"Surely you're joking, Mr.Kashyap."

"Surely you're joking, Mr.Kashyap."



All my hatred and envy was reserved for Anurag because I understood his work. My hatred was based on respect. My hatred was based on love. Of course, I didn't know it then.
Aug 16 2001 12:00AM


You carried the torch, my naïve friend. And they pissed on it.

Remember that silly high jump contest in school, where you had to jump and make a chalk mark on the wall? You were my wall. A wall for me to scale. Every achievement of mine was secret chalk mark I made to gauge my efforts against yours. And now, there are crimson spittle stains on the wall.

Eleanor Roosevelt carried this prayer in her purse during the Second World War:

Dear Lord
Lest I continue
My complacent way
Help me to remember
Somewhere out there
A man died for me today
-- As long as there be war
I then must ask and answer
Am I worth dying for?

There is a war being fought today. A war that few know about and even fewer care about. It is the war to preserve a modicum of intelligence in Hindi cinema. It is the struggle to nurture the remnants of creative integrity and expression in the largest film industry in the world. The warriors are the people who dare to defy market bromides, formulae and mantras, who dare to create and express on their own terms, for their own desperate, passionate need to make films.

Films, not proposals. Films, not marketing vehicles. Films, not an ensemble of stars performing an elaborate music video.

The enemy is an Axis of omnipotent but anonymous allies.

When Manmohan Desai asserted that his formula was one 'item' every ten minutes, was he aware that he was playing Frankenstein? Did he recognize the monstrosity he was unleashing upon the industry he so loved and came to symbolize?

The inheritors of Manji's legacy forgot that 'items' are mean to garnish and enhance the content of a film, not replace it. They replaced it. 'Fight scenes' replaced human drama, 'melodrama' replaced motivation, 'songs' replaced exposition, 'comedy tracks' replaced comic insights and Hindi cinema was reduced to a rugby joke.

The Axis also involves the Viewer. Reluctantly and because they were offered no alternatives, the Viewer gave up. He not only got accustomed to the repetitive inanities of Bollywood, he actually came to enjoy it. But this ally of the brain-dead retained a conspiratorial connection with the Light Brigade. The fathers of mainstream cinema scratched their heads in confusion when Ardh Satya ran for twenty-five weeks and Ankush opened to full houses. And how could Shyam Benegal keep making films? Obviously, someone was paying money to watch these films, but who?

The answer was never revealed. The Resistance stayed underground, surfacing every odd Friday for a guerilla attack on benumbed sensibilities.

Slowly, the Resistance gained in strength, putting up their posters openly and actually releasing films like Parinda, Roja, Satya, Hyderabad Blues, Terrorist and Zubeida. The enemy panicked. The Viewer was of course the principle ally. If the Viewer once again got used to intelligent films, where would that leave us: We, the Showmen? We, the Dream Makers? We, the Sellouts?

But the Axis had one more ally. More powerful than any other. An antediluvian monster that forgot to die, and was institutionalized by the moral brigade. The Censor Board.

An image from 'The Fountainhead' has always haunted me. You are locked in a room with a malevolent monster, diseased and salivating and vicious. He is going to kill you. You have no weapons to fight it. Your only hope for survival is to appeal to its reason, to its intellect -- to explain to it that it will achieve nothing by killing you. But the monster has no faculty for reason. It has no intellect. It will kill you.

I met Anurag Kashyap in 1995 when I was working part time in Crest Communication and instantly hated him for having started writing before me. I played safe: I worked as a copywriter for a year and as a creative consultant for a TV company, while all the time dying to write movies. Anurag shrugged at such notions of financial security. When I finally took the plunge, Anurag had already written Satya, Kaun and Shool.

He was actually writing the kind of subjects that I dreamed and fantasized about. People were paying him money to write them, making films based on them.

I watched his films with vicious intent, rejoicing everytime a line sucked or scene fell flat. I didn't care about more successful or better known writers. All my hatred and envy was reserved for Anurag because I understood his work. My hatred was based on respect. My hatred was based on love. Of course, I didn't know it then.

Imagine, then, my chagrin when Anurag was signed on to direct a film even before I had had my first release as a scriptwriter. And fathom my frustration when he signed me on to pen the lyrics. The gumption of the man! I was so angry, I wrote the best damn lyrics ever in my life, determined to outshine the brilliance of the director with my poetic heroism, like a desperate sub-plot trying to distract from the main narrative.

