And Then One Day: A Memoir (17 page)

T
he December vacation began and at FTII there was no question of hanging around in the hostel—the celebrated tradition of students staying on as long as they like, often much after completing their courses, started some years later. Jaspal/Shah managed tickets to Delhi, and since I had no desire to meet the folks and was dying to meet up with and show off to old pals at NSD, we stayed on there as guests of Om Puri who in turn was rooming up with a friend (male) he had made in the interim. Bhanu Bharti who had directed the ‘award winning’ production of
The Lesson
in our final year was readying a production of
Hamlet
in Hindi with Om playing the title role, and asked me if I would play Claudius. I was on the verge of saying yes when another ex-classmate asked me to act in his production of a new Hindi play called
Tilchatta
(the cockroach) by the writer of
Marjeeva.
Even though it was more bizarre and less comprehensible than that one, I said yes. Being produced by the Repertory Company, there were to be ten performances so I asked for a payment of 100 rupees a performance, I was promised 50. I immediately accepted. It was not uncommon for the Repertory to pay actors employed from outside, but apparently when Alkazi later heard of my demand, he was livid. But it was too late, I had made my packet.

Everything else about
Tilchatta,
however, sucked in spades. Apart from being an incompetent production, the script was easily one of the most demented pieces of dramatic writing I have ever had the bad fortune to engage with. Equating humans with cockroaches and presenting a dysfunctional marital situation through predictable tableaux, utterly ludicrous character interaction and the kind of moribund dialogue the writer must have heard in his nightmares, it was pure brain-damage. I have only on one other occasion (in a disastrous production of
Cyrano
at the National Theatre in London some twenty years later) been involved in a play where when it was show time I felt like fleeing, when it was on I hated every second, and when it was over I wanted to cut my throat as soon as possible. My wife Ratna, then still in school, came to see
Tilchatta
she told me, and still remembers it, but we were at that time very far from knowing each other. Anyway, this production, for whatever it was worth, saw me through the next month and even subsidized my journey back to Pune.

The instructors in acting at FTII were ex-students who were kept on the payroll through the goodness of Prof T’s heart. These poor bumbling travesties of acting teachers could scarce comprehend what they had been taught, perish the thought of passing anything on. What they did manage to pass off as teaching, while trying very hard and unsuccessfully to assume Taneja’s saab’s air of wisdom, was a small imitation of his jargon. My second stint with yogic excercises, the first having been with an ex-typist-turned- yoga instructor at NSD, proved as disastrous as the first and I became convinced that practising yoga was as useless for me as the ‘playback’ class. I foolishly avoided both these classes through my stay at these respective institutes, not even appearing for my playback exam and getting through because by the time I was due to leave, Taneja saab seemed to have lost all interest in the Institute.

Jaspal/Shah, both unwashed, always together, both bearded, both perennially stoned, both from the theatre, both unlikely candidates for the Hindi film world, not so strangely in FTII too were treated as the same person right from the start, probably being perceived yet again as one, or at least as identical. I suppose both of us somehow believed it too and kind of enjoyed it. How vastly different we actually were from each other would become apparent over the next two years.

Ram Gopal Bajaj, an elder from NSD who had befriended us both and who had been extremely supportive and encouraging even when I hadn’t deserved it, first pointed it out to me when during our next short break from FTII, rather than going home, both of us spent the time at Chandigarh where Bajju bhai as he was known was heading the University Theatre department. In the month we stayed there Bajju bhai directed us in
Ajaatghar,
a two-hander written by Rameshwar Prem, and it was the cause of many heated arguments. Bajju bhai, being strictly old school, emphasized the importance of diction and clarity while emoting, and we were determined to thoroughly indulge in our rudimentary understanding of the ‘method’. The play was performed, not without success, in Chandigarh and later in Delhi.

During
Ajaatghar
Bajju bhai expressed to me his concerns about Jaspal. We were not at all the same kind of person, he felt, and he was not at all sure this friendship would last; in fact he confessed it might be dangerous for me, I should try and go my way and let him go his. I was convinced he was talking nonsense then but in the light of what happened three years later, I have to believe that either Bajju bhai was clairvoyant or he had an incisive understanding of people. It was in the second year at FTII that the separation of personalities, and perceptions, began to take place. I moved into a single room, a perk for having stood first in the class here. A distance began to develop though we still smoked together all the time; and instead of eating, frequently endangered our health and our sanity with huge doses of Dexedrine to trip and then Mandrax to sleep. I should have detected the first sign of trouble when Jaspal said to me with just the hint of a grimace, ‘Arre! WE came first yaar!’ but I took it to be an affirmation of undying friendship.

So taken was I with what I was learning at FTII that I had prevailed upon Om, who was then in the NSD Rep, to come there as well, which he had; and after undergoing the humiliating rituals that are every newcomer’s lot to endure, had settled down not very happily. He was dissatisfied and seemed uninterested in what had so greatly excited me. Not so strange, considering that Prof T’s participation in the department was now minimal and the students were now completely at the mercy of the instructors. Om’s second year, in fact, coincided with the strike and cessation of all work for practically the entire second half of that term.

The students of direction were entrusted with making, in their first year, a silent 5-minute film as an exercise in continuity, and then a 10-minute film with dialogue; in their second year a mise en scene and an ad film; and in their final year a song, a documentary and a 40-minute feature known as the ‘diploma’ film. Though acting students, and invariably the same ones, were mostly cast in these exercises, it was the diploma films which were naturally considered most important by all students as a show-reel to get work in the industry, and acting students were not necessarily cast in those. And that is where all the trouble started.

