Every sperrrm is sacred – an appreciation of Vicky Donor’s Dr Chaddha

Among the many little pleasures of the new film Vicky Donor is the casting of the veteran character actor Annu Kapoor as the single-minded Dr Chaddha, who runs an infertility clinic in Daryaganj. Through his long career, including sporadic appearances in mainstream cinema, Kapoor probably never expected to meet a script that would require him to roll his tongue around the word “sperm” dozens of times. But he does it with aplomb, saying the word with a hard “p” and a stress on the “r” (and emphasising Dr Chaddha’s middle-class Punjabi background in the process) and often accompanying it with an arm movement that mimics a sperm’s wiggly upstream journey. Executed differently, in a different sort of film, the gesture could have been a demonstration of bad taste; instead, it makes you warm to this sincere man who has mentally reduced all human beings to sperm types (“bada heartless sperrrm hai”).

The good doctor is simultaneously Gandhian in his anxiety about the preservation of a man’s vital fluids and Hitler-esque in his ideas about Aryan supremacy (though the implications of the latter trait aren’t explored – it exists mainly to create situational comedy, and Dr Chaddha is in a humanist in all ways that matter). Large sperm models with wide-eyed expressions decorate his office; a sperm-shaped dangler bumps about in the front of his car; he says lines like “Shakal dekhke aadmi ka sperrrm pehchaan sakta hoon”. That all this is done without ever turning him into a sleazeball or a voyeur is a tribute both to Kapoor’s performance and to the way the character is written (though I’d like very much to think a screenplay like this could have been done by a man, I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that it was by a “female sperrrm” – Juhi Chaturvedi).

Throughout, it is obvious that Chaddha is much more interested in sperms than in actual sex. (At times you almost wonder how sound his knowledge of biological processes is: in one hilarious scene, while talking about the demand for celebrities’ sperms, he refers to “Lady Gaga’s sperm”, seemingly unconcerned that she is unlikely to manufacture the little things.) His heart sinks when he learns that his most productive donor (the film’s protagonist Vicky, nicely played by Ayushmann Khurana) might be in a sexual relationship or – even worse – getting married. And there is nothing remotely frat-boyish about their conversations, no sign of a dirty old man engaging in “guy talk” with a randy Lajpat Nagar boy.

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There might appear something surreal about a film where two middle-class Indian men have an upfront, “G-rated” conversation about sperm while eating chola-kulcha at a streetside stall. But I saw these scenes as a natural extension of the paradoxes that exist in Indian society when it comes to sex and procreation: the fact that even deeply conservative people – who wouldn’t dream of discussing “it” with their children – can become feverishly intrusive when the subject of a married couple starting a family arises. (More on that here.) Or the fact that what should be a personal decision might often hinge on the urgent need for an heir to pre-empt your brother taking over the family property. This film extends these absurdities to their logical conclusion. "Sperm aur egg nu meet karva do na!" an overzealous client tells Dr Chaddha in the same tone that a father might employ while arranging a "meeting" for his daughter with a suitable boy.

Among other things, Vicky Donor is a fantasy of aspiration in which a carefree young man might buy his grandmother a 40-inch LCD TV from the money he earns through legal but frowned-upon means. It is also, in a small but significant enough way, a “Delhi film”: when Vicky falls in love with an aloof Bengali beauty (culminating in a  sweet scene where Rabindrasangeet comes to Lajpat Nagar-4), we are reminded that though Lajpat Nagar and Chittaranjan Park are barely 15 minutes apart, they are different cultural galaxies within the mini-universe of south Delhi. (Of course, games of one-upmanship are played even within each of these pockets: as one Lajpat Nagar resident sniffily says of another, “Yeh toh C-block mentality hai.”)

When Vicky and his girlfriend Ashima decide to get married, the film becomes, for a while, a nod to national integration, and these scenes – well-intentioned as they are – are among its weakest. The caricaturing of vulgar but good-natured Punjabis and uptight, fish-and-high-culture-obsessed Bengalis is much too broad – especially given that both sets of family members are soon revealed to be more accommodating and sensible than the stereotyping suggests.

But by the end, the film has cast its net much wider than Punjabis and Bengalis. In a late scene where the little products of Vicky’s sperm-donating are gathered together with their families, we see that some of the kids are dark-complexioned while others have blonde hair; there are children from north-eastern and south Indian families. Peel away the skin and we’re the same underneath, goes a platitude about human equality, but Vicky Donor doesn’t miss an opportunity to remind us of what we all looked like months before skin and developed organs even came into the equation. Seen in this light, Dr Chaddha is one of the sages and visionaries of our time. Monty Python’s “Every Sperm is Sacred” could well be the soundtrack of his life, though he wouldn’t think of the song as a satire.

Notes on A Separation

The Iranian film A Separation was one of the most widely acclaimed movies of the past year, but I went into it knowing very little other than that it was about a married couple on the verge of divorce because the wife wants a better life (outside Iran) for their young daughter while the husband needs to look after his Alzheimer’s-afflicted father. Based on this synopsis, I expected to see a nuanced story about people trying to balance their responsibilities, feelings and circumstances. And indeed, Asghar Farhadi’s film is all of this.

But it is also (and this I wasn’t expecting) something very much like a thriller, complete with tale-altering twists; a psychological detective story where revelations aren’t just frisson-generators but flow all too naturally from the characters’ personalities and situations. Emerging from the screening at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, I found myself in a variant of the discussions one has after watching a film from the mystery genre, such as Kahaani or The Usual Suspects. ”Remember that line where she says...?” “What did that glance really mean?” “That exchange was so unobtrusive, one barely registered it at the time.” “I need to see THAT scene again.”

Two levels of suspense – inseparable from each other – exist in A Separation, and they both circle around the film’s central incident: a brief scuffle between the husband, Nader, and the lower-class woman, Razieh, whom he has employed to look after his father while he is away at work. There is, first, the mode of the conventional “whodunit” (or “what happened”) and though it feels glib to discuss a slice-of-life drama in such terms, the film itself makes nods to such suspense – as in a scene where Nader retraces the incident (which has got him into legal trouble) for the police.

But the other form of suspense – one that persists through the film – is at the level of character, where the concealment of seemingly minor information gives us a different perspective on a person's behaviour. Layers are gradually peeled away and we see the full potential (for goodness, anger, deception, understanding) of all the protagonists: Nader and (to a lesser extent) his wife Simin; their intelligent daughter Termeh; Razieh and her hot-headed husband Houjat.

