The burden of greatness

If ever there is a vote on the most hilarious moment of Hindi cinema, the ‘Mahabharat scene’ of the 1983 cult classic Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro would win hands down. What can trump the sari-clad corpse on roller skates playing Draupadi? If such tomfoolery can be re-created, it should probably be attempted only by the man who invented this genius idea in the first place. In his next release after almost a decade, P Se PM Tak , filmmaker Kundan Shah promises to bring back the much-missed dead body. “In JBDY the climax ran for 13 minutes. This time I plan to keep it 17 minutes long. And this one too will have a dead body,” says Shah with a wide smile.

He walks into his Bandra office at 11am with a bunch of newspapers tucked under his arm. He shouts out for a cup of tea, a lighter and a stool to rest his feet. I ask him about the progress of his film but he wants to discuss the day’s front page headlines first. “All my films are taken from newspaper articles. Even the most entertaining ones,” he says. In P Se PM Tak — which was slated to hit the theatres last month, but now awaits a new release date — Shah tells the story of a prostitute who becomes a chief minister in four days. The child-like enthusiasm with which Shah goes on narrate the intricacies of the plot proves that the 67-year-old is still raring to go. He throws open the doors of the two overstuffed Godrej cupboards to confirm that. “See, I have thousands and thousands of scripts ready. There’s one about a guy who has a car accident and when he gets up he realises that it’s been six months and he’s in a different car,” he gushes, “I don’t mind if somebody copies it. I’m quite democratic that way.”

Why then has he been away so long? “I’ve been out of a job. I’m on the periphery of the industry. I came up with the idea of P Se PM Tak in 1995 and have been waiting 19 years to make it,” he says. I wonder if one of the perils of making such an epic debut film is living forever under its shadow. Shah’s last big release back in 2002 was a forgettable Dil Hai Tumhara starring Rekha and Preity Zinta. Smaller projects after that didn’t even get a theatrical release. Shah is certain he could have made a far superior film than the 30-year-old JBDY , but that he was never given the opportunity. Filmmaker Sudhir Mishra, an assistant on JBDY , says even an Orson Welles could never make another Citizen Kane . “There are filmmakers who are not good convincers. They don’t have good marketing skills,” he says.

Mishra remembers how the gang of Film and Television Institute of India (FTII, Pune) students — Naseeruddin Shah, Ravi Baswani, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Satish Shah, Satish Kaushik — gave him his first job in the movies, as the film’s assistant director. “The making of that film is the stuff of legend. In the morning, we would have alu gobi and at night, gobi alu . We had a camaraderie that I have not seen since,” says Mishra. The filmmaker also recalls “a lot of argument” on the set. Naseeruddin Shah, in particular, threw a fit when he was told about the scene where Satish Kaushik’s character and he speak to each other on the phone in the same room. At one point in that logic-defying scene, the two characters end up talking on the same phone. “Nobody had done this before and nobody has attempted it later either. Kundan Shah just took a chance and it worked,” says Mishra.

While on a trip to Delhi to collect his National Award for JBDY in 1983, Shah was offered the opportunity to create a new television series for Doordarshan. “There were some nice serials made by Doordarshan at the time but there were many American shows like Diff’rent Strokes . Our motivation was to show we could outdo them,” he says with a laugh. He took a break from films and created iconic shows like Waghle Ki Duniya , Nukkad and Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi . He especially cherishes the experience of working with cartoonist RK Laxman on Waghle Ki Duniya . “I learnt a lot from him. Sometimes he would act. He’d show us how the peon would come and stand in the scene. I felt he was the best actor in the world. Of course, I never dared ask for a retake!”

One of Shah’s favourite pitches when approaching a producer with a story is, “Do you want a hit film now or a super-hit 20 years later.” Like with most cult films, JBDY too won due appreciation seven years after its release. Thanks to Doordarshan, which played the film on loop since it didn’t have enough material, the film got a second life. Again pointing to his cupboard, Shah says the script of the sequel is already complete. “It is not very funny, but more relevant,” he says. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another decade for this one.

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