PS Vinothraj: Filmmaker Profile

PS Vinothraj, whose last film Pebbles was selected as the Indian entry for the 94th Oscars, premiered The Adamant Girl at the Berlin Film Festival 2024. Like Pebbles, it makes astonishing use of Tamil Nadu’s unique light, sounds, landscape and even animals.

PS Vinothraj burst onto the indie cinema scene when his directorial debut Koozhangal (Pebbles) won the Tiger award, the top prize at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam in 2021. Late that year, it was India' entry to the Academy Awards. In February 2024, his second feature Kottukkaali (The Adamant Girl) premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, and all five screenings across the city were sold out. 

When I meet Vinothraj in person, he is all smiles after a wonderfully engaged post-screening discussion with the audience at Arsenal, one of Berlin’s many thriving arthouse cinemas. At his hotel in Mitte two days later, with his co-producer Kalai Arasu as our interpreter, it becomes clear that the smiles are part of his persona.

Vinothraj wears his experience lightly, but the 35-year-old’s journey into filmmaking has taken unimaginable grit and clarity. Compelled to drop out of school in Class IV, he worked as a child labourer in a Madurai flower market and a Tiruppur singlet factory before landing a job at a Chennai DVD shop, where he started watching three world cinema DVDs a day. The aesthetic of Vinothraj’s films—long takes, minimal background music, no songs, zero melodrama—may have been shaped by this immersion.

He beams when I mention the late Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, whose 1998 Palm D’or winner Eternity and a Day he has called his favourite film. His favourite filmmaker, he says, is Tony Gatlif, French director of many films on the Roma community. A picture of Gatlif, a 70-something man with grey hair and a warm smile, is Vinothraj’s phone wallpaper. Gatlif’s films and Eternity and a Day are “travelling films”, which Vinothraj says “will always be my inspiration”. But while admiring these European masters, his cinematic material is drawn from his immediate surroundings, both physical and socio-political. Formally, too, he makes astonishing use of Tamil Nadu’s unique light, sounds, landscape and even animals: a stray puppy, a sacrificial rooster, a mute but recalcitrant bull.

Pebbles featured an angry alcoholic called Ganapathy (stunningly played by Karuththadaiyan) who drags his son Velu (Chellapandi) out of school, so that they can go fetch his wife from her natal village 13 km away. Vinothraj mapped their journey, much of it on foot, onto a barren landscape of searing white heat that echoed Ganapathy’s relentless rage. Nothing really ‘happens’ during the 75-minute film (too short for an interval, which prevented a theatrical release in Tamil Nadu); it is about the mundaneness of this violence. But you cannot but be gripped by the father-son dynamic, with the child’s reaction to his father swinging between fear and subversion, and often settling for a watchful silence.

Silence is also the only weapon left to Meena in The Adamant Girl—if one can call it a weapon. Malayalam actor Anna Ben brings to the titular character a sense of mental fatigue combined with the last dregs of physical resistance. Meena is often in frame, in a moving vehicle. But she stays unmoving, even in her expression—except in one shot where she walks free, in her mind’s eye. And she speaks only one sentence in 100 minutes. We learn early in the film that she is ‘promised’ in marriage to Pandi (played with scarily believable aggression by popular Tamil actor Soori) but is in love with a boy she met in college.

Having failed to talk her out of it, both families decide to take Meena to a shrine where the ghost of her lover will be exorcised out of her. Her silence, Vinothraj told me, is because “the film starts after she has tried everything else”; one imagines the arguing and yelling and weeping that went before. Thinking about it later, I wonder if having a mostly silent protagonist also aids in Vinothraj’s quest, as he put it to me, to make films “that keep you visually engaged, that keep your attention despite whatever language barrier may exist.”
In other words, pure cinema.

Kottukkaali certainly is. It begins with a woman bathing, fully-clothed, at a public tap. Before seeing her face, we have felt her tears. Walking back home in the pre-dawn light, she passes by a covered bike and a buffalo, both somehow evoking the must-always-be-clothed bodies of women. Vinothraj takes us quietly by the hand into this cloaked world of women’s sadness, from Meena’s crying mother to Meena, whose tears have run dry. Parallel to it, often its cause, is the world of men’s anger, represented here by Pandi, his throat coated with a white lime paste because he is so hoarse from shouting.

Many have read the film as feminist, and it is. But Vinothraj’s clarity about everything that’s wrong with this universe does not preclude a profound understanding of everyone in it. “The film is about the internal war between Pandi and Meena. Neither of them is bad,” he told me, going on to explain how even minor characters fit into his cinematic vision. “The small boy in the rickshaw is like Pandi in childhood, a good boy. The little girl who drags the bull away is how Meena would have been in her childhood. Meenakshi was the ancient queen of Madurai. Pandi, Pandian, is also a historical king. So in my backstory, right from childhood, they’ve been ‘the king’ and ‘the queen’. Pandi would have felt responsible for Meena.”

Fictional backstories aside, his scripts often draw on things that have happened to people he knows. For Kottukkaali, his sisters contributed a lot of what became the women’s dialogue. “Everyone is very supportive (of my process). In fact, they joke: ‘Don’t get into any other trouble, or he’ll make another film!’”

His films, too, show a close-knit community where people look out for each other. But they also reveal a deeply patriarchal society: its rituals, its alcoholism, the lack of freedom for women, verbal and physical violence by men. Does he ever worry about the critical gaze he turns on a society he knows so intimately, exposing it to an international audience? “There are positive things in each culture, but also a few (negative) things that need to be addressed. As a responsible artist, it is my job to send a message across, so that these things will stop,” says Vinothraj. “There are no heroes and villains, only the social situation that is creating the conflict.”

First published in Moneycontrol, 10 Mar 2024. 

A child's view of the world through a train ride

This is the sixth column in my ongoing series on trains in Indian cinema. (Periodic reminder for new readers of this blog: I write a weekly column on cinema which appears in TOI Plus, as well as in Bangalore Mirror, Pune Mirror & Mumbai Mirror.)

-- In Gulzar's Kitaab, the railways are a route and a rite of passage for a child trying to find his place in the universe --

There are probably few films in any language that have been titled 'book'. But lest you think a film called Kitaab might be bookish (which in the eyes of many movie-viewers translates to boring), Gulzar's 1977 screen adaptation of Samaresh Basu's story begins in breathless motion. Gusts of black smoke rise into the sky, a train whistles, and the familiar “chooka-chook” of the moving carriage takes over, interspersed with a child's voice. He is making up a chant to match the train's rhythmic sound: Kidhar ja, kidhar ja, kidhar ja? Bhaag chala, bhaag chala, bhaag chala [Where d'you go, where d'you go, where d'you go? Running away, running away, running away].