Here's just one example of this understated suspense and the emotional complexity in this film’s best scenes. (Minor spoiler alert) Razieh has accused Nader of causing her miscarriage, which is a very serious matter because the foetus was over four months old and therefore technically a human being as per the local law. Much hinges on whether he knew she was pregnant when he gave her a slight push to get her out of his house.

At one point Nader confesses to his daughter that he had known Razieh was pregnant, but it had slipped his mind at that specific moment. (“But you know how the law is – they expect everything to be in black or white. According to them, either I knew or I didn’t know.”) This is borne out cinematically: the early scene where Nader (and by extension the viewer) overhears a conversation mentioning the pregnancy is shot in such a way that the information is presented almost subliminally, with other things simultaneously occupying his (and our) attention – it isn’t stressed at all. At the time of the altercation, therefore, the viewer is in the same position as Nader: so focused on the high emotion of the moment (he has just discovered that Razieh left his father alone at home, almost causing his death) that he isn’t thinking about Razieh’s condition. In other words, he knew and he didn’t know; it’s a difficult idea to express in a film, but this one manages it.

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After watching A Separation I read two or three reviews by Western critics, and thought it interesting that they discussed it mainly in terms of the broad cultural differences between Iran and the West (therefore clubbing all the characters in this film together) while glossing over the schism between the two sets of lifestyles depicted within the story: the relatively well-off, cosmopolitan life of Nader’s family as opposed to the penury of Razieh and Houjat. But this is another important kind of separation, one that is based on privilege and education – it’s a separation between those who can (just about) afford to employ domestic staff and those who are forced to take up such positions to make ends meet (even if it means that a woman from a tradition-bound family must hide the fact that she is working). It’s a separation between people who are still rigidly devout (to the extent of staking their souls on the Holy Book) and those who have moved away from (or adopted a more relaxed attitude to) religion. And this separation has a distinct bearing on the plot arc, the actions of these people and their attitudes to one another.

The tension of the class divide is manifest in offhand little exchanges. “You think all we do is beat our wives all day” Houjat shouts at Nader in the judge’s chambers; in another context, he exclaims “These people don’t even believe in God”, to which Nader retorts sarcastically, “Yes, God is only for you people.” At one point the conservative Razieh has to take religious advice about whether she is allowed to change the old man’s trousers when he has soiled himself. And Nader tells the judge that he couldn’t make out Razieh was pregnant because “she is wearing a chador all the time”. Over the course of the story, these separations become so overwhelming that the characters can barely see or hear each other; cultural differences, secrets and misunderstandings accumulate to create a snowball effect; much is revealed about individual character and, by extension, about the workings of a society.

I thought the growing complexity of the film’s structure (wherein we come to empathise with different people in turn) was reflected in the difference between its opening and closing shots, both of which are lengthy takes. The opening shot is relatively straightforward, with the camera adopting the perspective of the judge who listens to Nader and Simin make their case for a divorce. As viewers we are put in his position, asked to listen to these two people (whom we barely know at this stage) and form opinions about them. But in the long closing shot, which takes place as the end-credits roll and Nader and Simin wait outside the judge’s room (with other people, all of whom no doubt have their own dramatic stories, moving about in the corridor near them), the camera’s eye has become “objective”. We are no longer expected to judge (and by this point, the immense difficulty of forming judgements has been made obvious). We simply watch and wait for further developments.

Spectrum of an individual butterfly

Presenting the most giggle-inducing passage I have read in a book this past month. Christina Daniels’ I’ll do it My Way: The Incredible Journey of Aamir Khan contains this rhapsodic quote by Indra Kumar, director of the 1990 film Dil:

In Dil, I saw Aamir turning from a larva to a beautiful butterfly. But today, he can transform himself into a beautiful evening or a brilliant sunset with clouds of magnificent colours. He has the capacity to be the moon shimmering in the water below. He is such a powerhouse of talent that he can transform his personality into all these things and look beautiful. If in the beginning, Aamir was just an individual butterfly and his beauty limited, now he has acquired the capacity to create a spectrum of his own. That is his evolution.

I thought Karan Johar loved SRK and Herzog loved Klaus Kinski (remember “From the moment I saw him, I knew it was my destiny to make films and his to act in them”?), but this takes the director-star relationship into a hitherto unimagined dimension. I will never think of Dil the same way again (not that I ever really thought about it before).
[Coming soon: a review of the book]

P.S. I watched Dhobi Ghat recently. Aamir's determinedly faux-intense gaze, pursed lips and pointy ears reminded me of something but I didn't know what it was until a few days ago. Then I figured it out and felt happy again. See.

The artist, the ivory tower and the world: on Govind Nihalani’s restored Party

The old man on stage is performing a scene from the play Natasamrat, about a once-great artiste now living in his inner world. “All the greats are within me!” he declaims, lurching about the stage, “Caesar, Othello, Ganpatrao Belwalkar.” A woman – clearly a fan of the actor – watches from behind a curtain, deeply moved. "Caesar" is stabbed – “Brutus, tum bhi?” – and falls to the ground. The scene ends, the audience applauds.

Backstage, the woman meets the actor and voices her admiration. “Kitni vedna hoti hogi, na?” she asks (“There must be so much suffering involved in this performance?”) “Vedna mujhe nahin hoti, jo character mujh mein hai, usse hoti hai,” he replies politely. The suffering isn’t mine; it’s the suffering of the character inside me. Then he returns to the dressing room and removes his heavy makeup to reveal a much younger (and dare one say it, blander, less interesting) face beneath it.

Watching this scene in Govind Nihalani’s 1984 film Party, I did a double take. The face beneath the mask is that of Shafi Inamdar, whom I mainly remember for his role as the husband in the 1980s comedy show Yeh jo Hai Zindagi, and for a series of workmanlike character parts in movies. It was one of those moments that give you a fresh perspective on a performer whom you have taken for granted.

But this is just one of many startling scenes in an extraordinary film. Party has been a holy grail for many of the movie-lovers I know, its long-time unavailability on DVD one of our abiding cinematic puzzles. Apart from being a cutting social satire, this is the best representation I’ve seen in Hindi cinema of the chamber drama (where characters are forced into self-reflection in a closed setting) as well as of the ensemble movie. And yet it has been out of circulation for years. (I heard from an acquaintance some time ago that Nihalani himself had been searching for a decent print; this is not difficult to believe.)

Well, it’s here now, in an excellent print – one of the new “Cinemas of India” DVDs, which are restorations of NFDC films made in the 1980s and 90s. These discs represent a very important step in film preservation in India and I’ll be writing a longer piece about them soon, but for now here are some thoughts on Party.

