For the longest time, my idea of grown-up employment was the ‘Chopra Group of Industries’. For those familiar with ’90s Hindi cinema, this generic term amounts to anything ranging from ‘businessman’ to ‘CEO’ to ‘formal clothes, important office, swanky mahogany table’. The specifics weren’t important. It was every boy’s inevitability, a ragingly normal nine-to-five job that wouldn’t be the centre of one’s universe, because there’d be love, stability, family, dogs, heartbreaks, tragedies and villains once we left that cubicle. This was also a brief phase when my father attempted to go from being employed to employer — from ‘Yes Boss’ to Boss — by running a small garment company. I’d incessantly remind him of a sincere-looking Aamir Khan running a similar firm in Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke , urging him to make it big so that I could take over the reins in true successor style. Build up a nameless empire like Raj Malhotra’s funky dad (Anupam Kher, in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge ), I’d say, while mentally skipping circles around the many ladies from my colourful future.
That’s what most heroes did; a career was just incidental, and ambitions a footnote, as demonstrated by a charming Shah Rukh Khan in DDLJ (‘ baap ka business ’ is, today, almost a derogatory term), or a family-business-bound Salman Khan from Hum Aapke Hai Kaun . It seemed like a natural order of progression. Ask Dev (Sunil Shetty, in Dhadkan ), Madan Chopra (Dalip Tahil, in Baazigar ) and Sahabji (Rajesh Khanna, in Swarg ); folks who routinely did something consequential, signed documents, made money, chomped on expensive cigars and wore blazers over shirts. They were perhaps a rung above, say, the vague ‘export business’ breed of the two Khans in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (where did adult Rahul head to every morning?), the other Khan in Dil Chahta Hai (Akash is sent to run the Sydney office), or the all-in-one tycoon-ness of the Raichands (who pretty much own the air) from Kabhie Khushi Kabhi Gham . The ‘ hatke ’ agency life, which to my mind was business’s modern hipster cousin, didn’t look too shabby either, evident from Aditya Pancholi’s scoundrel ways in Yes Boss and Anil Kapoor’s extravagant baritone in Taal .
So there I was, a fresh college graduate, settling down at one of several minion desks in a sprawling market research firm, wondering what exactly Akshay Kumar’s profession was in Dil Toh Pagal Hai . He must have surely done his MBA after a year’s work-experience. His boss may have ‘promoted’ him to the U.K. branch (note how London and New York offices are hierarchically at the top of the Bollywood job chain), where he smiled a lot and travelled for conferences. If a bumbling ‘third wheel’ like Saif Ali Khan in Kal Ho Naa Ho could hold down an advertising post in plush Manhattan, this would be a breeze.
By noon on my first day, my palms were sweaty. The walls had begun to close in. Something wasn’t right. I stared at the number-crunching drones. Where were the office parties, Holi songs, Diwali dances, bitchy colleagues and shifty bosses? Keyboard-crunching noises intertwined with occasional intercom rings and stapler cuts, making for a drab soundscap, the kind that often exists outside of our hotshot protagonists’ cabins. This, and not soaring violins and captains’ mandolins, was the real soundtrack of life: the music of happy averageness. These were the in-between parts strategically omitted from scripts because they weren’t entertaining.
By teatime, I was cursing every storyteller who had an editor. Did I really have to earn my adventures? If I spent 25 days a month in a chair, would I even be capable of navigating life’s song-and-dance sequences in my off time? Suddenly, cinematic adulthood was nothing but a convenient montage of extracurricular activities. After two weeks of shiny shoes and overwrought trousers, I quit. Unlike most contemporary multiplex drifter-heroes, it wasn’t because there was an artist deep inside me.
This was way before sterilised office spaces became the villains in modern cinema. A decade ago, the industry wasn’t yet overflowing with deflected ex-engineers and IIT graduates exercising their writing and stand-up comedy muscles. Rajkumar Hirani hadn’t nudged a stone-minded generation of Indian parents with 3 Idiots yet. Imtiaz Ali’s characters were still boyish white-collar tycoons empowered by the recklessness of unorthodox women. The Office was at the peak of its wry sitcom powers, and nobody knew what an intensely suited Barney (from How I Met Your Mother ) did for a living, except that he was rich enough to cab it across boroughs.
This was ironically when even Ranbir Kapoor, the current poster-child of conflicted callings, had infused entrepreneurial youngness into the ‘corporate-slave culture’ with the genre-defying Rocket Singh: Salesman Of The Year . For an actor who’d go on to become the manifestation of anti-structural existence, he first made his mark, much like Hirani and his concept of Munnabhai, by rebelling within the shackles of convention. They moved within and against established order — the computer service and hospital businesses — before thinking beyond.
In a way, I was already swimming against the tide by abandoning a system I was perhaps supposed to revolutionise. But one look at my borderline-senile boss, and it was clear that I’d end up like Vinay Pathak’s dangerously isolated character from Ruchika Oberoi’s first segment of Island City — mechanical diligence to the extent of homicidal release — instead of Hrithik Roshan’s handsomely disillusioned stock-broker avatar from Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara .
It took me a while to realise, then, that even the pursuit of ‘art’ had its frustrating nine-to-five phases. No film shows you the everyman futility of creation, of writing, making and rejection, the tragic routine of waiting and hoping; we only see the showy end product: ponytailed artists, drug-addled drummers, bearded authors with other existential disasters. What one doesn’t sense as a child is the mundaneness between glorious lines.
While movies do reflect the socio-cultural vibe of a particular era, there is a deeper philosophy behind the eternality of these wish-fulfillment caricatures — that is, populist office-holding managers being arrogant and soulless, and minority artist-types being bohemian, flaky misfits. Or the notion that art is an antidote to life.
It’s not a war of lifestyles, jobs, genders or liberalisation. It is, at its core, a clash of generations, of thinking, of ideologies. If not for that two-week boss, or my family’s vanilla professionalism, the cliché of oppressive workspaces and alternative lifelines would have never appealed to me. And art is simply the consequence, a reaction of expansive expression, and an idea, not bound by orthodox definitions of creativity, canvas and silver screens.
Harpreet Singh Bedi reacted to his wicked, experienced MD (Manish Chaudhary) to secretly set up Rocket Sales, a new way of working — artistry within the field of corporate comeuppance. Munna’s idealistic principles, personified by ‘ jaadu ki jhappis ,’ became an art form in healing because of, not despite, the rigid Dr. Asthana’s dictatorship. Even ‘music teacher’ Raj Aryan’s (SRK, in Mohabbatein ) doctrines of love became Gurukul’s greatest work of humane art due to Narayan Shankar’s (Amitabh Bachchan) fossilized parampara .
Therefore, art is, both, the writers who break free through their simplistic reduction of professions on screen, as well as salesmen who escape to the movies to recharge themselves for the coming week. Art is, both, perfectly ironed shirts and khaki sandals; it’s me changing the face of market research after a jolt, as well as me quitting, sitting at home for a year, turning to cinema and writing about it. It’s you reading this in a family-owned optometry shop between customers, as well as in a vanity van between shots. Because art is not about what you do, but how you do things.
The writer is a freelance film critic, writer and habitual solo traveller