It is only after this that we see him: Master Raju, ubiquitous and irreplaceable child star of 1970s Hindi cinema, squatting on the train's floor, in the space between two lower berths. Above him, in the upper berths, two children pass a notebook to each other, conducting a silent game of knots and crosses. Even before we know anything of what the film is about, Gulzar has communicated how marvellous train journeys could feel for the middle-class child -- the adults asleep below, while you looked down from the deliciously unsupervised space of the upper berth, the holidays stretching ahead of you. The train journey was a time out of time.

As it turns out, Gulzar is only pointing to that sense of sweet interregnum, secured at both ends by middle-class cushioning, as a contrast. What makes Kitaab memorable is the real-life adventure on which it launches its boy hero – but here, too, the railways are crucial. Bored with school and misunderstood at home, Babla runs away from the city home he shares with his didi (Vidya Sinha) and brother-in-law (in an odd bit of casting, Uttam Kumar!). He gets on the train to go back to his mother in the village. But when shoved out for being ticketless, the 12-year-old suddenly finds himself in the real world he's been so impatient to enter.

In flashback, we see Babla and his best friend Pappu bunking school to wander the city, entranced as much by the street magician as by the halwai making jalebis. Again and again, they try to apprentice themselves to these men, who greet their enthusiasm with mostly indulgent disbelief. On the surface, these scenes evoke laughter: The boys, it seems, will do anything to get out of having to go to school. But the camera's attention to the men's practiced movements and the boys' rapt gazes tell a different story: These artisans are indeed masters of their craft. The children, watching them, grasp that fact instinctively – and any craft so consummately carried out seems worth learning. If classroom education has failed to engage these young minds, Kitaab suggests, it has also not yet infected them with the casteist, classist belief that manual work, no matter how skilled, is unworthy of admiration.

It is people like these that adopt the runaway boy -- the railway engine driver and his assistant, the station's resident midget, and Shreeram Lagoo playing a blind singer of the sort that could once be met on every train in India. Asking very few questions, they simply add him into their lives. The middle class passengers ignore the unclaimed child in their midst, but the engine driver gives him the last of his tiffin, the blind beggar buys him tea and food. The instinctive humanity with which they share what little they have is moving – yet Gulzar doesn't let things turn maudlin. We smile at little things and big ones: The little boy and the dwarf literally sizing each other up; the hackneyed phrases people use for emotions. When someone says “Bechara anaath hai [He's a poor orphan]”, Babla adopts the phrase, trotting it out for a quick dose of sympathy, often to hilarious effect. “Bechara anaath hoon [I'm a poor orphan],” he tells one ticket checker -- just before saying he's headed to meet his mother.

 

Much of the bittersweet pleasure of Kitaab comes from watching the child watch the world go by – and learning from it as he does. And although Babla was curious, observant and sensitive at school and at home, it is the train that offers him a sense of what the world is really like. The network of trains and railway stations is like a pathway through the world, and a microcosm of it. As Babla negotiates his way through this network, he encounters old age and disease, blindness and deformity -- and death. Like a latter-day Siddhartha, the protected middle class boy is confronted with the sight of suffering, and is shaken by it.

Unlike Siddhartha, though, the experience doesn't lead him to renounce the world – but to return to it richer. One could read Kitaab as a cop-out: Issuing a challenge to middle class pieties and normative barriers, but turning back before risk turns to danger. But one can also see it as an expansion of the child's universe, an initiation into life that acknowledges the inevitability of sorrow -- while not undermining the value of the safety net. As the blind train singer puts it, “Gaadi chhutne ka gham mat kariyo, baalak. Station na chhutne paaye [Don't mourn the missed train, child. Just don't let the station get away from you.]”

Published in TOI Plus, and three editions of Mirror -- Pune, Bangalore and Mumbai.

Darkness and death in the Indian Jungle

My Mumbai Mirror column:

The pitch-black vision of Aravind Adiga's Booker Prize-winning 2008 novel about class finds new audiences with a streaming film adaptation.

The White Tiger, currently the most watched film on a major streaming platform in India, features a protagonist born at the bottom of the country's social pyramid (not counting gender). Balram Halwai belongs to what Aravind Adiga, in the bestselling 2008 novel on which the film is based, calls “the Darkness”. “India is two countries in one: An India of Light, and an India of Darkness,” says Balram in the book, going on to elaborate a geographical basis for the divide, centred on water. Wherever the river Ganga flows, he says, that area is the Darkness – while every place in India that is near the ocean is well-off, in the Light.

 

Adiga names Balram's village Laxmangarh, and refers to Dhanbad and Gaya as the nearby towns, the places where men from the village go to seek work, or catch trains to cities further away: Calcutta, Delhi. But of course each time Balram speaks of the Darkness, the term conjures up something more than mere location. It encapsulates the desperate poverty that is the norm in a village like Laxmangarh, the entrenched hierarchy that makes sure that the backbreaking labour of men like Balram's father feeds the bellies of men like Ashok's father.

 

Ashok -- whose car Balram drives, and whose life choices he judges every day, even as he also aspires to them. “Rich men are born with opportunities they can waste,” says Balram scathingly of his master, who does very little about his oft-stated desire to change the future of India. The America-returned son of Laxmangarh's most exploitative landlord (nicknamed the Stork), Ashok is far too good for his own good. He has married his Indian-American girlfriend Pinky, who isn't of his caste, and who might even be Christian -- and his egalitarian ways do not sit well with his position atop the hierarchy. He is constantly trying to prevent Balram from opening doors for him, trying to make him sit next to him on a sofa, and generally experimenting with the radical idea of the servant's humanity.

 

Two weeks ago in this space, I wrote about another film in which, too, a US-returned Indian employer breaks the rules about how to behave with our servants. The exemplary hope of Rohena Gera's finely wrought narrative is that a man might actually fall in love with his domestic help.

 

In Ramin Bahrani's cinematic adaptation of his old friend Adiga's novel, the erotic and emotional charge of the master-servant relationship remains beneath the surface. But watching Balram attach himself to Ashok like a faithful puppy -- thrilled to be able to serve him well and distraught when his overtures are rejected -- one has no doubt that the charge exists. When a distraught Pinky abandons ship, Balram and Ashok are thrown back even more upon each other, creating unprecedented closeness – and thus also unprecedented distaste. In one remarkable scene, Balram goes instantaneously from cradling the drunken Ashok to slapping him, with some glee, when he passes out. It's a short journey, it seems, from worriedly trying to revive his master with nimbu pani to sprawling on his couch and drinking his whiskey.