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The sequence mentioned above is one of the establishing scenes of Nihalani’s film, but it also touches on a key theme: the divide between an artist’s work and his life. Is it possible for a character on stage to feel intense vedna while the actor playing that character claims to be untouched by the emotions (and afterwards peels off his makeup, puts on a shiny red kurta and leaves for a cocktail party)? Is it similarly possible for a writer to express a powerful social conscience and sympathy for the downtrodden in his work while otherwise leading a privileged life at a vast remove from the subjects of his writing?

Adapted by Nihalani and Mahesh Elkunchwar from the latter’s play, Party raises these questions from many different perspectives. In its opening minutes we meet the people – most of them writers or artists, or otherwise connected with the cultural world – who will gather at the house of arts patron Damayanti Rane (Vijaya Mehta). The much-felicitated poet Barve (Manohar Singh) is accompanied by his alcoholic wife Mohini (Rohini Hattangadi), a failed actress who is constantly “performing” – even in private moments with her husband – and seems incapable of distinguishing between art and life. (No wonder she interprets a line in Barve’s work about “khokhla pyaar” – hollow love – as a personal jibe.) Other guests include Inamdar’s theatre actor Ravindra, who is more adept at separating himself from his roles; the ostentatiously radical Vrinda (Gulan Kripalani) who specialises in preaching social responsibility to others; Damayanti’s melancholy daughter Sona (Deepa Sahi), who has a child out of wedlock; and a dignified doctor (Amrish Puri) who is an outsider to this circle (possibly even a stand-in for the viewer), watching from a distance, making the others uneasy (“Lagta hai aap lagaataar humein dekh rahe hain,” Barve tells him jokingly). Meanwhile a group of young partygoers – led by Damayanti’s son Rahul – take over an upstairs room and dance to popular American music, mostly unconcerned with the goings-on downstairs.

As the evening progresses, little details of character emerge. When we see how the aspiring poet Bharat (K K Raina) shrinks from getting his brand-new kurta ruffled at a bus-stop, we understand how much the invitation to this party (populated by potential “contacts”) means to him. Vrinda bickers with a playwright about the shameless populism of his writing and he retorts “You Marxists speak of the aam aadmi, yet you mock his tastes while sitting comfortably in your Malabar Hills bungalows.” Private epiphanies are experienced, confessions made and what began as a parade of stereotypes becomes a complex skein of people, capable of self-awareness but caught in the images they have created for themselves. This aspect of Party reminded me of Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel, in which a group of sophisticates settle down for a dinner party and then find they cannot escape their claustrophobic setting.

Inevitably, then, much of the talk converges on someone who did succeed in leaving – a poet named Amrit, friend to many of those present, who is now fighting the cause of exploited tribals. This enigmatic figure (whose simultaneous absence from and centrality to the proceedings is reminiscent of Beckett’s Godot and Conrad’s Mr Kurtz) becomes a catalyst for our understanding of these partygoers. Their feelings about him run from hero-worship to indifference to mild annoyance (“This so-called social commitment has become fashionable”) to contempt (perhaps Amrit’s “activism” is a cover for his being a creative spent force, Barve remarks drily). But when a journalist named Avinash (Om Puri) – the only person to have met Amrit recently – joins the group, banter gives way to an intense, no-holds-barred debate about an artist’s role in an injustice-ridden society. Is it enough for him to work in seclusion, or must he put himself at risk by participating in the world? “Hum likhte hain kyonke humein likhna hai” (“We write because we must”) Barve says, but Avinash insists that every work of art is a weapon and that art and politics are inseparable. “Do we want to live as artists or as human beings?”

Party is a startlingly fresh film both in these big discussions and in its casual chatter about the literary world. Two people debate the relative merits of Rushdie and Naipaul (and I admit to being amused to find that Naipaul had a reputation for being "bitter" even three decades ago). A minor character named Ila (played by Ila Arun) asks Barve why there is so little of the female perspective in his work, and though his reply is an apparently sensible one (he can only convincingly write about the things he knows), we are reminded of his distant, condescending attitude towards his wife. “You English speakers think too much of yourselves,” one person says, provoking the retort that there is such a thing as “vernacular snobbery” too. (Yet this party itself is clearly an aspirational setting where anyone not comfortable in English would be out of place. Bharat awkwardly says things like “She is drunken” just to make small talk and to fit in.) Opposing views are expressed on nearly every major topic. Damayanti (who basks in the reflected glory of artists without being one herself) is called a parasite, but the word becomes equally significant in another context – it can refer to a smug artist living off his early work and reputation, becoming fattened on fame without ever feeling impelled to seek fresh ground or question his own assumptions.

By now it should be clear that this is (like nearly all of Nihalani’s work) an explicitly idea-driven film: politically charged, full of reflection and counter-reflection. Being adapted from a major play in close collaboration with the playwright, it has the discipline and rigour of good theatre (and features a cast of fine stage actors – Mehta’s performance in the relatively unshowy part of the hostess becomes more impressive each time you see it). But these things perhaps make it important to clarify that this is definitely not just a static filming of a stage production. There is a strong cinematic sense in the use of space, the positioning of the characters relative to each other, the cross-cutting between groups of people. Frequently, parallels or contrasts exist within the same frame: as Bharat recites one of Amrit’s angry poems, we see youngsters dancing blithely through a window in the background; there is a fleeting moment when two “gatecrashers” move through a room looking bemused at the serious talk happening around them. And there are splendidly orchestrated scenes such as the one where, during a conversation between Barve and Damayanti, the camera repeatedly cuts outside the room to watch the drunk Mohini moving around silently on the porch. Barve will make a key confession about himself at around the same time his wife is shocked by her own image in the mirror.

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Driven though it is by conversation, Party ends with a harrowing wordless sequence where an old poet and a young poet (one man who has lived a complacent life; another who is in danger of doing so) share a nightmare vision and face their consciences. The scene ties in with a motif in Nihalani’s early cinema: the voiceless person, someone who is either unable or reluctant to speak up. (See Om Puri’s Lahanya Bhiku in Aakrosh or the silent, suffering wife played by Deepa Sahi in Aaghat.) But it also takes us back to the very beginning of Party – to a lovely shot of Sona reading a letter written by Amrit, so focused on the text that she barely moves, the camera drawing tentatively towards her. (Watching the film a second time, one might consider the light gently streaming in through the silk curtains in the background and think about the irony of this poet-activist’s letter being read in such a refined, unthreatened bourgeoisie setting.)

