Having assisted sister Deepa Mehta with some of her films, Dilip Mehta is out with his first feature, a satire. The former photojournalist is now a full time filmmaker, discovers Neha Bhatt.
You could easily forget the blazing heat of a particularly harsh summer afternoon in filmmaker and former photojournalist Dilip Mehta’s beautiful home in New Delhi’s Nizamuddin East. The interiors are eclectic and warm, each memento has stories to tell, and as we are about to discover, so has the man himself.
Mehta has recently followed in the footsteps of filmmaker sister Deepa Mehta, debuting with a feature film. In a sense, he has always had an eye for pictures, with a formidable repertoire in capturing on camera some of the important moments in India’s history: Morarji Desai taking over as Prime Minister in 1977, a picture that made it to the Time magazine cover, and among other memorable work, his portfolio of five years chronicling the Bhopal Gas Tragedy and the Emergency under Indira Gandhi.
As it happens, Mehta stumbled into photojournalism quite by chance. Some of his early memories take him back to St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. Ponytailed and bearded, the then teenaged Mehta was often caught reading Kafka under the trees rather than in the classroom. He soon left college to pursue graphic design in Toronto, where his sister Deepa had already set up a home. But soon after, Mehta dropped his job to travel the breadth of Canada, Nikon in hand. “Those were the days of Bob Dylan, so you had to hit the highway!” he laughs. “You won’t believe it — but every one of my shots turned out to be one worse than the other, but there was discipline in my work. I think that was a pivotal moment in my life. I packed my bags and came to India, and went back to Canada with a great portfolio. It’s then that I started knocking on the doors of newspapers and magazines.” He went on to shoot prize-winning images for Time, Newsweek, New York Times and National Geographic among others.
When we meet him, Mehta is glowing from the response to the recent Delhi screening of his first feature film Cooking With Stella starring Seema Biswas, Lisa Ray, Shriya Saran and Canadian actor Don McKeller. The film, a satire was released in Canada last month and he hopes to release it in India soon. “The film is about the inequalities between employers and servants. We don’t even call them domestic staff, we call them naukar. That has always rankled. But I didn’t want to make it into a serious film because then everybody would say, ‘Dilip bahut pontificate karta hai’ (Dilip pontificates), so I took it up as a comedy, which is easier to embrace,” says Mehta.
There’s no other way to say it. Cooking With Stella is an immensely likable film. It gives us Seema Biswas of Bandit Queen fame in an unusual role as conniving Stella the cook, who outsmarts her Canadian employers. Peppered with light humour, Cooking With Stella is a confident debut.
What made Mehta cross over to films? “For me, human dilemmas are important. I’m a storyteller. I record. But I felt restricted by a stills camera. Filmmaking on the other hand added another dimension,” he explains. Of course, filmmaking was far from alien to Mehta, who had worked with his sister Deepa on her Elements Trilogy: Fire, 1947: Earth, Water. “I was de facto assistant director on the sets of Fire, because at that time, I was the only one with a mobile phone,” he chuckles. And then, Mehta found himself as the creative director for 1947: Earth and production designer for Water.” He brought visual strength to the ensemble, and not to mention moral support, especially at the time when the controversy around Water erupted in Varanasi, against the portrayal of child widows in the film. It had to eventually be shot in Sri Lanka, but Mehta, inspired by the subject, returned to Varanasi to make a documentary, The Forgotten Woman.
Today, Mehta divides his time between Delhi, Toronto and New York, and is working on his next two features. “I’m writing the script for Second Best, a film on spurious drugs in India.” He fears his films being labeled as ‘issue-based’, and says, “But I can’t help it. I could never make a romance!” Mehta is also contemplating collating a book on Michael Jackson, based on exclusive photographs he had taken of the late king of pop at his ranch Never Land in California.
With his children away in the US, Mehta shares his Delhi home with his wife Nila, “entertaining friends, watching movies, or taking walks around Humayun’s tomb next door.” An interest his wife and he shares — evident on the living room walls — is collecting religious art. Is he spiritual? “I’m aspiritual,” he says firmly, “and I don’t believe in life after death.” He then philosophises, “How do you explain life’s coincidences?”
Perhaps we’ll leave that for another day.