 

Adiga articulated that strange intimacy well, and Bahrani excels in this section. In Pinky's absence, Balram determines to “be a wife” to his master – which apparently involves not letting him drink, and keeping his spirits up. But then Ashok's elder brother arrives to take charge of him, and brings rejection in his wake. Ashok goes from being grateful for Balram's company to swatting him away. Suddenly the servant's advice is too stupid, his attentions too cloying. A similar fluctuation happens with others, too; whenever an employer needs the servant, he is wooed and flattered, embraced, called a part of the family.

 

The grateful servant preens, at first. But this is intimacy conducted on one person's terms. And so the servant, powerless though he is, slowly discovers the weapons of the weak. In The White Tiger, Balram goes from being what the coarse-tongued caretaker of the building's netherworld of a basement calls his master's 'faithful dog', to a faithless cheat who realises he must take what he can get. The dehati chuha, the country mouse, learns the ways of the city. But even those petty ways – picking up other paying customers, invoicing fake repairs, siphoning off petrol -- are a fraction of what would be needed to actually bring the servant anywhere near the level of the master.

 

And so intimacy is corroded by duplicitousness. “Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love? Or do we love them, behind a facade of loathing?” muses Balram. Adiga/Bahrani's is a much darker vision of cross-class relationships than Rohena Gera's. That's the thing, though – Sir imagines bridging India's vast social gap with love, The White Tiger with crime. For the vast majority of India, both options remain fantasies.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, Sun 31 Jan, 2021.

All the perfumes of Arabia

My Mirror column:

Uplifting and devastating by turns, Vinod Kamble’s 2019 debut feature Kastoori (The Musk) is the kind of coming-of-age narrative that Indian cinema needs more of.

The first time we see Gopi’s face, he has just set eyes on a filthy public toilet. For most viewers of Vinod Kamble’s Kastoori (The Musk), the sight of that toilet – the next shot – would likely be enough to make us retch. Or at least make us want to bang the door shut and get as far away as we can. Gopi, however, can’t do that. He must step into the cubicle instead, a broom in one hand and a bucket of water in the other, his face impassive as he gets to the cleaning work he does alongside his mother.

As Kamble’s powerful debut feature proceeds, we see his teenaged young protagonist Gopi do all kinds of jobs that remain unofficially yet inescapably ‘reserved’ for Dalits in India, crucial jobs shunned by caste Hindus for their proximity to dirt and the dead. He helps his father bury unclaimed dead bodies for the police department, he assists other young men from the community in cleaning out septic tanks and, finally, assists a doctor who conducts autopsies.

Kastoori, available to view online till August 2 as part of the 2020 edition of the New York Indian Film Festival, derives much of its verisimilitude from Kamble’s own experiences growing up in a Dalit family of sanitation workers in Barshi village in Maharashtra’s Solapur. As with Kamble’s own life, education seems to offer Gopi the only way out of a poverty exacerbated by caste. But as the film makes sadly clear, staying in school is not easy, precisely under these circumstances.

“Dekhti main tere ko, kaise kaam pe nai aata tu [Let me see how you don’t come to work],” says Gopi’s mother angrily, before tearing up his textbook. Gopi is good at school and wants desperately to continue, but she does not have the wherewithal to support him. “Number aane se pet nahi bharta [Good marks won’t fill your stomach],” she scoffs. He has to earn his keep, and that means leaving school if that’s the only way his father’s job can stay in the family.

Poverty-stricken parents pulling a child out of school to join a caste-bound family occupation has been the theme of at least two previous coming-of-age Marathi films with Dalit protagonists. In Rajesh Pinjani's 2012 release Baboo Band Baja (available on a streaming website), a bartanwali and midwife tries to keep her little son in school, but finds herself battling her husband, who believes his son cannot escape a life playing music at funerals, as his grandfather and father did. In Nagaraj Manjule’s pioneering 2013 debut Fandry (the word means ‘pig’), a teenager from a pig-rearing Dalit agricultural family suffers his father's fatalism alternating with drunken rages. “You won’t die if you bunk one more day!” he says the first time we see him speak to his son.

Caste isn’t too sharply foregrounded in Baboo Band Baja, but there are frequent references that suggest it, such as the father’s angry complaint that band-wallas are always made to wait outside, never invited in. Fandry (also on a streaming platform) is much more upfront about caste: the visibility of Jabya’s ‘polluting’ work outside school instantly cancels out the minimal claims to constitutional equality made inside school walls. Kastoori carries on that necessary, painful task of measuring the Indian state’s promises against what society actually offers – and it does so with quiet aplomb.

The same classmates who shake Gopi’s hand when he wins an essay prize (Kamble makes a point by making it a Sanskrit essay) turn against him after they spy him helping clean a septic tank. “Here comes the sweeper, he stinks,” they murmur. “We should tell the teacher.” But Kamble knows that the schoolchildren holding their noses are only one end of the systemic rot – at the other end is the doctor who insists that the sweeper’s schoolgoing son replace his father, and the activist who sees no irony in a child doing the back-end work for a workshop about Dalit children’s education.

Caught between beaten-down alcoholic fathers and hard-scrabble frustrated mothers, youngsters in these films find other allies. Gopi’s lovely grandmother with the quavering voice is one such. Others find support outside the family. In a plot-line that presages Manjule’s massively successful Sairat (2016), when Fandry’s Jabya gets shyly besotted with an upper caste classmate called Shalu, he confides in the local cycle shop owner Chankya (played by Manjule himself). Close friendships between boys are also central to all these films – Kastoori wouldn’t be half as uplifting as it is without the warmth of Gopi’s close friend Aadim, the son of a Qureishi butcher who also understands what it’s like to be perceived as doing ‘unclean’ work.

Inspired by Iranian cinema’s use of children’s stories, debacles abound – a lost schoolbag in Baboo Band Baja, a crushed cycle in Fandry, a trickster selling fake goods in Kastoori -- while the search for beauty abides. The mythical ‘kali chimni’ (black sparrow) for which Jabya roams the woods in Fandry metamorphoses, in Kastoori, into Aadim and Gopi’s saving up to acquire the legendary perfumed substance of the film’s title. But Kamble ends his film on a remarkable note, silently redefining what beauty means. In a visual homage to the stone-throwing last shot of Fandry, that was itself a homage to the last shot of Shyam Benegal’s Ankur, Gopi flings away the bottle of perfume. Because perfumed beauty would be camouflage, and camouflage is not the answer.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 26 Jul 2020.

Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone

My Mirror column (10 May 2020):

As India's labouring poor are locked into cities and die tragically in their unaided attempts to get home, Muzaffar Ali's 1978 migrant classic Gaman acquires new layers of meaning.

In an early scene in Gaman, a hesitant Ghulam Hasan (Farooque Shaikh) gets off a train at VT Station and manages to find his way to the jhopadpatti that appears to be his childhood friend Lallulal's (Jalal Agha) Mumbai address. He pauses beside a group of young men chatting by the roadside. “Sunoh bhaiyya,” says Ghulam softly, his tongue still travelling along the slow perlocutionary path of his native UP village. “Woh kya hai ki kya Lallulal Tiwari yahan rehta hai?” 

The retort is quick and stinging, and the word now jumps out at us, an untranslated social footnote that will not be suppressed: “Apun tumko bhaiyya dikhta hai?”

One of the others deigns to direct the lost newcomer to the tin-roofed shanty (“third gali after the municipal toilet”) that the affable Lallu shares with several other men, and Ghulam quickly becomes one of its occupants. But Muzaffar Ali's 1978 directorial debut, a film made three years before his much more famous Umrao Jaan, never lets his viewers forget that this rickety roof over their heads is both temporary and tenuous. Shelter in the big city is so precious a thing that Lallu's labelling of it as his “Taj Mahal” is both a bad joke and thoroughly heartfelt. And the emotion only heightens through the film, as Lallu and his sweetheart Yashodhara (Gita Siddharth, of Garm Hava fame) yearn ever more for a place of their own so they can marry, while even the rented kholi is threatened with demolition.

For Ghulam though, it is the village home he has left behind that calls out to him, in the shape of letters bringing news of his ailing mother and his lonely wife Khairun (Smita Patil), whose face drifts up from his memories and looms large over the cityscape that he learns gradually to traverse. Aided by older men from his native region, so-called bhaiyyas, Ghulam becomes, like Lallu, a taxi driver in Mumbai. The film is full of shots of Shaikh in a taxi, his sad eyes seeing but not quite seeing the urban crowd he is now part of. “Hiyan bheed ka kauno hisaab naahi,” as he tells Lallu wonderingly.

Muzaffar Ali's use of songs is perhaps his most affective talent, and it is powerfully evident here. In the picturisation of the film's magisterial anthem of urban desolation “Seene mein jalan, aankhon mein toofan sa kyun hai/ Is sheher mein har shakhs pareshaan-sa kyun hai? (Why does the heart burn, why is there a storm in my eyes/ Why is everyone troubled in this city?)”, our gaze travels past blocks and blocks of urban housing, and cars seen from above, like unending queues of ants, and we hear Shahryar's line: “Ta-had-e nazar ek bayabaan sa kyun hai?” “Why is there a wilderness as far as the eye can see?”

One of Gaman's achievements as a film about the migrant experience is that the distance between the village and the city feels insurmountable, despite the technologies that bridge the two. That feeling is gestured to in the film's very first shot, when a letter is being laboriously typed with one finger (on a typewriter that, in one of those surreal moments that populate the watching of so much in 2020, bears the brand-name Corona), and the camera moves up from there to the telegraph lines that stretch across a bucolic rural landscape. A great deal of screen time is spent on trains and buses – and at moments of particular emotion, Ali inserts a distant shot of a plane in the sky, like some imagined modern-day pigeon-post of the heart.

Conditions of labour and lack of money make it nearly impossible for the poor migrant to go back home, even when nothing is ostensibly stopping him. In the third month of a shockingly unplanned and heartlessly implemented lockdown, when lakhs of India's working poor are being forcibly kept from going back home, Gaman's final sequence bears a terrible new weight. Farooque Shaikh bundles up his few belongings in his lovely old-style trunk (the objects of the feudal Awadh village were still beautiful) and arrives at VT, hoping to depart as spontaneously as he had arrived. But more than half the money he has saved in a year will go on just the journey home, he thinks, and his feet stop where they are. We leave him standing behind the collapsible gate that enters the platform, locked down in the city while his mind climbs onto the train, over and over.

I'd like to end this column with another moment from Gaman, when Ghulam is actually on a train. He and Lallu are going to meet Yashodhara. They are already late when the train suddenly stops. What happened, asks Ghulam the newbie. Must be an accident, says Lallu. It turns out a man has been killed under the train’s wheels. “The bus would have been faster,” says Lallu. “Yahi gaadi mili thhi marne ke liye! (Did he have to choose this train to die under?)” rues another man. “Patri se hataane ka aur gaadi start karne ka. Passenger log ka kaahe ko time barbaad karne ka (Get him off the tracks and start the train. Why waste the time of passengers?)” says a third voice.

Ghulam looks distraught. “Wait and watch,” says Lalloo. “You’ll get used to it like all of us.”

Watching Gaman in mid-2020, it feels sickeningly clear that all of us are now passengers, whose time can’t be wasted on mourning those the train rolls over. The numbers rise every day.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 May 2020.

Speak, memory

My Mirror column:
 
Ritesh Batra’s Photograph is an underappreciated gem of a film, gleaming with quiet revelations about the stories we tell ourselves.

Ritesh Batra’s Photograph (2019), much like his acclaimed 2013 film The Lunchbox, is based on a particular idea of romance: two people from very different worlds united by happenstance. In both films, that unexpected connection is forged by the big city, the vast anonymous wilderness suddenly letting two people see each other. In The Lunchbox, Batra used a mix-up by Mumbai’s much-feted dabbawalas as the device that brought a neglected housewife in contact with an office-going widower. In Photograph, the unlikely bond that Batra wants to us to believe in, between a street photographer called Rafi and a modest Gujarati girl prepping for her CA exams, is tied to something just as iconic in the city: the Gateway of India.

Yes, perhaps there’s a kernel of reality there. Where, except at the Gateway of India, would a working class Muslim man from a village in Ballia, Uttar Pradesh, living five to a kholi in Mumbai, have a chance to speak to a fair, English-speaking, academically-inclined girl from an upper middle class Hindu family? But for Miloni to have her photo taken by Rafi is one thing; to have her actually respond to a personal request from him days, even weeks later, is quite another. It is in making us believe in their slowly unfurling connection that Batra wins, and in the ever-so-delicate performances he draws from Nawazuddin Siddiqui as the watchful Rafi and Sanya Malhotra as the almost painfully quiet Miloni.

