he lost touch with Kashyap.One evening he came back to the Xavier’s hostel and found Kashyap waiting among the trees. He had moved to Mumbai hoping to join the Xavier’s filmmaking course but had been too late for admission. Kashyap had no roof over his head so Ali invited him to stay a while illegally in his hostel room.

In those years there were many days when Kashyap lived on the street. “I used to sleep on that traffic island,” Kashyap will point out for you near Lokhandwala, “between those two lamp posts to protect me from oncoming traffic. Even later when he was working for Zee he still had homeless days. “But my loo was in the Taj” says Kashyap with vicious pleasure. Kashyap smoothed Ali into his first well-paying job in Mumbai and rejoiced when in a couple of years Ali went from earning Rs 1,500 a month to Rs 40,000.

Ali’s life is fused forever with Kashyap but he gives Kashyap less leeway than most. Ali says bluntly, “Anurag has had trouble making his movies and has been depressed. It is not that uncommon. At least he has the chance to keep making movies.” And that is a blessing to be examined.

The Kashyap cult is currently feeling avenged for their years in the shadows. This tight net of loyalty and love is what can send the newly successful Kashyap meandering into Ram Gopal Varma territory, a world where everyone agrees with him. The sometimes insightful, sometimes incoherent PFC blogs (which he was instrumental in starting at a time when independent cinema was barely mentioned in the mainstream media) frequently run the danger of turning into a Passion for Anurag space. If his next film bears more than Dev D’s streaks of self-indulgence, would his fierce loyalists stop him?

Kashyap says he does not want to be steam-rolled into making movies now that he smells like success. He says, “I’m afraid of what kind of movies I will make on this high. That’s why I am not making anything for a while and I am deliberately scaling down our budgets and equipment.” This week he wrote testily on PFC exhorting people to put their money where their mouth is. “Where are the discussions on Firaaq and Barah Aana, both of which I saw in an empty theatre today? If none of these films work prepare yourself to go back to the cinema we have tried so hard to leave behind.”

Kashyap never gives up on projects. He lives with them for years in his head then writes them in a 36-hour flurry. On the sets he is a restless presence, redrafting dozens of times, talking continuously, a trail of paper and energy, convinced that this particular attack of acidity is a heart attack and he needs to go to hospital. He works intuitively, smelling out what an actor or a location would add to the film, sifting through a lifetime of literary and cinematic references. Sriram Raghavan, one of his oldest friends in Mumbai is convinced Kashyap single-handedly kept Mumbai’s Lotus Books in the black for years.

In his office, Kashyap is an optical illusion: sometimes just another writer typing away. At other times, his shoulders are too big, eyes too wicked for the small room. In one corner hangs an Allwyn Kalicharan poster that looks fresh though it is five years old. In a dystopic Delhi (renamed Hastinapur) Allwyn Kalicharan was to be a superhero for our times. When Anil Kapoor pulled out of the project, Kashyap was enraged by producers who said that no one would understand the film. Not as enraged as later, when the release of Sin City prompted lazy producers to show an interest in Allwyn. He is currently writing Doga a superhero film. He likes Doga, a Raj Comics superhero without superpowers, only emotional intensity. Doga’s warped mind creates the monsters he fights later. It will be interesting to see what Kashyap does with the metaphor since he is currently on a break from fighting his monsters.

Kalki Koechlin, his girlfriend, is credited with much of the new calm. It has been three years since he and his editor wife Aarti Bajaj split (‘she was sick of my drinking and depression but we still work together.’) His relationship with actor Ayesha Mohan probably did not help. Kashyap falls in love obsessively but Kalki came into his life unbidden and slowly.

The search for the perfect Chanda was taking on epic proportions. Audition tapes were crammed full of young actors writhing, moaning, faking orgasms unconvincingly for what was seen as a ‘sexy’ part. Kashyap rejected Kalki’s portfolio saying, “I don’t want any white-girl model types.” He didn’t even stay for her audition. But ten minutes later, when Kashyap saw her tapes, Kalki was summoned back. Kashyap had found his Chanda. Chanda of the full lips and schoolgirl rawness. Generous, vulnerable, alternately clowning and seductive, Kalki’s Chanda was flawed but luminous. Restless Kalki juggled on the sets so Chanda did too.