“Bheenche huye jabre dard kar rahe hain,” says the voiceover (“My clenched jaws are aching”). “Kitni der tak dabaaya jaa sakta hai khaulte laave ko. Kisi bhi pal khopri crater mein badal jaaye.” (“How long can I stay silent and keep this lava inside me? My head feels like it could turn into a crater.”)

[This may be a good time to point out that the shuddh Hindi used in this screenplay is occasionally so dense and layered that you might need to watch some scenes a second time just to fully process what is being said.]

The voice is the familiar one of Naseeruddin Shah and a tinge of amusement enters it when he says “khopri crater mein badal jaaye”, as if to acknowledge the corniness of such an analogy in an otherwise austere monologue. But when the writer of this letter makes his brief appearance in the final seconds of Party, the words will be given a morbidly literal form. It is one of many times in this film where something said in a light vein subsequently acquires a much darker shade. In brightly lit, elegantly furnished rooms people clink glasses and make small talk, but there are storms raging, both in their hearts and in the world outside.

Party isn’t a movie that you can appreciate in just about any mood, but those who open themselves to it will be driven back to it a few times. It is so well written, constructed and performed that it should stimulate even those (I include myself here) who are ambivalent about its ideological position. Wary though I am of hyperbole while rating movies, I think this is among Hindi cinema's great achievements. And now it has the print it deserves.

P.S. For anyone interested in recurring visual motifs in a director’s work, especially from one film to the next, here’s a little exercise: watch the very last scene of Party, note how a shuffling walk creates the sense of someone weighed down by heavy chains, and then watch the opening shot of the film Nihalani made immediately after it – Aghaat. (I wrote about Aghaat in this post.) The little "link" between the two scenes reminded me of other prominent inter-film connections, such as the similarity between the closing shot of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and the opening shot of his next film A Clockwork Orange.

Of creative heads and delivery boys - the many faces of a growing comics industry

[Here, somewhat belatedly, is the full text of the essay I did about Indian comics for The Caravan. Have added a few images here, as well as links to some of the comics mentioned in the piece]

The crafts bazaar Dilli Haat is spacious and conveniently located, making it a good outdoor venue for a cultural event in wintertime Delhi. But it’s a good setting for an annual comics convention on another count too. In a place defined by its variety — handicrafts from across India on sale, food stalls plying cuisines from different regions a few paces apart — it doesn’t feel quite so strange to turn a corner and find Suppandi, the simpleton from Tinkle comics, walking about with Rorschach, the embittered vigilante from Alan Moore’s Watchmen, while Jughead Jones and Supergirl pose for photos nearby. Anyone familiar with these characters will know that they belong to very different fictional universes, but at the second annual Comic Con India those universes and many others met.

At this point, let me confess to not being any sort of expert on the comics industry, though I am a fan of some of the medium’s masters—Moore, Eddie Campbell, Art Spiegelman, Osamu Tezuka, Craig Thompson among them—and have followed developments in Indian ‘graphic novel’ publishing in the past few years, particularly the work of fine artist-cum-writers such as Sarnath Banerjee, Amruta Patil, George Mathen and Vishwajyoti Ghosh. Stepping into Comic Con 2, I knew very little about the current state of Indian comics – at least the ones that usually take the form of a continuing series and aren’t typically brought out by big-name publishers. The result was something of a sensory overload.

Arrive an hour before the official opening of the event and it looks busy enough: groups of publishers, editors, writers and artists unpacking their wares and setting up stalls. By the time the first set of visitors begin trooping in, it’s hard to keep track of everything that is going on. As you’d expect, hundreds of comic books are up for sale at stalls run by long-time players like Amar Chitra Katha and Diamond Comics as well as by relatively new companies such as Campfire, Level 10, Pop Culture Publishing (started by Twenty Onwards Media, the company that organised the convention), Rovolt and Libera Artisti. A small indoor stall houses Sufi Studios, which has on offer a book of benevolent spiritual teachings (with some faces depicted featureless in keeping with the Islamic tradition of not representing holy persons pictorially). The Chennai-based publishing house Blaft, known for its offbeat and imaginative publishing of pulp fiction, has a terrific-looking anthology of graphic stories titled The Obliterary Journal (the title comes from a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that visual storytelling should “obliterate” conventional literature). Sporting a green mohawk and a shiny red jacket, Blaft co-founder Rakesh Khanna looks very much into the spirit of things.

Comics aside, there is plenty of merchandise—T-shirts, bags, mugs, posters—as well as workshops, impromptu drawing sessions and magic-trick demonstrations. And, in true lit-fest style, a programme of events—book launches, discussions—held on a small stage, though they rarely last for more than 15-20 minutes each, and microphones routinely malfunction. Over the weekend in particular, there are large crowds, and much of the visitor interest is in the side-attractions: a stall noisily running round-the-clock promotions of the forthcoming film John Carter, photo opportunities with comic characters, or just the fun of walking around, gawping at things and being part of something unusual.

It’s one thing to have an outsider’s view of the Indian comics industry—to be told by people in the know that it is at a fledgling stage, roughly where comics in the US were 70 or 80 years ago. It’s quite another thing to see it up close and realise just how much work is being done by scores of enthusiastic writers and artists all over the country. When I did online searches for the people and companies I had encountered, nearly every writer’s blog or publisher’s website led to a dozen other links about projects in various stages of completion (or abandonment). As you’d expect, there is plenty of depressingly mediocre work as well as some that is highly promising.

There are large variances in quality, a range of subjects and styles, and completely different attitudes about what comics can or should be. To understand this, it is important to remember that comics is not a “genre” (which is how graphic novels were frequently described by reviewers when they first became popular in India) but an expansive medium, throbbing with ideas, ideologies and objectives.

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Sipping coffee at a stall, I have a conversation about form and content with Suhas Sundar, creative director, Level 10 Studios. Many readers new to the world of comics tend to be literal-minded, Sundar points out; they have no real understanding of an abstract narrative where (for instance) text flowing across a panel might not function as explicit commentary on what is being depicted. “Comics as art are not … where you have a panel of a man looking out of a window and the text that goes with it is, ‘He looked out of the window’.”

As a reader, I endorse this view; the graphic novels I admire most are the ones with layered narratives, where text and drawings work with—or against—each other in complex ways; and where it takes two or three readings before you can fully appreciate the many levels of storytelling. But a short while later I come to the World Comics stall where a much more egalitarian philosophy is being expressed. “Anyone can draw,” Sharad Sharma is telling reticent visitors. “Your experiences and opinions are more important than your illustrations.”