The gulf between them has been described as “cultural”, and I suppose that is one way to put it. But the financial inequality is stark enough to ensure that even a simple transactional moment between them is experienced completely differently by both parties. Miloni can forget to pay the Rs 30 for her instant photo not just because she is distracted, but because the amount is so little as to not even register in her mind. Meanwhile, for Rafi, who counts out even his petty change to send home, one disappeared client can turn a good day into bad.

What Batra does beautifully is to show us these quiet people, both adamant to resist the paths laid out for them. For Rafi, the prospect of marriage is not entirely unattractive, but he thinks pining away for a wife in the village will make him a “softy”. It is soon clear that he resists because he is the sentimental grandson who revisits his childhood in story after story, recognising in his grandmother’s childhood stories the power of fiction (“She made us laugh so much that we wouldn’t even know if the stove had been lit that day”) – and returning her gift now with an elaborate fiction of his own. For Miloni, life so far has been defined by her parents: home to tuition and back, the CA examination, arranged marriage to an eligible boy, America. She is so unused to choosing anything that even the colours of her clothes are of no consequence to her. Spending days with Rafi and his dadi becomes the furthest she has strayed from the straight and narrow.

At the centre of the film is the photograph of Miloni that Rafi takes. But Batra’s style is literary, in the best possible ways, and so it is no coincidence that we don’t ever properly see the picture. The image here is but a prop for stories – for Rafi’s story that he has a fiancée, and later for Miloni’s story of how she and Rafi got together. She makes it up for Dadi’s benefit, as she does her dead parents. But what she sees in it is true: a happier self, now invisible to her, that Rafi’s gaze seems to capture.

There is nostalgia here aplenty – the breeze on the ferry, the old Hindi film song in a kali-peeli taxi on a rainy Bombay night, Campa Cola as the taste of a childhood self. But the quality that felt slightly contrived in The Lunchbox – handwritten notes, the repeated error of the dabba delivery, no mobile phones – has also been smoothed into something more convincing here, something in which the past is not a simple refuge. The pleasure of the ice gola is destroyed by a stomach upset, the old single screen theatre by a rat. The old lady urges Rafi to let go of the past: to forget the mortgaged house, the deprived childhood. In a darker subplot, the story of the man who hung himself in the room where Rafi and his four mates live is told and retold in their drunken sessions: now with humour, now with pathos, but most of all with a kind of desperation – as if telling and retelling the tale might exorcise the ghost of the past.

Perhaps what makes Photograph so rewarding is its recognition that we live in the past and the present simultaneously, and that it isn’t necessarily the end of the story that matters most, but what you remember of it. In the words of Rafi’s marvellous sales pitch to prospective customers: “Saalon baad jab aap yeh photo dekhenge, toh aapko aapke chehre pe yahi dhoop dikhai degi, aapke baalon mein yeh hawa, aur aapke kaanon mein hazaaron logon ki awaazein. Sab chala jayega. Hamesha ke liye sab chala jayega. [“Years later when you look at this photo, you will see this very sunlight on your face, this breeze in your hair, and the voices of thousands of people in your ears. Everything will go. Everything will be gone for ever.”]. Everything will end, but a memory can still be a gift.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 Nov 2019

Reeling in the Real

My Mirror column:

Twenty years after his Baishey Shravana, Mrinal Sen revisited the subject of famine with Akaler Sandhane, producing a fascinating film about films.

“Mrinal Sen was the lead player, in a shining cast of recipients for the national awards given away by the President Shri Neelam Sanjiva Reddy in the 28^th National Film Festival held in Delhi on April 23, 1981,” reads the 1981 film festival catalogue. The film that won Sen not just the Swarna Kamal for Best Feature Film but also the National Awards for Best Director and Best Screenplay – as well as Best Editing for its editor Gangadhar Naskar – was called Akaler Sandhane (In Search of Famine, 1980).

It was Sen's second time making a film about famine. The first time was Baishey Shravana (1960), which I wrote about in the column before this one. Unlike Baishey, which was a period film set during the historical 1943 Bengal famine, Akaler Sandhane was set in the present. A modern film crew from the city arrives in a village to shoot a film about the 1943 famine, and finds itself embroiled in fractious local divisions.

When the film opens, it presents us with two worlds that seem equally generic, undifferentiated: a busload of shrill urbanites with little interest in the village beyond its use as a 'location', and a mass of villagers who look upon the arriving film crew with a mixture of awe and suspicion. As the crew spends time in the village, bridges are built between these worlds: the lapsed local folk actor who appoints himself the crew's caretaker and informant, or the film's heroine Smita (played by the late Smita Patil) establishing a personal connection with the last remaining occupants of the zamindar bari -- including the solitary lady of the house who watches the film crew at work, clearly a cinematic precursor to Kirron Kher's character in Rituparno Ghosh's Bariwali.

Sen's gentle, observational style manages to slowly unpack both sides. Yet the closer the interaction between them, the more the gulf seems to widen.

The film operates simultaneously at several levels. Deceptively unstructured in the way it seems to unfold, it moves constantly between the film-within-a-film; the interactions on the film set -- in which we have the sharp-shooting director (Dhritiman Chatterjee playing a version of himself), the flamboyant actor (Dipankar De, also playing a version of himself), two actresses and a production manager; and the village, into which we make sorties, usually with members of the film crew.

Several of these sorties make direct reference to the power of cinema in the world. The global reach of Hollywood is signalled in an amusing village-level advertising campaign for a local outdoor screening of Guns of Navarrone, said to star “the great actor Anthony Queen” and “the most beautiful woman in the world”. In another wonderful conversation, the local theatre actor says he's been told his face has a Russian cut, and also that he was so starved of good scripts that he had once sent to Calcutta for a copy of a book by (or perhaps about) Karl Marx.

At other times, Sen refers obliquely to his own previous film about the famine, such as with the opening shot of the train, or with the repeated sequence of Dipankar's character excitedly reporting the arrival of the military in the village. At a more philosophical level, too, Akaler Sandhane and Baishey Shravana share a preoccupation with how human beings react to the pressure of a calamity like famine: which values are suspended, who is allowed to suspend them, which things ought to be forgiven and which are not.