Kalki was interested in everything about filmmaking and soon became Kashyap’s Girl Friday.After the movie was done Kashyap flew to America, a country whose self-fashioning tragedy -- the 9/11 attacks -- he mocked blandly in Gulaal. (It is also a country he admires greatly for its creative license. He badly wanted to cite Narendra Modi’s excesses in Gulaal.) In America Kashyap discovered he had grown ‘accustomed to her face’. He called Kalki and bumbled his confession. Kalki only slightly suspicious of directors who come bearing gifts was ready to be wooed. “All the biriyani which he kept cooking for me then to impress me, I don’t see any of it now,” Kalki jokes.

In an industry where romantic relationships are rarely acknowledged openly they have been very open in their affection. Kashyap has declared himself a new man, someone who leaves parties early, shuttles between his hardworking office and book-strewn household. A diet chart is tacked prominently near his desk and Kalki’s theatrical collaborator, Prashant Prakash wanders in and out of his office with as much ease as Aamir’s young director Rajkumar Gupta.

In college Kashyap’s classmates used to mock him for hanging out almost exclusively with his juniors by calling him BKD, Bachchon Ka Dada. Kashyap today is surrounded by extremely ambitious young writer-directors jostling with ideas. This year he intends to produce four of their best scripts. Kashyap and his contemporaries Imtiaz Ali, Sriram and Sridhar Raghavan, Shivam Nair, Nishikant Kamat have broken industry conventions by sharing their scripts at every stage, showing their first cut to each other, critics and the public. They have made collaboration cool. And these collaborators are the most pleased with Kashyap’s success, happy that his restlessness may now be accompanied by contemplation.

We will forever have the grit and wit of Kashyap’s movies, if also its bouts of self-indulgence. Up ahead in the next few years are a Guru Dutt biopic and Bombay Velvet, a noir set in 1960s Mumbai, all jazz and newsprint. With luck we will also have the monster-baiting Kashyap.

(A shorter version of this piece has been published in this week's Tehelka)

To follow the Deol men would be one way of tracing Bollywood’s history. From Dharmendra, rarely allowed to dip into his deep well of comedic ability, to Sunny Deol, whose big battered body gave us a sweet-natured bull, forced into brutishness by a relentless world, time after time. Then, there was Bobby, askew enough to not quite fit into the dying genre of masala romance, too early for a cinema that fit him. When Bobby played an amiable young liar who discovers that much bigger crooks are cloaked by respectability in Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Kareeb (1998) we had very little to say to it. A decade later, when cousin Abhay played a just as amiable crook in Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, we were ready to embrace Lucky, the terror just below the surface and the much sharper indictment of middle-class greed.

Thirty-two-year-old Abhay Deol is, in one sense, the physical embodiment of New Bollywood. His genetic heritage is big, goodlooking and smooth enough to draw the crowds. His acting chops strong enough to work with a range of clever young directors. It would seem that perhaps it’s his timing that’s right. Oye Lucky’s director Debakar Banerjee disagrees, “There is only one of Abhay. There should be many more. Right from the beginning, he has gone in search of directors who enjoy surprising their audiences. And at this stage, even for producers who think in terms of pure cash, he is a sound strategic choice. I think Abhay has created this space in the industry on his own.”

Anurag Kashyap, who likes to call Deol an early Johnny Depp, goes further. “Look at all the strange little movies that have come in the last few years. The only common link is Abhay. He’s resisted the pressure of the market and done what he wanted to do, unlike actors who do what they think they ought to do.”

DEOL HAS a quality of silly happiness that is infectious. Of all the strange young men he has played so far, Deol’s own personality is closest to the hopeful hero of his first film, Socha Na Tha. Deol’s other heroes have been fallible, corrupt, foolish. In Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, he’s no Robin Hood. In the shot where he’s awaiting capture in his expensive apartment, you see him surrounded by his tawdry spoils, hugging them the way Tim Burton’s Penguin communed with frozen fish — with desolate affection.

