Director Saeed Mirza on his memoir of his friend Kundan Shah, and why a Nukkad may not work today Premium
The Hindu
We have lost the ability to laugh at ourselves, says Mirza
Seasoned filmmaker Saeed Mirza is in that delightful phase of life aglow with mellow mornings. At nearly 80, most of us would have happily retired from the public eye, preferring to listen to music or spend time with grandchildren. Not so Saeed.
Having virtually said goodbye to the world of Hindi cinema, he is devoting his time to writing. He began with Ammi: Letter to A Democratic Mother, a tribute to his mother, and has now followed it up with an exercise in nostalgia with a rather quizzically titled book I Know the Psychology of Rats.
The title gives nothing away. It is only when one is few pages into this masterpiece on friendship and companionship that one realises this was a memoir of well-known film and TV director Kundan Shah, who was Mirza’s close friend. He calls the 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 changing grammar of Hindi cinema. Excerpts:
It is another way of seeing a friendship, also a world, simultaneously. The illustrations [by Nachiket Patwardhan] are conceived as murals. It mixes up chronology. It contains the relationship between Kundan and I, a beautiful relationship.
He himself said so: ‘I look more like a clerk than a filmmaker’. Yet, there was an intensity about him like no other filmmaker. I want this book to be accessible to everybody, to let everyone know the kind of genius Kundan was. Towards the end of his life, when he made films like P Se PM Tak, there were smirks that he had lost it. It was not quite true because he was dealing with a world that was turning more and more grotesque.
You take the absurdity of a Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro: it was absurd but also true. He somehow felt that was not good enough. He journeyed on. He found a world that pretended to be civilised but was not. He struggled to find a form that could encompass what he felt innately.
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