I expected to be thrown out after the very first attack. But every assault of mine was met with enthusiastic -- no, excited -- deliriously excited reactions from Anurag. He loved every song I wrote. The courage of this man. The heroism!

Until I realised, one day, that it was not courage at all. It was innocence. An innocence that was completely unaware of my intentions. He wanted to make a film, a good film, a great film if possible, and he saw my vicious attacks as genuine contributions to the film's welfare. Childlike in his intentions, he suspected no malice in mine. How do you defeat a man who is unaware that you are raging a battle against him with everything that you do, everything that you have? I gave up. Anurag almost won.

Almost. At the last minute, the Censor Board launched its secret weapon.

Anurag screened Paanch for this Jurassic wonder. At the end of the screening, a man who I believe is a primary school teacher called Anurag in and asked him what cinema meant to him. Anurag asked in turn what it meant to him and the man replied, without blinking an eyelid, that it meant 'healthy entertainment'. Healthy entertainment, according to Masterji, was absent in Paanch. He asked why there were no 'positive characters' in the film. Obviously it would have been a complete waste of time to explain the concept of a noir film to the gentleman; Anurag explained instead that all the characters were to him positive to some degree.

The gentleman then suggested that the film was too violent.

I have seen Paanch. Its wizardry lies in creating a sense of violence without its explicit depiction. The film gets under your skin, creates the kind of dirty residue that normally remains in the aftermath of a street fight. Instead, Teacher Rex felt that this film glorifies violence. Anurag asked for specific scenes that had bothered the Board, which he was willing to defend and delete if necessary. No instances were forthcoming; the man was too busy objecting to the language now.

Then came the piece de resistance. The man said that the film was too long for a thriller. He arbitrarily asked Anurag to trim it by forty minutes! Too long for a thriller. Oh Anurag, I wish I had been there to see your face. The joy it would have given my aching heart to see your initial lack of comprehension, then the rage and then the helplessness; the intense desire to ask this gentleman where he kept his cane so you could put it where it belonged. Too long for a thriller. Marvelous!

Maybe Once Upon A Time In America should have been cut down from four and a half to two hours. Oh wait a minute, they did. And reduced a classic to a schizophrenic collection of visuals. Isn't Bertolucci's 1900 too long for an epic? Well, it does encompass the story of a century, so I guess it can stretch to five hours. And thank God cricket matches last an entire day, or else Lagaan would have had to be trimmed by an hour or so.

But a thriller! What in a thriller justifies two hours and forty-five minutes? Your story? Your development of characters? Your plot? Your choice?

Surely you're joking, Mr.Kashyap.

At the end of it all, Anurag Kashyap was refused certification for his film.

Fortunately, he reserves the right to appeal to a Revising Committee and subsequently even to the Judiciary. I hope that the idiocy that characterized his recent ordeal will not mark the subsequent process of rectification.

Is Paanch too long a film? I think so. Anurag doesn't. Is Paanch a great film? I don't know. Who decides?

The Viewer. Only the goddamn Viewer and no one else.

I have seen the herculean effort that went into creating this film. I have seen the heartbreak, the conflicts, the highs and lows, the delirium and the genius that marked the process. I was present in the studio when Anurag kissed everyone in sight, including myself, because he had no other way of conveying his delight at the song. I was present when Anurag kept pushing his agitated cinematographer to attempt a scene with almost no lights. I was fortunate enough to share the ride without running the risks. Anurag ran the risks. Paanch is a year of Anurag's life.

And today, with the checkered flag in sight, a frustrated referee with no concept, no awareness of the medium is signaling an indefinite pit stop.

Let us not even dwell on some of the inanities, the obscenities and the regressive outrages that the Board has passed to date. These are not the reasons Anurag's film deserves a certificate.

It deserves a certificate because he made a film with passion and with love.

If today, no voices are raised in protest, in defiance of this murderous monolith, then we lose forever the moral right to complain about the lack of intelligence, the absence of imagination and the dearth of heroes in Hindi cinema.

source:http://abbas-tyrewala.sulekha.com/blog/post/2001/08/surely-you-re-joking-mr-kashyap.htm