Even to journalists on the phone, Deol is without the guarded machismo of young stars, the carefully cultivated intensity meant to shorthand gravitas. But Deol’s charm lies in his vulnerability, his inability to disguise his wheedling. “Love me, love me” the undertone demands while he confides that growing up in the Deol family was like being a Von Trapp. He was the youngest of seven strictly brought-up Deol cousins. Outings were limited to family trips, and there was a blanket ban on late nights. The son of Dharmendra’s younger brother, producer Ajit Singh Deol, Abhay grew up calling Dharmendra ‘Dad’. “It sounds strange to outsiders. I grew up calling my parents, Ajit Uncle and Usha Aunty. But it never felt strange to me.”

His is the charm of the beloved baby of the family. To know that and then watch him in the movies doubles the pleasure. What on earth would this boy know of unhappiness or corruption or self-doubt? This really must be that strange thing: acting. Even Navdeep Singh, a close friend, thought he was too young to play Satyaveer, a man resigned to failure and life in small-town Rajasthan in Manorama Six Feet Under. Deol failed to convince him, then attempted another route. Shemaroo was interested in producing a film with Deol. Singh was looking for a producer. Deol made the project take off and put on Satyaveer’s moustache. The Satyaveer he became was to Singh’s great satisfaction.

More recently Deol saw a chance to play India’s heroin chic: the wan but cool lover, Devdas. Deol first dreamt up a contemporary Devdas set in Los Angeles. Scriptwriter Vikram Motwani, who worked on Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas, liked the idea but asked him to read the original. “I told him that Devdas was not cool. He was alcoholic with tremors and shakes.” Convinced, Abhay brought energy to a grittier tale of addiction and obsession. Motwani wrote the first draft and took it to Anurag Kashyap. Kashyap’s draft is the forthcoming Dev D, set in Punjab and Delhi.

Deol’s directors and coworkers will tell you he will actively campaign for his scenes to be cut if it will improve the screenplay. Kashap says, “He’s not the kind of actor to hog the camera.” Deol likes movies more than being a star. He reads scripts slowly and thoroughly — and all the time. His film sensibilities are eclectic. “As far as film families go, we were fairly sheltered. But we did go to shoots to see Chacha. I remember going to the sets of Loha and seeing Mandakini. I remember watching Sholay and loving it. But the big moment was watching Star Wars and then Bladerunner. My brain exploded. Then I fell in love with Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Terence Hill, Iranian films, all sorts of films.”

As an adult, Deol was confident that a more script-driven Bollywood would arrive. “I believed that there would be a change. I just had to work and it would happen.” After a few years abroad in film school, he was back in Mumbai looking for something different.

There was a familiar, relatively easy path awaiting Deol, but his six movies have all (except one) been with debut directors and small budgets. He has chased projects, read hundreds of scripts, wooed and seduced directors into carefully tailored movies rather than picked the one-size-fit-all star launch.

Motwani has known him since he was eight. “Hrithik Roshan’s launch changed the industry’s idea of a launch. Abhay has resisted pressure to go in that direction. It’s hard to watch people your age get high profile movies, more publicity, more money and not give in.”

He found it in Socha Na Tha, persuading the startled Imtiaz Ali, whose first film it was, to meet the formidable Deols, who were keen on producing it. It was in that strange little romantic comedy where Deol and Ayesha Takia wander around as if they know something no one else does, that Deol started out.

“Socha Na Tha looked like Bollywood, but it was only in disguise.” Much like him, one would imagine. Though the response to Deol was positive right from Socha Na Tha, few of his movies were big commercial successes. Deol’s biggest frustration has been the lack of wholehearted marketing of small films. That has changed with Oye Lucky and Dev D.

But Deol confesses he can’t imagine being a regular hero. “I’m too shy to dance. I don’t want to seem stuck up and arrogant, so if it is absolutely necessary I will do it to keep the peace. But most directors would see that I am uncomfortable.” He prefers the quirky and even powerless to the spectacular and heroic. “Everyone in the audience would empathise with the vulnerability of someone like Satyaveer. He isn’t super clean but he has some principles. He can’t take revenge on goondas. He can’t beat anyone up.”

What a revolutionary thing for a Deol to say, “He can’t beat anybody up.” In Abhay you see the alter-lives of the other Deols, a Sunny who’s actually beaten by the world’s inequities, a Bobby who gets to be the oddball, a Dharmendra who gets to deliver cheesy one-liners with relish and a handsome smirk.

Published here.

Related links: 

Bollywood in 2007

Interview with Navdeep Singh

Interview with Imtiaz Ali