It was being whispered that the acting course was to close down and Prof T was involved in setting up an institute of his own in Bombay, so he was seldom present through our closing few months, also managing to be diplomatically absent when we the students of acting were with extreme fervour pressing our demands to be included in the student diploma films— an event that forced the Institute into temporary limbo and hastened the closure of the acting course.

It is not unlikely that my blood pressure will begin to climb when I recount the incidents which led among other things to a hunger strike, which completed the isolation of the student actors, made the chasm between them and those of other courses unbridgeable, created lasting animosities, and a heartburn that hasn’t yet subsided. Arguments on integrity or lack of it were traded, all actors were bunched together into one generic group, a group that was in some way ‘special’ but not special enough to warrant inclusion in student projects. Whereas a cameraman or editor or recordist could not be recruited from outside the student body, the student directors were permitted free rein in their choice of actors— they could cast anyone they liked, acting student or not. There were actually students of acting who went through their two years without once facing a camera. When we made the first noises of dissatisfaction about this, the not even half-truthful justification about the age limitation of the acting students (most between eighteen and twenty-five) was trotted out to justify the student directors ignoring the acting department as material for their films. I encountered not for the only time the vanity of film-makers who refuse to acknowledge actors as an essential component of film-making and regard them only as a necessary evil to be put up with.

Preparations for making that year’s diploma films had begun and teams were being assembled. Some actors, myself included, received more than one offer, while some didn’t get any at all. Those who didn’t had also been through the two- year course and we were all equally untested, so it was not a matter of confirmed capability. This judgemental behaviour of the direction students—ignoring actors whose prerogative it was to be included in the diploma films—was quite insufferable, as was the fact that outside actors were often cast for absolutely no reason but the flimsy ‘my conception’ and ‘perfect casting’ argument. That many of the worthies who as students were resolute on demanding complete freedom in casting the characters as they had ‘conceived’ them, and refused to ‘be dictated to by bloody actors’ later went on to willingly genuflect to the star system in the real tinsel world as far as casting goes, is another story.

Without mincing words, but deleting the expletives that rise like bile every time I recall all this, we student actors thought there was something mighty rotten with this situation. It stank. Apart from the fact of student actors missing out on what should have been an assured part of their training not being perceived as an injustice, it just didn’t seem to sit well with anyone that we actors were asking to be considered as essential participants in the making of the films, on par with the technicians. We had to concede that none of us could be cast as a child, and as for playing older than one’s age, well we all knew it has never been done in the history of acting! Despite giving in to these two conditions, our stand that apart from these cases only acting students were to be considered for leading parts in diploma films was considered to be ‘limiting the film-makers’ vision’.

The students of acting by and large, it must be said, had over the years not exactly endeared themselves to their colleagues in other courses, had shown scant interest in anything to do with the film-making process, had seldom or never stepped into an editing room, had in fact isolated themselves during their student days; and to make matters worse, many undeserving ones had landed up at least for a short while on top of the heap when it came to breaking through in the big bad movie world. Not so surprising then that this aggravated the resentment felt by students of other courses who, despite slogging away and being good at their work, did not reap half the rewards even an indifferent actor could if his luck was in. Flaunting their newfound wealth and celebrity, or for those who hadn’t found either, flaunting the attitude of being somehow entitled to both became the nature of the FTII students of acting; all were marking time before the big band started to play for them. All of them seemed well prepared for a life of fame as if that were an end in itself, and learnt all the wrong things along the way.

It was largely this not erroneous perception of the acting course students that got us no sympathy whatever during our agitation. A number of students from the other courses who privately claimed to agree with us did not hold the fort when it came to the crunch; and the crunch came very quickly. The actors went on a hunger strike demanding that their conditions be met and the battle lines were instantly drawn, ‘Actors vs the Rest’. We were outnumbered, outmanoeuvred, bushwhacked and slaughtered. We had no one on our side— not the establishment, not the staff, not the other students, not the press, which though not quite as rapacious as today, happily jumped into the act to report that we were ‘holding the institute to ransom’ by ‘making unreasonable demands’; we had ‘misbehaved’ with a hotshot government official, one Mr Jamal Kidwai, then Secretary in the I&B ministry who, lighting his pipe, imperiously waved us away when we went to explain our stand to him, so we gheraoed him but still couldn’t get his ear; we had been ‘rude to veteran film makers’, actually only to Mr Hrishikesh Mukherji who tried explaining to us in words of two syllables why in movies the director is so much more important than the actor and was told by us to cut the baby talk. Apart from a token attempt to reach out to us made by Mr Mrinal Sen we found no one willing to even listen to our point of view. Girish Karnad, then the director, evidently still considers the strike to have happened ‘for the silliest of reasons’. We were branded complete villains in the whole affair, thoroughly reviled, threatened with expulsion and even arrest. The police was brought in to keep the peace when arguments started getting out of hand on the third day. Girish, harassed beyond endurance, was on the verge of signing a scrap of paper conceding what we wanted. He never actually did but with our hunger and our demands reaching fever pitch he engaged with us and assured us justice would be done. He promised to personally make sure no acting student was left out of the diploma films. We ended our agitation, not suspecting it was all a ploy to facilitate Mr I&B’s sneak exit from the back gate. The Institute was immediately declared closed and we were all asked to go home until further notice.

Through this episode Jaspal/Shah had played identical roles together: representing the actors, making the statements, taking the lead in the agitation, deciding courses of action. Now we began to differ. I saw no point in continuing a fight I could see we were losing, he wanted to ‘fight to the death for our cause’. I was not sure what use we would be to any cause, dead.