To follow the Deol men would be one way of tracing Bollywood’s history. From Dharmendra, rarely allowed to dip into his deep well of comedic ability, to Sunny Deol, whose big battered body gave us a sweet-natured bull, forced into brutishness by a relentless world, time after time. Then, there was Bobby, askew enough to not quite fit into the dying genre of masala romance, too early for a cinema that fit him. When Bobby played an amiable young liar who discovers that much bigger crooks are cloaked by respectability in Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Kareeb (1998) we had very little to say to it. A decade later, when cousin Abhay played a just as amiable crook in Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, we were ready to embrace Lucky, the terror just below the surface and the much sharper indictment of middle-class greed.

Thirty-two-year-old Abhay Deol is, in one sense, the physical embodiment of New Bollywood. His genetic heritage is big, goodlooking and smooth enough to draw the crowds. His acting chops strong enough to work with a range of clever young directors. It would seem that perhaps it’s his timing that’s right. Oye Lucky’s director Debakar Banerjee disagrees, “There is only one of Abhay. There should be many more. Right from the beginning, he has gone in search of directors who enjoy surprising their audiences. And at this stage, even for producers who think in terms of pure cash, he is a sound strategic choice. I think Abhay has created this space in the industry on his own.”

Anurag Kashyap, who likes to call Deol an early Johnny Depp, goes further. “Look at all the strange little movies that have come in the last few years. The only common link is Abhay. He’s resisted the pressure of the market and done what he wanted to do, unlike actors who do what they think they ought to do.”

DEOL HAS a quality of silly happiness that is infectious. Of all the strange young men he has played so far, Deol’s own personality is closest to the hopeful hero of his first film, Socha Na Tha. Deol’s other heroes have been fallible, corrupt, foolish. In Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, he’s no Robin Hood. In the shot where he’s awaiting capture in his expensive apartment, you see him surrounded by his tawdry spoils, hugging them the way Tim Burton’s Penguin communed with frozen fish — with desolate affection.

Even to journalists on the phone, Deol is without the guarded machismo of young stars, the carefully cultivated intensity meant to shorthand gravitas. But Deol’s charm lies in his vulnerability, his inability to disguise his wheedling. “Love me, love me” the undertone demands while he confides that growing up in the Deol family was like being a Von Trapp. He was the youngest of seven strictly brought-up Deol cousins. Outings were limited to family trips, and there was a blanket ban on late nights. The son of Dharmendra’s younger brother, producer Ajit Singh Deol, Abhay grew up calling Dharmendra ‘Dad’. “It sounds strange to outsiders. I grew up calling my parents, Ajit Uncle and Usha Aunty. But it never felt strange to me.”

His is the charm of the beloved baby of the family. To know that and then watch him in the movies doubles the pleasure. What on earth would this boy know of unhappiness or corruption or self-doubt? This really must be that strange thing: acting. Even Navdeep Singh, a close friend, thought he was too young to play Satyaveer, a man resigned to failure and life in small-town Rajasthan in Manorama Six Feet Under. Deol failed to convince him, then attempted another route. Shemaroo was interested in producing a film with Deol. Singh was looking for a producer. Deol made the project take off and put on Satyaveer’s moustache. The Satyaveer he became was to Singh’s great satisfaction.

More recently Deol saw a chance to play India’s heroin chic: the wan but cool lover, Devdas. Deol first dreamt up a contemporary Devdas set in Los Angeles. Scriptwriter Vikram Motwani, who worked on Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas, liked the idea but asked him to read the original. “I told him that Devdas was not cool. He was alcoholic with tremors and shakes.” Convinced, Abhay brought energy to a grittier tale of addiction and obsession. Motwani wrote the first draft and took it to Anurag Kashyap. Kashyap’s draft is the forthcoming Dev D, set in Punjab and Delhi.

Deol’s directors and coworkers will tell you he will actively campaign for his scenes to be cut if it will improve the screenplay. Kashap says, “He’s not the kind of actor to hog the camera.” Deol likes movies more than being a star. He reads scripts slowly and thoroughly — and all the time. His film sensibilities are eclectic. “As far as film families go, we were fairly sheltered. But we did go to shoots to see Chacha. I remember going to the sets of Loha and seeing Mandakini. I remember watching Sholay and loving it. But the big moment was watching Star Wars and then Bladerunner. My brain exploded. Then I fell in love with Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Terence Hill, Iranian films, all sorts of films.”

As an adult, Deol was confident that a more script-driven Bollywood would arrive. “I believed that there would be a change. I just had to work and it would happen.” After a few years abroad in film school, he was back in Mumbai looking for something different.

There was a familiar, relatively easy path awaiting Deol, but his six movies have all (except one) been with debut directors and small budgets. He has chased projects, read hundreds of scripts, wooed and seduced directors into carefully tailored movies rather than picked the one-size-fit-all star launch.

Motwani has known him since he was eight. “Hrithik Roshan’s launch changed the industry’s idea of a launch. Abhay has resisted pressure to go in that direction. It’s hard to watch people your age get high profile movies, more publicity, more money and not give in.”

He found it in Socha Na Tha, persuading the startled Imtiaz Ali, whose first film it was, to meet the formidable Deols, who were keen on producing it. It was in that strange little romantic comedy where Deol and Ayesha Takia wander around as if they know something no one else does, that Deol started out.

“Socha Na Tha looked like Bollywood, but it was only in disguise.” Much like him, one would imagine. Though the response to Deol was positive right from Socha Na Tha, few of his movies were big commercial successes. Deol’s biggest frustration has been the lack of wholehearted marketing of small films. That has changed with Oye Lucky and Dev D.