For about 15 years now, Sharma and his movement, Grassroots Comics, have been holding workshops in small towns and villages, encouraging people to use drawings to express the issues that are troubling them. Reading the bulletin A Tool for Democracy, which collects some of these narratives—simply told chronicles of injustice and discrimination, a few of which show emerging visual flair—one is reminded that comics, like any other artistic medium, can have a strictly utilitarian function as well, especially in places where underprivileged people don’t have a voice of their own. It doesn’t just have to be about artists honing their talents, practising fine lines and shading for the love of creativity. Something similar might be said about Zubaan’s recently published Our Pictures, Our Words: A Visual Journey Through The Women’s Movement, which collects pictorial representations of the many issues facing women across the country. Though this isn’t primarily a book of comics, it is a reminder of the power of pictures—even unsophisticated ones—to spread information about important issues. As a Zubaan representative told me at an exhibition of posters included in the book, these weren’t made by trained artists, “they were put together by ordinary people who were moved by a cause”.

There are just as many conflicting approaches to content as well. At the Vimanika Edutainment stall, company head Karan Vir Arora talks in a way that make me feel like I’ve stepped into a time machine (perhaps the creaky thing in the sci-fi story I flipped through at the last stall) and travelled back to 1967 and a key incident in Indian comics history: Anant Pai being disturbed to find that youngsters knew more about Greek myths than Indian ones. Pai went on to establish Amar Chitra Katha (ACK), which introduced at least two generations of Indians to their mythology and history (and permanently fixed in their minds images of what gods, rakshasas and apsaras should look like). Companies like Campfire and Vimanika have been revamping many of these stories for newer readers. “We are confused about our past,” Arora says, sounding older and wiser than he looks. “Discovering our heritage is a way of instilling pride in our country.”

Personally I feel some of us have too much pride in our ancient culture and in the fantasy of a rosy past. Vimanika’s website proclaims that each story in its comics “will have a moral in it” and refers to “virtues that were considered common during that era but which are now looked upon with amazement and fear in today’s world”. In these comics, mythological figures like Shiva are given a look that draws on Western fantasy while not straying too far from the template established by ACK. Bright colours are the norm, but as Arora points out, “We are careful to make sure that the proportioning of the figures—the body and head sizes—are true to life. We don’t want to give it a cartoonish, anything-goes feel.”

Other artists and writers take a different position on mythology. “Many of us are tired of doing the same old devotional stuff,” says Harsho Mohan Chattoraj, one of the brightest, most prolific artists currently working in Indian comics, while Pratheek Thomas—a former engineering student who co-founded the independent publishing house Manta Ray two years ago—says his company isn’t interested in turning mythological characters into new-age superheroes. “We’d prefer to produce new material and become a platform for original creative talent.”

There is another, more practical consideration in shying away from the mythological-retelling bandwagon: since you don’t have copyright on these characters, someone else with a better design and more money could make a couple of minor tweaks to your Hanuman and usurp your space. “The downside of working with original characters is that it takes longer for readers to become familiar with the stories we are telling,” says Level 10’s Sundar, “But the payoff can be big with a new concept that really catches on.” Everyone in the industry is familiar with those international fairytales about entire franchises built around one little character. Everyone can dream it might happen to them one day.

The attempt to create fresh, contemporary content often means inventively juxtaposing the real world with the supernatural, so that the latter becomes a commentary on the former. “If you look at our festivals and crowded public events, this is a country begging for a zombie apocalypse,” deadpans novelist Samit Basu, who has written the online series Unholi (about a zombie infestation during Holi) for Graphic India. An early passage in The Hyderabad Graphic Novel (a work about the city at various points in its history, intelligently written by Jaideep Undurti and drawn with fine attention to detail by Chattoraj) shows a time-travelling autorickshaw in the Cretaceous period, the driver telling a potential passenger “Jurassic Park mein savaari nahin milta”. Another auto-driver becomes Yamaraj’s chauffeur in the Trivandrum-based company Libera Artisti’s Auto Pilot: Meter Down, one of the most impressive new comics I saw at Comic Con (and the first in a 10-volume series).

There are, of course, explicitly realist (and creatively illustrated) scenarios too: vignettes from an old-folks’ home presented in austere black-and-white (Roney Devassia’s ‘Karuna Bhavanam’, included in Blaft’s Obliterary Journal); Charles Sobhraj’s escape from Tihar Jail, told in rich colours in Manta Ray’s ‘Year of the Snake’ (published in Motherland magazine’s ‘Prison’ special). Manta Ray’s goal of “amplifying the voices of interesting people” is being played out in the forthcoming ‘Twelve’, a black-and-white 12-part series about young Indian adults and the choices they make. They have also been producing a witty weekly strip on current affairs, ‘The Small Picture’, for the newspaper Mint.

Elsewhere, tropes from Indian pop culture—especially cinema—recur, as in Widhwa Maa, Andhi Behen (Widowed Mother, Blind Sister), about a crime-fighting duo who get their names from staple characters in melodramatic Hindi films of the 1970s and 1980s (and who try to stop Bollywood from “losing its soul” to cerebral, new-age directors like Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee!). Or Munkeeman, conceptualised by Abhishek Sharma (director of the film Tere Bin Laden) about the Delhi-menacing ‘monkeyman’ who wants to lose his bad reputation. While the writing in some of these strips is uneven and the narrative leapfrogs all over the place (perhaps in imitation of a masala Hindi movie), they do provide a sense of what a good home-grown comic series might look like.

There is, in any case, a natural relationship between movies and comics—not least because of the large number of creative people who work in both media—and this sometimes translates into graphic stories being used as inexpensive advertising. For his still-to-be-released thriller The Blueberry Hunt, starring Naseeruddin Shah, director Anup Kurian developed a strip that was published in instalments on the film’s Facebook page. More often than not, film-based comics are shoddily assembled works that end up dying quietly on the movie’s website (try Googling “Ra.One official comic” and you’ll see what I mean). A rare example of an official film comic put out by a major publishing house is the 80-page Agent Vinod strip for the yet-to-be-released Sriram Raghavan-directed Saif Ali Khan-starrer. “We are treating it seriously, as a publication in its own right,” says Westland’s Paul Vinay Kumar. “It’s based on the characters and script, but it isn’t slavishly faithful to the film.” If the strip does well, more such tie-ups can be expected in the future. But of course, the movie-comics relationship can flow in both directions: director Anurag Kashyap has given Westland the go-ahead to turn his unfilmed script ‘Allwyn Kallicharan’ into a graphic novel, after which he might consider filming it.

