Conventional wisdom says don’t choose a book by its cover. But can there be a case for choosing a book by its foreword? We will come to that. Let’s deal with the book first.
British poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold, who lived in the 19th century and worked as an inspector of schools, said famously that journalism is literature in a hurry. More interesting observations have come on the two occupations since then, none more interesting than Oscar Wilde’s (“The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read”). But it is Arnold’s that has held its position through centuries and was intoned by Richard Gere in The Runaway Bride. Gere, in the film, was a newspaper columnist, a bad one, who, under deadline pressure, did not care to check his facts and lost his job. Magazine journalism is in less of a hurry, though still far from literature.
Before you pick up this book, be warned that it is a collection of writings done by Anupama Chopra in her long career as a journalist, mostly in magazines (these days you can catch her on NDTV’s Picture This). So do not expect literature. But there is reportage-based history here.
If you are ok with that, this book will take you down the years to show how the Hindi film industry has evolved. You will meet Hanif Kadawala and Samir Hingora, former video pirates who became joint owners of the Magnum group of companies, which was rumoured to be funded by Dawood Ibrahim. You will hear Mahesh Bhatt argue that there was no problem if people took money from those who did not have the cleanest records. “It does not matter as long as you make the film and repay them,” he says. Three months after Chopra interviewed Kadawala and Hingora, they were arrested for involvement in the Mumbai bomb blasts. In 2001, Kadawala was shot dead. Six years after that, Hingora was sentenced to nine years in prison for criminal conspiracy.
These days, there is a trend of directors writing or co-writing their own stories and scripts. Many of them seem to do a decent job. But more than that, it is becoming imperative at a time when Hollywood has begun to sue. An August 1993 piece from India Today shows how there was no such fear back then. Scriptwriters made pots of money by lifting from Hollywood movies. Over 90 per cent of the Hindi movies in production at that time were estimated to be either remakes of Hollywood blockbusters, Hong Kong films, older Hindi films or a mix of everything.
Mahesh Bhatt’s Dil Hai Ki Manta Nahin was an abashed copy of Clark Gable-starrer It Happened One Night, right down to the hitch-hiking scene. Sadak, again Bhatt’s, was a patchwork of scenes picked from Taxi Driver, Lethal Weapon and Cyborg. Robin Bhatt, Sujit Sen, Javed Siddiqui and Akash Khurana drew from sources as varied as Roman Holiday and It’s a Wonderful Life. The team had no qualms about copying and had even ordered a software called Plots Unlimited, which generated thousands of combinations from a database of plot fragments. Robin Bhatt told Chopra: “There is nothing original under the sun. My talent lies in knowing what to steal…” In the irony of 1992, Aziz Mirza’s Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman, a rehash of Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420, walked away with the Filmfare Award for Best Original Screenplay.
The Foreword by Shah Rukh Khan, the subject of an earlier book by Chopra and also the hero of Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman, tells us much more on this. Of the many scripts narrated to him, he remembers vividly the one by a young, bearded type. It was about a man who loves a woman but cannot marry her. The man turns bad and the woman marries a cop. The cop shoots and hurts the lover, who manages to escape in a train, which is going back to the village where he fell in love. He is dying and needs water, but there is no water in the train. The woman, who is pregnant with the cop’s child, takes out her breast and puts her milk in his mouth, which quenches his thirst. Thereafter, somehow, their relationship changes to one of brother and sister. The bearded type was offended when Khan told him the story sounded odd.
The industry has changed much since Chopra began writing and Khan started acting. He has been a part of this change. In a not-too-long foreword he tries to capture this change from his standpoint, pausing to regret the loss of “a certain madness”. It’s written like literature in a hurry, but is much less hurried than Khan’s speech on screen.
FIRST DAY FIRST SHOW
Anupama Chopra
Penguin Books
375 pages; Rs 499