Saeed Mirza
| Photo Credit: Sohail Hashmi
Seasoned filmmaker Saeed Mirza is in that pleasant section of life aglow with mellow mornings. At almost 80, most of us would have fortunately retired from the general public eye, preferring to take heed to music or spend time with grandchildren. Not so Saeed.
Having nearly stated goodbye to the world of Hindi cinema, he’s devoting his time to writing. He started with Ammi: Letter to A Democratic Mother, a tribute to his mom, and has now adopted it up with an train in nostalgia with a somewhat quizzically titled e book I Know the Psychology of Rats.
The title offers nothing away. It is barely when one is few pages into this masterpiece on friendship and companionship that one realises this was a memoir of well-known movie and TV director Kundan Shah, who was Mirza’s shut friend. He calls the e book “a tribute to our friendship, to the most astonishingly wonderful guy that Kundan was.”
In this interview to The Hindu, he talks of Shah and the altering grammar of Hindi cinema. Excerpts:
I Know the Psychology of Rats is one of essentially the most uncommon biographies. It does not take itself too critically…
It is one other means of seeing a friendship, additionally a world, concurrently. The illustrations [by Nachiket Patwardhan] are conceived as murals. It mixes up chronology. It accommodates the connection between Kundan and I, a stupendous relationship.
An illustration from the e book
| Photo Credit:
NACHIKET PATWARDHAN
You write within the e book that Kundan had that middle-class clerk-like look and no one would have thought of him as a filmmaker…
He himself stated so: ‘I look more like a clerk than a filmmaker’. Yet, there was an depth about him like no different filmmaker. I would like this e book to be accessible to all people, to let everybody know the sort of genius Kundan was. Towards the top of his life, when he made movies like P Se PM Tak, there have been smirks that he had misplaced it. It was not fairly true as a result of he was coping with a world that was turning extra and extra grotesque.
For a person who gave us a pleasant movie like Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro and Wagle ki Duniya on the small display, do you assume Kundan would have been higher off had he caught to comedy or satire?
You take the absurdity of a Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro: it was absurd but in addition true. He by some means felt that was not adequate. He journeyed on. He discovered a world that pretended to be civilised however was not. He struggled to discover a type that might embody what he felt innately.
Don’t you assume he may have prevented making movies like Ek Se Badhkar Ek and P se PM Tak?
Ek se Badhkar Ek was pure stupidity whereas P Se PM Tak was a grotesque enterprise. He was making an attempt to combine varieties.
Having stated that, do you assume we now have misplaced the artwork of satire?
We have misplaced the power to giggle at ourselves. We take ourselves too critically. We assume we’re a superior individuals and the world owes us loads. It is unusual variety of vanity.
You as soon as gave us Nukkad. Now, we don’t see any risk of one thing like that working…
(Laughs) I feel the socio-political milieu has shifted so drastically {that a} Nukkad might not work right this moment.
We see this huge acceptance of South Indian cinema in North and West India…
I’m not so positive whether or not it’s the acceptance of South Indian cinema in North India or simply soaking in leisure. I feel we’re seeing a cut up persona. At one stage, there may be Brahmanisation, at one other, there may be the OBC component in South Indian cinema. We are looking for ourselves in every kind of shapes and sizes. Pushpa, RRR and the remainder.
Coming again to your e book, do you assume Hindi cinema may have area for one more Kundan Shah?
I can’t put a finger on it. Kundan used to say that we have been regressing so quickly as individuals that each facade of civility has been stripped away. There was a really skinny veneer. Behind this was greed, profiteering, lust and pornography. So how will a Kundan Shah slot in?
Kundan apologised for the Gujarat pogrom of 2002 although he had nothing to do with that…
He was a passionate man, fully trustworthy. He was indignant on the [turn of events] even in 1992. When it got here to [Babri] masjid, he believed in rebuilding the mosque brick by brick in gradual movement so we knew what we had achieved.
Now in the identical movie trade we see the largest movie stars and administrators kowtowing to the federal government…
They have heaps of skeletons of their cabinet. It does not essentially imply they agree with what the state is doing. A big part of the trade does not agree with it however they lack the braveness to step out. But sure, there are agenda movies, made by these individuals who agree with what’s going down. It is a small proportion however very seen and voluble. It is there on tv too.
What’s subsequent?
(Laughs) I don’t know although I need to write an inside monologue and discover my very own identification in it. As I watched in [Jean-Luc Godard’s] film Breathless, I need to be a mortal and to die. It is an odd feeling.
ziya.salam@thehindu.co.in