Understandably, given the rich global history of comic storytelling, many Indian illustrators, even the really talented ones, are strongly influenced by the drawing modes of the international comics they grew up with. “Many artists become skilled copiers of other people’s styles and don’t push their own idiom,” says Sarnath Banerjee who (along with other established comic artists like Orijit Sen and Parismita Singh) co-founded the Pao Collective to help promote originality and independence in the field.

But there have also been pleasing instances of indigenous art being used to tell stories. One of the pieces in The Obliterary Journal, ‘Memories of the Nayagarh Incident’, uses the Odia style of pata chitra to present an apparently straight-faced account of extraterrestrial sightings in Odisha in 1947 (among the depictions are a “yantra-purusha” with pincer-like hands and a spacesuit-wearing alien raising its palm in the “ashirvad stance”). This is the work of Sri Pachanana Moharana, who runs his own workshop in the Puri district and specialises in palm-leaf engravings. The Rajasthani miniaturists Shankar Lal Bhopa and Birju Lal Bhopa didn’t get the canvas they deserved in the satirical Lie: A Traditional Tale of Modern India (a book that prioritised ideas over artwork, to its own detriment), but the Gond artists Durgabai and Subhash Vyam brought a distinct vision to last year’s Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability—their surreal flourishes (a water tank given the shape of a fish; train wheels drawn as serpent heads) turned what could have been a textbook-like account of BR Ambedkar’s life into a richly imaginative work, one where strangeness of form created its own commentary on social injustice.

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Given all this variety—and the strong sense of an industry on the brink of big things—an event that brought comic creators and aficionados together was long overdue. Jatin Varma and his team at Twenty Onwards Media have reason to be happy about the success of the convention’s first two editions. “There has been definite progress from Comic Con 1 to Comic Con 2 in terms of smaller players taking more initiative,” Varma says. “Everyone was a little uncertain last year, but this time they have shown more promotional savvy and have come up with some good ideas to draw in readers.”

Most of the mainstream publishers and bookstores did not participate, which may have been a missed opportunity. One of the exceptions, Random House India (RHI)—which has distribution rights in India for DC Comics, Vertigo and Archie comics—found itself in the happy position of having to replenish its stock four times. “We were left with fewer than 400 titles of the 1,700 we stocked—it was a huge success,” says a thrilled Ritesh Singh, who manned the RHI stall. To put this in perspective, though, most of the comics sold at this stall were works by international superstars such as Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore. That doesn’t necessarily say much about the prospects of the indigenous comics industry, which is still trying to build awareness and find a foothold.

Speaking with participants, the chief impression I got was of small start-ups with not more than five to 10 employees each: groups of artists, writers and entrepreneurs (including people who are some combination of all three) on the fringe of mainstream publishing. There was an appealing artlessness to many of these conversations. As a literary journalist, one is used to hearing self-aggrandising spiel from editors at big publishing houses who are convinced they know what they are doing (even if the quality of many of the titles they produce every month suggests otherwise). It’s refreshing, then, to hear young comic publishers admit that there is a shortage of good content, and that it’s pointless to expect profits in the near future. “I tell people, don’t think you’ll do five comics and then find an investor” says Level 10’s Sundar. “You have to be in it for the long haul.” Similar sentiments are echoed nearly everywhere else. Even Varma, who has worked hard to make the convention a reality, candidly admits that for all the footfalls so far, there is a basic lack of awareness. “Robert Crumb [the renowned American comics artist] was at our awards show the other night, and some people didn’t know who he was.”

Here, then, is a world of people—including those with important-sounding designations like “Content Manager”, “Creative Head” and “MD” printed on their business cards—who haven’t yet learnt the self-assured language of the marketplace. Speaking of visiting cards, I saw one (for the founder of the company Bombay Merch) that read: “Founder and MD. Packaging Boy. Delivery Boy. Chai-Coffeewala.” That isn’t just wry humour—it reveals something important about the workings of an industry where young entrepreneurs don’t expect to sit in high-backed chairs ordering minions about. Most participants at the convention manage companies, and are here strategising and trying to strike publishing and marketing deals not because they went to B-schools but because they are essentially comic-book geeks pursuing a passion.

“I spend much of my time at events lifting jute bags filled with our comics, because we don’t have labourers to do it for us,” one of them tells me. While dignity of labour is always a good thing, this points to a larger problem faced by the industry: the fact that too many of its young talents have to constantly multitask instead of focusing on their field of specialisation. “We need a culture where writers have the freedom to do their work without worrying about things like marketing,” says Sundar, citing the example of leading Japanese manga companies, where the division of labour is as neat as the arrangement of food items in a bento box.

But lack of finance and sponsorship makes this difficult: the advent of the Richard Branson-founded Virgin Comics a few years ago seemed to have heralded a new era of professionalism—good production values and decent salaries—for the industry, but Virgin pulled out and the company now operates in a more low-key avatar as Liquid Comics. Meanwhile, indigenous companies—including the ones that run small studios with their own contracted artists—know that the future lies in digital content, but that much work needs to be done. Internationally, the major comics are available online and on Apps—for a price. But in an industry where creating awareness is the first step, companies must put some free content on their websites (such as Level 10’s Odayan series) to gauge interest levels. Print versions are brought out subsequently.

A running theme in nearly every chat I had at Comic Con was that the artists and writers working on comics were not in it for the money. But how far can passion alone take you? The savvier and more talented freelancers earn a living by working on multiple projects (and across media) simultaneously, but this raises another question: should a serious artist spread himself so thin? “We receive portfolios all the time,” says Blaft’s Rakesh Khanna. “But we haven’t met enough Indian artists who are fully committed to one big, continuing story, which is how the comics industry really took off in the West. We need more nutcases who will spend ten years just drawing and trying to realise a grand, integrated vision.” This creates a circle: quality can suffer when artists, to avoid sinking into a financial pit with a single long-term project, either keep day jobs or have their fingers in many different pies.

Other problems include lack of proper distribution and display, and the chariness of big publishers to deal in comics. “I approached a major newspaper group five years ago with an idea for starting a comic,” says Chattoraj, “but they have been reluctant to take the initiative even though I said I would bring my expertise to it.” There is a feeling in the industry that big publishers are more open to doing stand-alone graphic books than to commissioning a full-fledged comics series.

