Place in My Heart , livre ebook

ANUPAMA CHOPRA

A Place in My Heart
PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Introduction
1. Sholay
2. Amitabh Bachchan
3. The Lunchbox
4. Tungrus
5. Angamaly Diaries
6. Chak De! India
7. Chashme Buddoor
8. Dil Chahta Hai
9. Don
10. Duniya Na Mane
11. Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi
12. Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam
13. In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones
14. Kabhi Kabhie
15. Kal Ho Naa Ho
16. Karan Johar
17. Karz
18. Kumbalangi Nights
19. LSD: Love, Sex Aur Dhokha
20. Luck by Chance
21. Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival
22. Maqbool
23. Monsoon Wedding
24. Mughal-e-Azam
25. Nayakan
26. Priyanka Chopra Jonas
27. Rangeela
28. Satya
29. Super Deluxe
30. The Cinema Travellers
31. Theatres
32. Supermen of Malegaon
33. Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham . . .
34. Kalyug
35. C/o Kancharapalem
36. Loins of Punjab Presents
37. Masoom
38. Mirch Masala
39. Sairat
40. The Namesake
41. Udaan
42. Vada Chennai
43. Aaranya Kaandam
44. Bandit Queen
45. Celluloid Man
46. Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi
47. Daayraa
48. Diljit Dosanjh
49. Guide
50. Aditya Chopra
51. The Cannes Film Festival
Acknowledgements
References
To my parents-Navin and Kamna Chandra-who were bewildered by my career choice ( Bollywood journalist, are you sure? ) but supported every decision I made, including marrying into the mob. Thank you.
Introduction
Sometime in the summer of 1989, I fell in love with Bollywood. That term hadn t yet become a moniker for the Hindi film industry. Neither was it an attention-grabbing, instantly recognizable global brand. If anything, Bollywood stood for a chaotic, loosely-cobbled-together world that, more than anything, resembled the Wild West. It was a world brimming with gaudy, larger-than-life personalities who made, mostly, gaudy, larger-than-life films. Contracts were as rare as bound scripts. The money sometimes came with shady strings attached. There was billowing colour, flashes of artistry and more than a touch of recklessness-you heard of producers who had sold their homes to make movies, and actors who flitted from one set to another like bees pollinating flowers. Bollywood was an ecosystem fuelled by luck and money, gambling and glamour. In short, it was irresistible.
My love affair expanded and endured. After Hindi cinema, I became passionate about Hollywood and world cinema. Film festivals taught me new ways of seeing. I embraced not just the movies but the people who made them. I came to understand the adrenaline highs of the business and the piercing loneliness of failure. I came to relish not just the beauty and magic of the art form but everything that came with it, from the crazy deals (I ve seen payments made with suitcases of cash) to the constantly shifting power structure (each Friday decides your fate afresh), to the ugly, desperate pursuit for success, which remains elusive, treacherous and uniquely lonely. Inevitably, I married into the mob.
Over the years, films, artists, events, spaces continued to fire my grand passion and lodge themselves deep in me. This book is a journey through some of these. A Place in My Heart is about a life defined by cinema. I want to share with you everything in entertainment that has, as Marie Kondo would put it, sparked joy in me. I hope that it does the same for you.
1
Sholay
Sholay is my first movie memory. I was eight years old when it released in 1975. I remember watching the film in a theatre and being terrified, not just of Gabbar Singh but also of that screeching, wailing background score that kicked in every time he appeared-there was a haunting menace to it.
As I got older, I kept revisiting the film and it soon became a favourite. I started to see the masterful storytelling, the layers in its characters (even the minor ones like the Angrezon ke zamane ke jailer and Soorma Bhopali), the uniqueness of the setting (the rugged badlands of Ramgarh) and the astute comedy (the tanki scene is a classic but even Jai s snarky asides to Basanti are gold). Sholay is one of the finest examples of the traditional Hindi film form, which seamlessly blends genres. As Veeru so memorably put it, Iss story mein emotion hai, drama hai, tragedy hai .
It is almost impossible for a viewer today to comprehend the seismic impact of the film when it first came out. It ran in Mumbai s Minerva theatre for five years. Even in its 240th week, it was houseful. The film s box-office collections-it grossed approximately Rs 35 crore in that first run-remained unmatched for nineteen years, till Hum Aapke Hain Koun . . ! released in 1994. The film s cultural influence was even farther-reaching. So much of the dialogue has passed into colloquial usage that, even taken out of context, phrases like Bahut yaarana hai or Kitne aadmi the ? or Arre o Sambha still carry a world of meaning. More than thirty years after its release, characters and lines from Sholay were being used to sell products and as comedic fodder in skits and in other films. In Mere Brother Ki Dulhan , released in 2011, Katrina Kaif re-enacts the tanki scene. Her character Dimple prefaces the performance with: Main batati hoon film kya hoti hai, dialogue kya hotein hai, acting kya hoti ha i .