On the one hand, the film points out the irrationality of people's responses to performance: the villagers are attracted to the glamour and money of the cinema, but take offence when the village's women are asked to audition for the part of a prostitute. On the other, Sen's superbly understated direction nudges us to see the recurring parallels between the cinematic and the actual world. Akaler Sandhane contains not one but three handicapped/paralysed husbands, their emasculation by circumstances making them unfairly suspicious of their wives.

Misunderstandings grow rife, and as always, the supposed honour of women becomes the node around which insults begin to fly.

At one level, the filmmakers seem unable to communicate with the world in which they are filming, completely cut off from the social mores and power centres that govern the village. That distrust of the people is gestured to again and again by Sen, when he has film crew members say such things as “The public is erratic”, and ends by having the sage old village schoolmaster recommend that they finish shooting in a studio where “there will no fear of the people”.

But at another level, that breakdown of communication is precisely because of the unexpected resonances between the film and reality, which are so strong as to end up threatening the existing power structures of that reality. The film crew represent a privileged elite, yes – but the only reason they get under the villagers' skins is because the past their film digs up is too close for comfort for many members of the village. The reel is too real.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 Feb 2019.

Streets full of dreams

My Mirror column:

Two recent city films, one from Delhi, the other Bangalore, make us think about the role fantasy plays in the lives of the poor.

The memorably named Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Jaa Riya Hoon (I’m Taking the Horse to Feed It Jalebis) is a welter of visions. “This film is culled from interviews and dreams of pickpockets, street vendors, small-scale factory workers, daily wage labourers, domestic workers, loaders, rickshaw pullers and many others labouring in the city of Shahjanabad, Old Delhi,” reads the opening text of Anamika Haksar’s debut film. A long-time theatre person and activist, Haksar has said in interviews that the film germinated in her mind soon after her marriage, when she first began to spend time in Old Delhi and had a window looking out on a roof where three men slept every night.

Watching Ghode at the Dharamshala Film Festival earlier this month, it was clear to me that Haksar had spent many years with that memory, trying to turn that real window into a metaphorical one.

Ghode retains her originary three men on a roof, giving them professions and roots — the pickpocket (Ravindra Sahu) and the sweet seller (a tragically under-used Raghubir Yadav) are from UP, while the loader (K Gopalan) is Malayali. But she surrounds them with a cast of 400 non-actors from Purani Dilli. An unorthodox mix of animation, fiction and documentary, Haksar’s film has a clear political aim: expanding an uncritical, vaguely nostalgic gaze (afforded by her upper-middle-class Kashmiri family’s Old Delhi connections) into a perspective simultaneously sharper and more broad-based.

A crucial conduit in that politics of representation is the portly figure of Akash Jain, a well-off resident who serves as guide to Old Delhi, and as faux-sutradhar to the film. Played by real-life theatre person Lokesh Jain (who with his partner Chhavi did the interviews on which the script is based), “Awaragard Akash” sings the city’s praises in highfaluting clichés as familiar as they are fake. To watch him shepherd clueless visitors through this overburdened, garbage-filled, drug-addled place of poverty and backbreaking work, while declaring it “Tehzeeb ki jannat (A heaven of civilization)” is to both laugh and cry at the ironies we live with.

Less successful is the film’s shunning of a linear narrative and near-total jettisoning of psychological realism. Ghode’s multitude of dream visions can be surreal and cheeky — levitating corpses bandaged in white; a calendar-style Lakshmi contending with a lehrata hua Communist flag, or my favourite: a labourer’s fantasy of his exploitative boss turning into a lizard. But there’s also a hyperreal mode that tries too obviously to grab our attention: for instance, that same labourer’s muscles shown pulsing exaggeratedly, at excruciating length.

Dreams animating the dreary lives of the poor are also the subject of Indu Krishnan’s 78-minute documentary, Good Guy, Bad Guy, which was screened at the Urban Lens Festival in Delhi yesterday. Like the 59-year-old Haksar, Krishnan spent over five years with a much younger working-class man who is her central character. She first meets Zakhir in Cubbon Park, that island of quiet in the raucous tide engulfing Bangalore. He is feeding the monkeys — not by strewing food on the ground, but feeding each individually.

Krishnan finds this unusual and decides to get to know him. A runaway who left home many years ago, Zakhir works as a ragpicker in Bangalore’s scrap-sorting area, Jolly Mohalla. By day, he trawls the city’s streets for reusable trash. By night, his primary concern is to find a safe place to sleep. The animals he befriends — monkeys in Cubbon Park, street dogs, even pigeons that roost above a house where he sleeps — are a refuge in a hostile city, and Zakhir imagines their lives as implicitly better than his own. “No one bothers these creatures,” he tells Krishnan. “They can do what they want. If they show up at Cubbon Park, they’ll get fed, too.”

That imagined life is quite different, however, from that of a caged animal. In one of the film’s oddly moving juxtapositions, when Zakhir ends up in jail in a murder case, the filmmaker manages to track him down and asks him if he might want to work in a zoo upon release since he likes animals so much. Zakhir’s response is characteristically gentle but immediate: “It is a sin to keep animals captive.”

Later in the film, he ends up working for a piggery. But with Krishnan’s help, he also embarks on an attempt to fulfil what he tells her is his real dream: directing a feature film. In contrast to Ghode’s biting sarcasm and rambling excess, Good Guy is a gentler, simpler film, a bit like Zakhir. Like Haksar, Krishnan remains a privileged outsider, never really exposing herself. Still, despite some unnecessary drama and bad background music, her honesty about her own position vis-à-vis Zakhir — bailing him out or connecting him with a Kannada filmmaker because “without that there would be no film” — disarmed me.

Watching the near-illiterate Zakhir create a script and songs for his film, with at least one featuring himself as a sort of anti-hero, it was hard to know how I felt about his dream life. The question is similar to the one implicitly raised in Haksar’s film: do dreams keep people from being crushed by hopeless conditions? Or are they a perpetual escape from reality?

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 18 Nov 2018.

We girls are lions

My Mirror column:

Young girls battle the odds of childhood in Kampala and Kabul: thoughts on Mira Nair's Queen of Katwe and Yosef Baraki's Mina Walking.

