Review: An Unsuitable Boy is honest, reads like a good Karan Johar movie

Karan Johar's, first film, <i>Kuch Kuch Hota Hai<i/> was a huge hit in India and the overseas market

An Unsuitable Boy
Karan Johar with Poonam Saxena
Penguin
216 pages; Rs 699

Karan Johar’s, first film, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), was a huge hit in India and the overseas market. Before that, Aditya Chopra’s first film, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jaayenge (DDLJ, 1995), and Sooraj Barjatya’s second film, Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (1994), had found similar phenomenal success in India and overseas. Clearly, there was something that this young, new breed of directors was getting right. Their stories — sneered at for being about a conservative, conformist youth, family values, song, dance and weddings — found resonance across India and the world. It was to explore this non-resident Indian market for films that I met Mr Johar, then 26 years old, at his office in Mumbai in 1998.

 
Messrs Chopra and Barjatya were (and still are) reclusive. Mr Johar, however, was a complete surprise. He was articulate, well-informed, knew the overseas numbers and helped me locate the right sources for them. When I called him later on his landline with some queries, he took the call — unusual for film types.
 
Almost 20 years later his autobiography An Unsuitable Boy has the same openness and honesty. It gives you a glimpse into the mind of one of India’s most successful filmmaker, producer, TV host and now part-time actor (he played the bad guy in Anurag Kashyap’s Bombay Velvet). Mr Johar has an innocent, childlike view of life. You may not agree with his cinema and sensibilities but you have to admire the honesty with which this book tackles everything — rumours about himself or his medical treatment for anxiety.

 
The prologue is a bit heavy, covering Mr Johar’s struggles with his love life, his state of mind today and so on. The book really picks up after that, just like a good Johar movie.  The story of the fat little boy who was too shy to speak, winning an elocution competition and trying to discover what he likes to do is interesting, though you do wish someone could have put some outside context to his story.
 
That is the biggest issue in an otherwise readable book. It doesn’t tell you the complete story of the man. Since his debut, I have watched almost every film Mr Johar has made or produced as he went about resurrecting father Yash Johar’s Dharma Productions. But the films are missing in this memoir. He talks too much about his feelings around a film and too little about how he thought it through, put it together and so on.

 
For example, how and why did Kabhie Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001), arguably his most profitable film to date, happen? It came to define India’s image in other countries. It also added to the globalisation of Shah Rukh Khan and still keeps making money from rights sold to some TV station somewhere in the world. Or what exactly were his suggestions and inputs to the DDLJ script? Mr Chopra was his friend and they had discussed the story for months. On the eve of Mr Johar’s departure to Paris for an advanced French course, Mr Chopra asked him to stay back and assist him with DDLJ. That is how Mr Johar, a south Mumbai boy, ended up getting into films.

 
Much of this is written in an “I, me, myself,” stream of consciousness, style. That and the many repetitions are irritants with which a good editor could have dealt. But the writing style also tells you that Karan Johar the man is no different from Karan Johar the filmmaker. He has a thing for melodrama, expensive clothes and settings, an eye for fashion, an ear for music. And he is self-indulgent. Anyone in the audience would have told Mr Johar that the hurricane sequence in My Name is Khan should have been chopped out. He mentions it. But indulge he did. And in the process of being who he is, Mr Johar brought the director back into the limelight. That hadn’t happened since Subhash Ghai, perhaps.

 
But Mr Johar is also very self-aware. There is, therefore, a twinge of regret and rebuke in some parts. As he writes, “I am not taken seriously by the industry nor by the audience beyond a point. I don’t know why. Maybe I am a victim of my own image. Maybe I will never be given the credit even if I create a piece of brilliance on celluloid, like Raju Hirani gets, for instance. I think every other film-maker is far more easily forgiven than me. I am this person who is always assaulted because of the things I do. I dilute the importance of being a serious entity. I don’t stand seriously, quietly in a corner like Raju Hirani does or project mad insanity like Sanjay Leela Bhansali or have the seriousness and Sufism of Imtiaz Ali or the intellectual capacity of Zoya Akhtar. I am this bhaand (jester) who entertains. The simple truth is that I do things that make me happy. I am not here to create a structured legacy. I am here to live the moment.”

 
If that is what gives us those movies, keep living the moment, KJo.