It is rarely easy to walk in someone else’s shoes. They almost never fit well and are usually not your style anyway. In other words, it is almost impossible to see the world exactly the way someone else does. So when you have writing that expresses someone’s point of view, it takes an extremely enlightened and accepting mind to appreciate its nuances and enjoy the story.
While Jai Arjun Singh is a good writer whose writing on cinema in various newspapers is a pleasure to read and whose previous works ( Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro: Seriously Funny Since 1983 , The Popcorn Essayists (as editor) and short story ‘Milky Ways’) are indeed commendable, his latest offering is confusing, to say the least.
But if you let go of the need for order, for some kind of sequence or coherent story, and are willing to read a series of thoughts, memories and quotes — a sort of self-indulgent musing about an idol — then his take on filmmaker Hrishikesh Mukherjee works well. Singh examines a life through a career, the films that Mukherjee made, and various anecdotes associated in some way with them, calling it an ‘enthusiast’s tribute’ by talking about what appealed to him the most. He considers films like recipes almost, analysing them, peering at them closely, setting each in its socio-cultural context and then adding a little tadka of his own feelings.
Yes, this does reduce a movie that might have been a favourite to rather a dry-breadcrumb consistency, but it brings out aspects that you may not have thought of when you put it on your Top Ten list.
A personal favourite has always been Chupke Chupke . Singh breaks it down meticulously, doing the kind of job a movie critic with obsessive-compulsive disorder would do. Discussed in a series of parenthesis and fabulously long sentences, he talks of the 1975 Sharmila Tagore-Dharmendra starrer as a series of minor “transgressions couched in humour from beginning to end”. The comedy offers “piquant little observations about the workings and fragilities of a society”, Singh says, matching norms of the time with scenes from the film. In some ways, it becomes sort of soap opera-ish, something you could possibly watch on television today without feeling like you stepped into a regressive past. But does this make Chupke Chupke boring or unwatchable? That is where the Mukherjee magic takes over. The comedy of deliberate errors cannot be coloured by intellectual examination by however learned a critic.
The book’s appeal lies not in the exploration of Mukherjee’s films that everyone knows well and loves, but in the discussion of what is not often on the average fan’s must-watch list. Singh is an obvious fan who has watched these productions over and over to understand Mukherjee and find insights in the tiniest details. The director’s first, Musafir , had Dilip Kumar, Kishore Kumar and Suchitra Sen, but was not considered very successful when it released in 1957, even though it did garner a National Awards Certificate of Merit. Achha Bura (1983) is rarely spoken of, while Biwi Aur Makaan (1965) was deemed a flop. And then there is Anand (1971), which is perhaps the filmmaker’s most lauded work. It made Rajesh Khanna noble and courageous as the cancer patient, a change from his tilt-headed romantic act, and it brought into focus a gangly young man the world would soon recognise: Amitabh Bachchan. This is not to say that Anand does not have faults — it does, more than can be counted; for instance, terminal cancer patient Khanna looking as cheerful and astonishingly healthy on his last day on earth as he did when he strode along singing ‘Zindagi, kaisi hai paheli haaye’. Singh notes similarities between Anand and Mukherjee’s darker Satyakam (1969), pointing out that the grey shades of the former last only until Khanna’s entry in a “swell of star-heralding music”.
There is no definable structure to the book, which makes it a little difficult to digest. There is so much detail that Mukherjee himself drowns in the narrative. It needs some going back and forth, since Singh often wanders into “as mentioned earlier” and such references, often going back to a film a reader would have mentally put back into the cine-file, to say something else about it. Happily, a sense of humour and a respect for the writer’s involvement in his treatise and its subject engender an interest and a willingness to plough through to the end. At which point, the small sigh of relief is unheard above the applause that the book and its author deserve.
Ramya Sarma is a writer-editor who works from home on almost anything interesting, as long as there is a steady supply of chocolate and green tea by her side.