Queen of Katwe, directed by Mira Nair

You only have a childhood if the world allows you one. And much of the time, much of the world doesn't. Yosef Baraki's incredible 2015 film Mina Walking tracks the everyday life of one such 'child', the 12-year-old Mina. We walk with Mina from the shack she shares with a senile grandfather and a drug-addict father through the streets of Kabul, where she joins the war-torn city's endless stream of hustlers, selling cheap mass-produced scarves with the plaintive and unbelievable tag of “I sewed them myself”.

The 27-year-old Baraki, whose family migrated from Afghanistan to Canada when he was a child, was inspired to make the film after he met a group of young streetsellers on a trip back to Kabul as an adult. Having cast a real-life 12-year-old called Farzana Nawabi as Mina, Baraki's approach was to give her only segments of his fluid script, often shooting her in real-life situations. Following Mina and the other characters around the city's crowded bazaars and empty backstreets, the skeletal 5-6 member crew tried to blend in whenever possible.

The result is a gritty film whose performances and locales both have a wrenching, dry-eyed aridity – the wasteland of a graveyard, a polluted river, plastic everywhere, Airtel umbrellas providing little shade to the blue-burkaclad women with whom the film ends. Some of Baraki's urgent, discomfiting immediacy comes by placing us in medias res. As soon as the film begins, we are accosted by the vision of a child shouldering more responsibilities than most adults.

The motherless Mina not only takes care of her ailing, half-demented grandfather -- cooking for, and feeding him, even begging neighbours for milk for him -- but has to also save him from himself when she goes to school, by tying his ankle to a post so that he doesn't wander off. In school, her textbook theorises about the equal responsibility of men and women to educate themselves. On the street, she is the one given the job of breaking in the new entrant, and the only one who defends the young ones against the older boys. Back at home, she must defend both her earnings and her school-going against a father who constantly berates her, arguing with her as if he is a child himself.

“Boys are so weak. We girls are lions,” preens a schoolmate of Mina's. Her childish bantering tone befits the classroom, where there are still children with childhood troubles, such as not being able to do homework because visiting grandparents have caused a late night. But it seems utterly incongruous when applied to Mina, precisely because it is true.

Another indomitable young girl, hustling for survival on the streets of another third-world city, is at the centre of Mira Nair's 2016 film Queen of Katwe. Nair's film and Baraki's couldn't be more different – Baraki is a first-time filmmaker funded by his father, Nair is an established international director backed by Disney. And Nair is telling a real-life fairy tale. The film's eponymous 'queen' is Phiona Mutesi, a ten-year-old from the Ugandan slum of Katwe, who went to a chess class run by missionary 'Coach' Robert Katende for the free porridge and ended up reaching the World Chess Olympiads.

But the comparison springs to mind, partly because Phiona's surroundings, like Mina's, are desperately poor. Nair's frames are not gritty and her camera isn't handheld, but she does not shy away from the indignities of the Kampala slum: the murderous traffic, the putrid heaps of garbage, the laborious daily filling of water in yellow plastic containers at an open tap – and conversely, the terrible annual rains that flood the Katwe shanties, making families homeless. For a film that a lot of children have watched, Queen of Katwe is also impressively frank about this being an economy in which women can often survive only by selling their sexual selves. We see Phiona's fear of treading the same path as the many young women she has watched graduate to high heels, only to keel over into the laps of men. “Very soon men will start coming after me. Where is my safe square, Coach?” says Phiona (Madina Nalwanga), soon after she has learnt that her older sister is pregnant.

In different ways, sexual adulthood seems to loom over these girls as a threat: increasing their supposed value in a market in which they don't wish to become commodities. Young Mina's struggles for money, for food, for dignity, come to a head when her father decides to use his position as an adult man to trade in the only capital he still possesses: his daughter. (The same premise appeared in two films I wrote about a fortnight ago, Closeness and What Will People Say. If it recurs so often in realist cinema, I wonder, how much more terrifyingly often must it occur in life?)

Nair's film picks out the one narrative in a million where a young woman in a dysfunctional society manages to pick herself up out of grinding poverty. It celebrates the inspiring exception, turning an African underdog story into the perfect American dream: as a classmate tells Phiona, “In chess, the small one can become the big one.” Mina's story doesn't allow her – or us -- that sort of happy ending. And yet there is something that lets us believe, even as her bright courageous gaze is covered up by a blank blue flap of cloth, that Mina is still out there somewhere, walking.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 Dec 2017.

Machines director Rahul Jain on his acclaimed film: 'In India, inequality stares back at you'

Rahul Jain's debut Machines is a compelling, deceptively simple cinematic essay on the dehumanising effects of labour, set in a cloth factory in Gujarat. Having won awards and acclaim at film festivals from Zurich and Thessaloniki to Sundance and Mumbai, the documentary was screened at the Dharamshala International Film Festival last weekend. 

We caught up with the 26-year-old debut filmmaker at his family home in Delhi just after Diwali, to talk about privilege and inequality, shielding ourselves from our environment, capitalism and the creative process.

You grew up in Delhi. 

Yes, till the age of 15. In Pitampura. By the time I left India, we were in GK II. And then while I was gone, my family moved to Geetanjali Enclave. And then a few years ago, we moved here [to the South Extension house].

Do you have plans of moving back here?

I have actually moved back. Though I'm travelling a lot, and it has been difficult to be here and meditate for my next film. I went out today for a few hours, and it was very depressing. But I guess that's what I'm looking for. [laughs]

Yes, I read that your new project is about environmental pollution. Is this also a fieldwork trip – given that Diwali now inaugurates the pollution season in Delhi?

It is, kind of. But very privileged and protected. I think the suffusion of politics and art is a relatively recent thing, maybe 100-150 years. Since the Renaissance artists have had this problem of how to represent anything an invisible force: the greatest of those would be God. To look at a poison does not suggest what that poison can do.

So why does the visual representation matter then?

This is something I struggle with. But this is where the human comes in. It is life that interprets matter around it. Otherwise matter is just matter. If I can somehow manage to excavate and provoke certain kinds of reactions from a wide intersection of the population of the city... I don't experience the city the way an average person here would, by needing to walk around. When I went to school in a non-AC school bus, maybe I did. But now, with air conditioning, for example, the more you  avoid the genie outside, the more the genie outside keeps growing. It's a Catch-22, something that I'm really confused and scared about — as much as one can be with a level of comfort that allows you to ignore your surroundings.

It's more and more possible to shield yourself from the environment. Once you begin, there seems no end.

Yes, the thickness of the barriers between you and the world keep growing, the more you avoid the world outside. I don't really know how to communicate that fear to people for whom that fear is not up to their necks at the moment. I don't know if this blindness is a socio-economic problem. This is going to affect all of us. Maybe the richest will dig into mountains and hide themselves inside, but that won't really be life, would it?

