GOOD FRIDAY

GOOD FRIDAY
Anurag Kashyap seemed jinxed. His films ran into hurdles — till now. The director of Black Friday is now being toasted


You know a man by the colours he keeps. Anurag Kashyap chose black — and the hue reflected the state that he had been in — till yesterday, that is. The unkind once called him Anurag ‘Jinxed’ Kashyap, for his much-hyped films never saw the light of day. They no longer do so. Black Friday, a film that he directed on the March 1993 bomb blasts in Mumbai, has finally been released. And Kashyap, at long last, is in the pink.

It’s been quite a journey for the old student of Hansraj College, Delhi. “I have been very nervous and biting my fingernails all along. But now I am happy and feeling relieved,” he says.

Black Friday got into trouble in 2005. When the film was just about to be released, a stay order was issued against it. And that was not surprising for the controversial director had faced a similar problem with his debut film, Paanch. In what was a rare case of its kind, the censor board ruled against the film, saying that Paanch did not have any positive characters and that its language was too abusive.

The courts finally cleared the film — the story of five wannabe rock stars and their merciless pursuit of success. In the meantime, producer Tutu Sharma and Kashyap fell out, and made up again. And Tejaswini Kolhapure, Sharma’s sister-in-law, waited for her career to take off with what she thought was her debut film. After eight long years, she finally got married earlier this month. Paanch never had its commercial release.

Anybody else would have packed up his director’s chair and left for home. But Kashyap, friends hold, is not the kind to give up a battle. After all, he had even weathered the storm that besets young men when they join the University of Delhi with empty pockets. “I did not have enough pocket money, which was a problem as I couldn’t go out on a date,” he says of his college days.

His friends, however, hold that they knew Kashyap would end up breaking his jinx. “He is a strong guy. He has gone through a lot of turmoil mentally but has been fighting all odds. Anyone else in his place would have crumbled,” says close friend Sanjaay Routray, the executive producer of Paanch.

Clearly, the man who likes his Kafka has already made a name in the Mumbai film industry for his films, which have been shown at private screenings. “From the look of it, Black Friday is a super film,” says director Sudhir Mishra. “Anurag, as a writer and director, always had talent. As a writer, he has brought about several changes and that was no mean achievement. In the years to come, he will prove himself as a director too,” says Mishra.

Kashyap had been doing screenplays for several years before he turned to direction. And though he wrote the dialogues for Deepa Mehta’s Water, he has mostly stuck to his genre: that of black cinema. He wrote the script for Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya and Kaun, the screenplay for E. Niwas’s Shool and wrote Yuva for Mani Ratnam.

“Anurag brought a great deal of flair and language when he wrote Yuva,” says Ratnam. “I do not speak the Hindi language well but Anurag managed to do the right thing by penning the dialogues correctly. I am sure his vision as a director helped him in this,” he says.

Audiences at large may not have seen his film till yesterday, but the industry had pinned its hope on their man from Gorakhpur. Which is why, despite all the hiccups that Kashyap faced professionally, producer Kumar Mangat wanted him to direct his film No Smoking — with John Abraham in the lead. “He is very talented and a great writer,” says Kumar Mangat. “And he will show with No Smoking that he is a great director as well.”

Kashyap, though, would be keeping his fingers crossed, because life as a director has not been an easy one for him. After Paanch got stuck, Anurag got busy with a film called Gulal. The film, shot in the backdrop of Rajasthan and student elections, starred Antara Mali and Jesse Randhawa. But once again the movie got stuck — this time because of financial problems.

And then there was Black Friday, shot in a chilling docu-drama format. When producer Arindam Mitra, who was then with Mid Day, approached Kashyap for writing the screenplay for a tele-documentary based on a book on the 1993 blasts written by Mumbai-based journalist Hussain Zayedi, Kashyap had his reservations about the format. “Why not a movie,” he asked. And then, once he had written and shown his screenplay, it was clear that it would be a film — and that he’d direct it.

And that is the essence of Anurag Kashyap. This, the industry holds, is not a man who believes in beating about the bush. He lays it straight, without any frills or trappings. People who worked with him in Black Friday say that he is passionate about cinema, and knows the pulse of the people, especially the youth. “He is not a stereotypical Hindi film director,” says an associate. “His dialogues are earthy and very real — and a far cry from the Javed Akhtar school of writing”.

Not surprisingly, critics are all praise for the film. “His films are stark and chilling,” says one critic. Yet, even as Kashyap received rave reviews internationally when Black Friday hit the festival circuit, he faced hurdles on the domestic front. The stay on its release came after some of the accused in the blasts argued that the film’s release would hinder their passage of justice while the case was still on. Now, two months after Justice Pramod Kode of the TADA court began delivering his verdict, Black Friday has got its deliverance.

And Kashyap, no doubt, is a happy man. “It’s a great feeling when people like your work,” he says. Or when they get to see the work in the first place.