Faced with a book on the subject matter of which he has strong opinions, an honest reviewer should show his hand. So let me quickly touch on a passage in Christina Daniels’ I’ll do it My Way where it is said of the 1990 film Dil that “it excelled in the use of light-hearted comedy”, that it was “a complete entertainer” and “a path-breaking film”.
How to put this mildly: I disagree. Dil was among a handful of movies that had me fleeing, at the age of 14, from Hindi cinema (I stayed away for over a decade). I remember it now as a tacky, cliché-filled romance featuring people who lived in a state of comical hyper-intensity. Aamir Khan’s nostrils flared impressively, Madhuri Dixit endured one of the worst sartorial crises of her career, and there were Anand-Milind songs that might loosely be described as tuneful (in the sense that I could hum them today if someone held a gun to my head and told me to) but not memorable in any meaningful sense of the word.
This is just a difference of opinion about a single movie, but more generally I’ll do it My Way reads like a motivational book built around a pre-formulated thesis. The myth-making begins with the first chapter, which has a story about the 12-year-old Aamir Khan practising alone on a tennis court, turning down an offer to hit with another boy because it would spoil his own game. Daniels uses the incident to buttress a narrative about the perfectionism that the actor would later become associated with. “Aamir focussed on his goal, be that tennis, chess, the Rubik’s Cube [sic], clearly showing the beginnings of his later single-minded pursuit of excellence.”
She then examines his career via approximately 20 movies, and a theme emerges: nearly each of these films is “unique” or “significant”, and a step forward in Aamir’s relentless evolution as an actor who has done innovative things while continuing to be a popular mainstream star. I was surprised to see Qayamat se Qayamat Tak described as “the unusual story of a great love cut short”. (The story was hackneyed enough in the 16th century when Shakespeare plagiarised plot elements from Ovid for Romeo and Juliet, but even in the context of the action-dominated Hindi cinema of the 1980s it wasn’t all that radical.)
However, things get more fraught in the sections about the recent films, given that Aamir’s movie choices in the past decade have shown an increased self-consciousness about doing “socially relevant” cinema. One passage goes: “His projects at this time like The Rising and Rang de Basanti were not just films. They were driven forward by powerful themes that made them milestones in their genres.” The phrasing reveals a distinct attitude: what Aamir does is more transcendent than mere movie-making.
By now it’s clear that this book is a worshipful tribute, and one can argue that there is nothing inherently wrong with such a venture — if Daniels honestly sees Aamir’s career as an unbroken series of triumphs, well-judged image makeovers and films that have altered the landscape of Hindi cinema, so be it. But one would expect such a thesis to be backed by rigorous analyses of the films themselves, or at least by the gushing of an unapologetic fan. Instead, the author’s own voice is largely absent; in its place are quotes from newspaper reports and magazine articles, and long transcripts of the inputs she got from Aamir’s colleagues. The latter make up the bulk of the text, and while some of them are informative, many say the same things over and over again, in increasingly rhapsodic prose.
Some of them would tickle the funny bone of even Aamir’s biggest fans. Indra Kumar must have felt that the line “I saw Aamir turning from a larva to a beautiful butterfly” wasn’t adequate to express the full scope of his feelings, so he continues: “He can transform himself into a beautiful evening or a brilliant sunset with clouds of magnificent colours. He has the capacity to be the moon shimmering in the water below. He can transform his personality into all these things and look beautiful.”
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“He’s not swimming in the well,” says director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, channelling Master Yoda and Paulo Coelho, “He is out there in the ocean [...] Aamir does not belong to a particular time and space [...] Sixty years from today, when you look back, it will not even matter that he was in this era. He will become even bigger.”
Given all this, it is unsurprising that Daniels herself can’t resist sun imagery in the mysterious final sentences, “For him, today’s peak becomes tomorrow’s sunset. Aamir Khan follows the eternal sunrise.” I’ll do it My Way is a good-looking book: well-produced, neatly structured, with a nice collection of photographs (and, it has to be said, some sloppy editing — at one point “Mann” is translated as “heart”). But it is best read – or rather, flipped through – by someone who already deifies Aamir Khan and who prefers mixed metaphors to in-depth analysis.
I’LL DO IT MY WAY: THE INCREDIBLE JOURNEY OF AAMIR KHAN
Christina Daniels
Om Books International
221 pages; Rs 495