But even people not in that position seem not to see what it is doing to them, and worse — what they're doing to it. In my very middle-middle class Delhi neighbourhood, families hoarded fireworks and lit them after midnight. That — not relief — was the response to the Supreme Court ban on firework sales. It seems like everyone wants to assume the role of victim.

Every single book that I've read about climate change or global warming, the first chapter talks about denial. Of course there's pollution outside, but the real pollution is inside our heads, which is causing us to not perceive the magnitude of the behemoth we are facing, we are causing. Carbon is a solid but we have managed to transmute it into a gas.

The other thing is slow violence. As a five-year-old, there was something fascinating about explicit, extreme contrasts — if the punch doesn't have the dishoom-dishoom sound, we might experience it less. It's easy to kill creatures in a video game. Like that virtual violence, the pollutants we are generating remain virtual or fictional — till they hit us. Maybe an animal feels more when they see a chrysanthemum growing in January instead of April. How do you generate that foreboding, the terror of what that means? To depict that is a big representational challenge.

What you just said about denial and our comforts making us deny our role reminded me of one of the strongest scenes in Machines: where the factory owner says he keeps the labourers' salaries low because they would spend the extra money on bidis or alcohol. That is class blindness and denial. The other thing I remember is that in an interview you gave, you mentioned that you wanted to capture the stench of ammonia in the factory — which takes us back to depicting the invisible.

I'm just a very olfactory person. I am very moved by smell. I even choose my partners by it. I am wary of it, but I use it in my art as well. But films are nonetheless a two-dimensional medium. You get sound and image, you have to make do with that, but I try to generate a kind of synaesthesia.

I believe that you first visited the factory in Machines when you were a small child. What stayed with you from then?

Sense perceptions. A child doesn't have the language to articulate the world, they can only feel. I was three feet tall and there were all these sweaty people, very big. And the machines were very big. It was one of my foundational experiences to have seen that, even though I was only a tertiary participant. As a child, I was a ghost there. My whole life it was brewing, I think. Then three things happened. First I was given a warning that I would get kicked out [of film school] if I didn't make something. But I didn't identify or relate with anything in my immediate environment.

Where was that?

In Valencia, which is 40 miles from Los Angeles. Very white and very dull. Then I was googling for inspiration and googled '25 Greatest Photographers Ever' and came across Sebastian Salgado's book called Workers. I was hypnotised. It literally took me back to my exaggerated perspective, that of a child. Also around the same time in 2013, the Rana Plaza incident in Bangladesh happened, where a garment factory collapsed and over a thousand people passed away. This was also one of the catalysts that brought this into the zeitgeist.

I could have made this film in a bread factory or a Pepsi factory. I mean, the whole world is built on slavery of some kind or another. But the earliest rhetorics of working class conditions and anthropology of workers was articulated for some reason in textile mills.

Yes, true. So did you work out why the cloth matters? I mean, there is an obvious visual contrast between these reams of fabric and the often meagrely-clothed men working to create them...

Yes. Which some of the girls in my school in California found really hot. Though I wasn't at all eroticising them in that way.

How old were you when you started shooting?

Twenty-two. It took me three years to finish the film. I'm 26 now. That time I had, when I was studying other things, was helpful. I didn't have a producer for the longest time. It wasn't very expensive at first: I had my own equipment, my best friend from film school, Rodrigo Trejo Villanueva, agreed to be my cinematographer, and we have a synergy. I'm somebody who worries a lot, but he didn't give a f**k about important deadlines. I learnt patience from him. It's the most basic fact of meditation: to calm down and not be tremored (sic) by twenty different ideas. When we lose our anally-retentive postmodern sense of control, that's when we can let go. I do believe that creativity needs a kind of looseness — your mind needs to free itself of the tautness of deadlines, and be relaxed enough to make wild juxtapositions in your head.

You don't ever appear in the film.

In films, just like in life, what you don't see is as important as what you see. Of course the film is brought to the audience from my perspective. But my presence would be a barrier, or filter. It would take away the urgency of the words spoken. I wanted viewers to feel they were being directly addressed.

There is one scene towards the end, where the crowd of labourers outside ask you what you've come to do, whether you actually want to help, or will you also just go away like politicians do. What did you say?

I didn't really have any answers. But I told the workers what I was doing.

And what was the response?

They thanked me. Some of them said, that's really kind of you, that you're trying to understand what we're going through. Some of the others were just happy that someone had pointed a camera at them for the first time in their lives. These people come from a place of thinking nobody cares about them. So for anybody to be curious about their situation, about their being, is almost a phenomenon. But we're humans and we respond to empathy. Also I communicated with them the kind of privilege I come from, and the fact that I've never earned a single penny in my life, and that I'm studying.

That's a difficult thing to do.

Absolutely. You really have to be vulnerable. Sometimes a worker would ask me, yeh camera kitne ka hai, and I could not bring myself name a figure that would equal 20 years of his salary in that factory. So I would just say, it's very expensive.

That is also the basic question that drove me to make this film: not knowing why there is this inequality. In many places the illusion of equality is much more present. Here in India it stares back at you.

So are you back in India for good?

Well, at least as long as I'm working on my next project, the documentary on pollution. It's depressingly inside my head still. I need to put pen to paper.

Did you write a script for Machines?

[Shakes his head to indicate no].

But you want to write a script for this film?

No, I just want to see my thought process tangibilised [sic]. Writing things down helps. I mean my father still takes notes, and he's one of the most successful men I know. And he went to school till Class Eight.

You started out going to engineering school in the US. How long did you last?

Six months.

But the science that you studied, seems to survive in your concerns, and in your metaphors.

I came to art very late. Until the age of 20, I had never met an artist. But I had met scientists. And businessmen and lawyers and doctors.

You're just back from the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. Any thoughts on current cinema in India? Do you watch Indian films?

I'm going to watch a Bollywood film with my family tonight, and I know that every part of my brain will be screaming 'I want to get out of here'. We are a film-watching country, but it can't be about the numbers. It's about what sorts of film we're watching; what films it is assumed we want to see. The formula [of producing commercial cinema] works on the same principle as Amazon or Netflix, which is to say that the machine is supposed to be able to predict what you would like. But it is a machine making that decision, and a machine can only create based on what has been made before. How then will anything new ever get created?

Published in Firstpost, 5 Nov 2017.