But there are also signs that this is changing. Westland will soon be publishing a Local Monsters series (written by Samit Basu, featuring a yeti and a rakshasa, among other characters) and is also partnering with Level 10 Studios to bring out print versions of the latter’s online comics. At the International Comics Festival at Angoulême, France last year, Jaideep Undarti and the team behind the The Hyderabad Graphic Novel struck a deal with a French company to publish the book in translation—which means the French version will probably be out before the English one. The Obliterary Journal has an optimistic ‘Volume 1’ on its cover, suggesting that there will be sequels. This summer, Penguin India is publishing an anthology of graphic stories put together by the Pao Collective. Also in the works is a Partition-themed graphic anthology edited by Vishwajyoti Ghosh and published by Yoda Press. “The stories include contemporary and historical reportage and political documentary,” says Ghosh, “and the visual style is diverse too: from notebook doodles to photo comics and comics out of film grabs.”

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Prominently represented at Comic Con this year was the popular online store Flipkart.com. Many in the industry agree that with physical bookstores reluctant to set aside much space for comics, Flipkart has been a boon for publishers and fans. (“Their display is the best too, because every book gets its own page!” says Varma.) Fittingly, the very first ad in The Indian Comics Journal—an industry magazine launched by Twenty Onwards Media—portrays the online store as a caped crusader for the comics world: “Whatever the Comic. Whatever the Odds. Flipkart Man will deliver.”

It’s a silver lining to be sure—one of a few that are beginning to reveal themselves—but one can’t help feeling that the Indian comics industry will need more than one superhero to pull itself into the mainstream. For now, they can only help their own cause by carrying on trying to strike that all-important balance between good artwork, inventive content and intelligent writing—and hoping to get lucky along the way.

Andar ki baatein: on inside references in movies

The new film Agent Vinod has a scene where the eponymous spy (played by Saif Ali Khan) looks into the eyes of a girl named Ruby (Kareena Kapoor) and deadpans the lyrics of a beloved 1960s Hindi film song: “Yeh jheel si neeli aankhen / Koi raaz hai inmein gehra?” (“These lake-blue eyes / Is there a secret deep within them?”)

The lines work well enough in the given context – this is a world of double-crossers and triple-crossers, and Vinod (probably not his real name) doesn’t know if Ruby (definitely not her real name) can be trusted – but the seasoned viewer will catch another, more playful layer: the girl who was serenaded thus in the 1960s film – Kashmir ki Kali – was played by Saif’s real-life mother Sharmila Tagore. (In an earlier scene in Agent Vinod, Ruby injects Vinod with truth serum and persistently asks “What did your mother call you when you were a child?” - a question that might acquire a different shade when you remember that Kareena and Saif are in a relationship offscreen.)

Incidentally the actor who performed that old song was Kareena’s real-life grand-uncle Shammi Kapoor. A few months ago, another new film, Rockstar, paid tribute to the recently deceased actor by replicating part of the song, with another young Kapoor – Ranbir – imitating Shammi’s famous gyrations.

If any of this confuses you, you are clearly new to the world of Hindi movies. In an industry dominated by the cult of the star personality and built on dynasties – with star children and grandchildren proliferating everywhere – it isn’t surprising to find sly little allusions and homages of this sort. Nor is this an entirely new phenomenon: sticking with the Kapoors, one wonders if Raj Kapoor was being a touch devilish in giving his grandfather Dewan Basheswarnath a tiny part as a judge in his 1951 film Awaara, considering that the old man had once “decreed” that no one from his family would join films!

Much has been written on mainstream movies indulging their stars, even if it means winking at the audience at the cost of a narrative’s internal rhythm: I’ve lost count of the number of times Amitabh and Abhishek Bachchan have appeared together in “cameo” scenes that exist merely to add to the family-video collection (Ram Gopal Varma ki Aag and Delhi 6 being among the most embarrassing cases). But nudge-nudge moments can exist even in lower-profile films – the ones we tend to associate with integrity - and in scenes involving non-starry actors.

Early in the 1987 movie Jalwa, two friends – one doing push-ups, the other walking by – see each other from a distance and engage in a bit of playful name-calling. “May your mother-in-law run away with a eunuch!” one yells. “May your sister-in-law marry a gorilla!” the other replies. Credible buddy-buddy banter, you’d think, but there’s a subtext. The actors playing this scene – Naseeruddin Shah and Pankaj Kapoor – were wedded to sisters in real life, and their mother-in-law was the venerable actress Dina Pathak. There is probably a minuscule chance that the dialogue is coincidental, but we should know better.

Shah and Kapoor were – then, as now – among our most respected actors; the sort of performers who are (in a somewhat simplistic view of acting) expected to always "sink" into their parts and leave “themselves” behind. But both men have appeared in films containing inside references that are best appreciated by the other members of the crew. In fact, Kapoor’s character in Jalwa is named Albert Pinto, which is an allusion to one of Shah’s early roles (the name has also slyly been used in other films such as Jaane bhi do Yaaro - which also mentions its own director, Kundan Shah, in its opening scene).

When we see a finished film – especially a good, satisfying film created by a pooling together of notable talents – it’s possible to forget that the cast and crew weren’t just professionals doing their jobs; that they may also have been exhanging private jokes behind the scenes and finding small ways to keep themselves entertained during what is often a mundane, long-drawn-out and frustrating process.

This isn’t excuse-making: I'm not condoning movies that overdo self-indulgence at the expense of the narrative. But it’s also worth remembering that when movie characters are played by people whom we are familiar with (even if they are supposedly chameleon-like actors), we rarely experience them as blank slates anyway. On a conscious or subconscious level, we bring what we know of them – their real lives, their previous roles – to the experience. It’s part of what can make the movie-watching process intimate and unreal at the same time. You smile indulgently at the Saif-Sharmila reference, but for that moment you forget about Agent Vinod.

[Did a version of this for my Business Standard column]

Sea-walking with Nemo in the Andamans

It’s been a while since I used this blog as anything other than a warehouse for my official writing, but since I've just returned from a very nice trip to the Andamans, here's a recommendation for anyone who plans to visit those lovely islands in the near future.

A big highlight of our stay was the sea-bed walk a little way off the North Bay coast (which is a 20-minute ferry ride from Port Blair). This wasn’t on our initial itinerary, but we lucked out massively: a company named Sea Link Adventures brought this activity to India for the first time last month, which means we were among the first few groups of people to try it here.