That is exactly what Sholay is: a masterclass in cinema. Other films from the 1970s might seem shoddy and dated now, but Sholay has aged like a bottle of Ch teau Lafite Rothschild. It still hits all the right notes. As Shekhar Kapur so rightly put it: There has never been a more defining film on the Indian screen. Indian film history can be divided into Sholay BC and Sholay AD.
Sholay started as a four-line story, which writers Javed Akhtar and Salim Khan took a mere fifteen days to develop into an outline. The set-up isn t startlingly original: the prime mover of the story is Thakur Baldev Singh, who hires two petty thieves, Veeru and Jai, to hunt down a brutal dacoit named Gabbar Singh who has massacred Thakur s family. The writers, who then wrote under the moniker of Salim-Javed, were inspired by films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , Sergio Leone s Spaghetti Westerns and Akira Kurosawa s Seven Samurai , arguably the mother of all mercenary movies. Sholay also has echoes of Raj Khosla s 1971 hit, Mera Gaon Mera Desh , and of the successful B-grade Indian Western, Khote Sikkay . But Salim-Javed and director Ramesh Sippy were able to take this familiar genre material and refashion it into something that proved to be innovative and enduring-the denim outfits, the horses, the guns and the steam engines give the film an ageless quality.
Sholay is a rare film that can be watched any number of times-I still get goosebumps when Thakur walks into his home with gifts for his family, only to see a row of bodies in shrouds. I still get teary when, after Jai s death, the widow Radha-who had perhaps imagined a future of love and laughter with him-shuts the window of her room, as though shutting out life itself. The writing, the characters, the performances, even the humour (think of Jai sarcastically asking, Tumhara naam kya hai, Basanti ? ) still hold. The beats of the narrative, which moves from terrifying violence to comedy, song and dance, and drama, still exert a formidable grip.
Sholay changed the lives of everyone connected to it-even the peripheral characters. The late Mac Mohan played Gabbar Singh s henchman, Sambha. Sambha has only one line in the film-when Gabbar asks what reward the government has announced for capturing him, Sambha replies: Poore pachaas hazaar . But Mac Mohan said that the popularity of the film made him lose his identity. He told me that when people approached him for an autograph, they looked bewildered when he signed Mac Mohan because they thought his name was Sambha!
Another minor player, Viju Khote, was immortalized as Kaalia, a henchman whom Gabbar shoots after famously asking: Tera kya hoga, Kaalia ? Until his death in 2019, Viju had people addressing him by the character s name. He told me that when people on the street sometimes recognized him and shouted Kaalia! , his son would get angry, but then Viju would explain: We are eating our bread and butter because of that.
I interviewed these actors for a book I wrote on the film. In 2000, Sholay celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. Ramesh Sippy s children-Rohan, Sheena and Sonya-wanted to mark the occasion with a book that chronicled the struggle and passion that went into making the film. Ramesh and his crew had defied traditional industry wisdom and worked against gargantuan odds. They had strived for nearly two years, over 450 shifts, to create a singular work of art. Sometime in 1999, I was invited to trace the story of the making of the film. I spent months doing research, interviewing the principal cast and crew, and trying to shape the material into a narrative that would be at least a fraction as compelling as the film itself. I was deathly afraid of doing something that Sholay never does-boring the audience.
Sholay: The Making of a Classic was published in 2000. The following year, it won the National Award for Best Book on Cinema. As I went up on stage to accept the award from President K.R. Narayanan, I understood that the cinema gods were still smiling down on the film. My book begins with a tarot card reader named Dolores Pereira who, sometime in 1974, had met Ramesh Sippy and Amjad Khan in Bangalore and predicted that Sholay would run for many years. Dolores was right about that, but I don t think even she could have imagined that the writer of a book on the film would also be rewarded with such a high honour.
Over the decades, I ve fallen in love with hundreds of movies. But Sholay will always be special. You can watch the film on YouTube. * If you haven t seen it, you really should. And if you have, well, then you know what I m talking about.
* Availability of films might change over time.
2
Amitabh Bachchan
This is Amitabh, he said, as thoug