It was terrific. Basically you go down to a depth of around 20-25 feet, walk around on the sea-bed (in a net-enclosed space of roughly 400 square metres) and spend around 20 minutes gaping at corals and fish. For the first-timer, it’s simpler than scuba-diving (which we also did): you don’t need to practice breathing through your mouth; the only apparatus you carry is a (fairly heavy) helmet that keeps your whole head dry and lets you breathe as you do on land. Which means that once you’ve adjusted to the buoyancy and the general otherworldliness of the setting, you can walk about with the guides and take in the sights without worrying about such things as water getting into a face mask or regulator.

We have some nice pictures from our walk (see below), but even these don’t capture the more ethereal aspects of the experience: I had something resembling an out-of-body moment when I fed a school of fish with my bare hands and felt dozens of little mouths nibbling at my fingers.

“With fronds like these, who needs anemones?”

Also loved the Clownfish flitting in and out of their sea anemones. Finding Nemo was a great film, but when you see the real thing up close you realise how quickly the line between animation and live-action can get blurred. The colours here matched anything created by the best Pixar technicians working on that movie. You can see them in these two photos (click to enlarge):

(Don’t miss the little one on the left of the second picture, who appears to be sitting on the anemone. And the pen-shaped fish floating just above him. The great thing about the photos we have is that there are many little details in each one – you have to enlarge and look two or three times before you can take it all in.)

I’m told Sea Link is planning to take the sea-bed walk to Havelock Island too, which sounds excellent because the waters there are clearer than on North Bay. Do put this on your schedule if you’re going (and email me for contact numbers etc – I don’t think the company has a functioning website yet).

DVD Classic: Shaitani Anand (or Return of Zombie Rajesh)

[Did this piece on a long-forgotten - but now restored - Hrishikesh Mukherjee film for the April 1 issue of Sunday Guardian. Do also see this explanation in the pages of that paper]

Hindi cinema’s tradition of zombie-love, vampirism and necrophilia has been well-chronicled over the decades, which is understandable, for nearly every major film has splashes of surreal, unexpected horror. The hospital scene near the beginning of Amar Akbar Anthony where Nirupa Roy, in need of a blood transfusion, rips away the tubes and sinks her fangs into the throats of her three sons lying on nearby beds, has been the subject of more Ph.D theses than anyone can count (including a celebrated one titled “Mommie fiercest: the hermeneutics of maternal love and vampirism in popular Hindi film”). Much has similarly been made of the resurrection scene in the climax of Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa where the undead poet Vijay escapes his coffin, strikes a crucifixion pose at the entrance of a hall and sings “Yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaaye toh kya hai?” (“Who cares about the world of the living? It's cosier underground.”)

For decades, heroes and villains have smacked their chomps and droned “Main tera khoon pee jaoonga” at each other, but the word “khoon” has subtler resonances too: our films are full of people betrayed by their blood (hard-hearted relatives) or by their blood cells (prolonged death by cancer). Narcissistic male stars with crumbling faces play characters one-third their age, suggesting a Mephistophelean trade-off. Entire acting careers (Jeetendra? Mala Sinha?) testify that zombies, if they pick their disguises well, can get high-paying jobs. And has any national cinema anywhere in the world – even the Japanese, with their talent for visceral creepiness – offered horrors to rival the sight of Sanjeev Kumar playing nine roles in a single film? No.


One director steered clear of this ghoulishness for much of his career: in the 1970s, Hrishikesh Mukherjee specialised in gentle, character-oriented scripts and a somewhat narrow definition of “realism” that precluded werewolves and icchadhaari naags. But this is precisely why Mukherjee’s 1980 film Shaitani Anand, lost in the eerie mists of time and recently recovered from film vaults, is such a significant work.

The back-story is as intriguing as the film itself. It began life as a straight sequel to one of the director’s best-loved movies, Anand, but it developed a zombie twist when a young executive producer named Bhootpret Ramsay brought his own ideas to the table. Consequently, the story begins with the beaming cancer patient Anand rising from the grave and setting off to convince his old associates that death, like life, must be lived to the fullest.

This is not typical Mukherjee terrain, but there had been hints of an appetite for morbidity in his earlier work. As the American critic Pauline Kael shrewdly noted, his 1972 film Bawarchi – in which a cook teaches a well-needed lesson to a family intent on devouring each other – anticipated the cannibalistic clan of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre by two years. What exactly was in those innocent-looking pakoras that Raghu the bawarchi was serving the Sharmas?

Raghu and Anand were both played by the same actor, the superstar Rajesh Khanna, whose early filmography – sanguine and twinkling though it appears from a distance – was marked by reflections on life, death and the hereafter. (“Zindagi kaisi hai paheli haaye,” he sang in Anand itself, but there was also “Maut aani hai, aayegi ek din”, crooned in a deceptively upbeat song in Andaz – shortly before the death of his character. And the melancholy number “Zindagi ke safar mein guzar jaate hain joh makaam / Woh phir nahin aate”, which loosely translates as "There's no going back / When you're in zombie land".) By the late 70s Khanna’s career was in free-fall; ironically, his replacement as Bollywood’s most successful star was the lanky Amitabh Bachchan who had played a supporting role in Anand. It is perhaps no surprise then that Shaitani Anand developed into a meta-commentary on the star system. There is profound human tragedy in the story of the sweet-natured Anand becoming a vindictive fiend and stalking his friend Bhaskar – who has changed his hairstyle and no longer recognises him – through Hindi-film studios.

Personally I regret the scrapping of the planned ensemble song that had a number of actors turning into zombies and menacing Bachchan: when an assistant writer jumped ship for the Manmohan Desai camp, a “borrowed” (non-zombie) version of the idea was used in the “John Jani Janardhan” number in Desai’s Naseeb. This omission notwithstanding, Shaitani Anand is a fine horror film as well as a remarkable meditation on stardom as a monster that can suck the life-blood out of you until your wax statue in Madame Tussauds looks more alive than you do. In this sense it’s a movie years ahead of its time (as anyone who has watched Shah Rukh Khan in Ra.One will know) and it’s easy to see why vigorous efforts were made to keep it out of sight. Watch it now!

Postscript: The American film Shadow of the Vampire tells a fictionalised account of the making of the horror classic Nosferatu, built on the idea that the enigmatic leading man Max Schreck was a real-life vampire who feasted on the cast and crew during the shooting. One doesn’t wish to cast similar aspersions on a star of Rajesh Khanna’s magnitude, but it may be noted that the credits list of Shaitani Anand includes several names who never again worked on a Hindi movie. One can only politely wonder about their fate. But perhaps they were Mukherjee and Ramsay’s acquaintances who agreed to help out on a low-budget project and went back to their day jobs afterwards. Yes, that must be it.