But Deol confesses he can’t imagine being a regular hero. “I’m too shy to dance. I don’t want to seem stuck up and arrogant, so if it is absolutely necessary I will do it to keep the peace. But most directors would see that I am uncomfortable.” He prefers the quirky and even powerless to the spectacular and heroic. “Everyone in the audience would empathise with the vulnerability of someone like Satyaveer. He isn’t super clean but he has some principles. He can’t take revenge on goondas. He can’t beat anyone up.”

What a revolutionary thing for a Deol to say, “He can’t beat anybody up.” In Abhay you see the alter-lives of the other Deols, a Sunny who’s actually beaten by the world’s inequities, a Bobby who gets to be the oddball, a Dharmendra who gets to deliver cheesy one-liners with relish and a handsome smirk.

Published here.

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Bollywood in 2007

ACRITIC ONCE said that one must assume that all Hindi films, unless stated otherwise, are set in Mumbai. In 2007, we have no Hindi movies left, only Bollywood, a gaping monster eating everything including its own past. We have left Mumbai and visited a lot of small-towns this year, but the small town we have visited the most this year is Bollywood. In a year when nostalgia was rife, Hindi cinema’s greatest hit Sholay underwent a makeover repulsive even to those who are fascinated by the badness of B-grade films. All the spoofs we have watched and performed in our living rooms, all the filmi gossip we ever heard and told, all came together in one interminable sitting called Om Shanti Om. Even the superb noir film Johnny Gaddar could not avoid paying homage to Bollywood.

While watching Om Shanti Om was like being forced by a garrulous friend to look at a pile of family albums, Jhoom Barabar Jhoom was like a sexy, amusing layabout, making you bemoan its wasted potential. Treacly with Bollywood references (Bobby Deol and Abhishek Bachchan riding a motorcycle-sidecar combo, looking like gorillas on tricycles with, of course, Yeh Dosti playing in the background) and happily zany visuals (an exploding wax Superman, Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed floating by at the Paris Ritz), the movie flopped like almost all of this year’s Yash Raj movies. Despite its chumminess, Om Shanti Om (and Jhoom Barabar Jhoom) kept us outside its oddly closed and uninviting world. Frequently, the self-referencing and nostalgia (especially the Bachchan self-referencing) became a dizzying mess that rivalled the radio scripts that get hopelessly mixed-up in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.

In a year full of confident debuts, Navdeep Singh stands out with his stylish and funny noir film, Manorama Six Feet Under. The suspended PWD engineer-turned-sleuth Satyaveer Randhawa (Abhay Deol)knows the long-waisted beauty in a ghagra choli who appears in the summer haze is a mirage. No woman from his Rajasthani smalltown, Lakhot, looks like the mirrorwork-and-bandhini goddesses of 90s Bollywood or even Aaja Nachle’s Shamli or Laaga Chunari Mein Daag’s Varanasi. Manorama Six Feet Under’s Lakhot does not have dancing troops of ‘colourful characters’ in ethnic costumes. For much of the movie, Singh keeps Randhawa’s wife Nimmi (sexy Gul Panag) in a pantheon of nighties topped by a sweater and a duppatta. Goldfish tanks are the most recurring image in this film, where everyone seems trapped and suffocated. Very different from the exuberant North Indian small-towns of Imtiaz Ali’s Jab We Met, through which we are summarily dragged by Geet Dhillon (Kareena Kapoor).

As we squeeze chin-deep into our metros, do we dare look back fearlessly at villages and small towns we have left behind, as Singh has? Or are we afraid of turning into pillars of salt? Is there any doubt that we think of our small towns as ‘back there’, where we don’t want to be? When Anurag Basu made Life in a Metro, he had one of his characters, Shruti, voice some of this discomfort. Like Shruti, we lie awake at night knowing that our cherished production of global citizenship can fall apart because of one Embarrassing Wedding Guest. Shruti is appalled at the idea of marrying Monty, a charmer who does not hide his Lucknow (or was it Meerut?) roots. So obvious are their differences to Shruti that she is appalled when Monty offers to set her up with a friend from back home. When she tells Monty that she wants a husband “who likes to travel, who reads, and who has a sense of humour”, multiplex audiences must have winced. We’re young enough for our pretensions to still embarrass us.

If we think of small towns as repositories of our authentic selves, parrots in which we have hidden our souls, then Aaja Nachle was a close-reading nightmare. Like many other small towns of cinema, Shamli likes starch and order and was scandalised when Diya Srivastav eloped with a gora. When she returns to Shamli, she finds that the ‘moral’ order is now enforced by the saffron brigade and villainish Muslim mall-builders. Madhuri Dixit in Aaja Nachle is not a drag version of Swades’ radical Shah Rukh. She cynically manipulates the leader of the saffron brigade. She lets Mrs Chojar (Sushmita Mukherjee) be thwarted in her passionate desire to be on stage. Mohan Sharma, the once-jilted cafe owner, is supportive, but Diya never reconsiders him as an object of romance. Instead, we are offered the possibility that the pizza-baking young politician will hook up with Diya in New York, to where she returns.

Is Bollywood’s current fascination for small-towns a sign that we are preparing to put our real small-towns in museums? Kamal Swaroop’s witty film Om-dar-ba-dar set in an imaginary small town in Rajasthan was made in 1988. Until very recently, the film was like a cinephile’s Loch Ness monster: beloved and rarely sighted. Om-dar-ba-dar is exactly the movie to dust off and fall in love with now.

This has also been a good year to decide which critic’s opinions you want to bank on in the decades to come. If, for instance, your neighbourhood reviewer said OSO was hilarious and you sat stonyfaced before jokes that have been done to death by a decade of MTV and Channel V, it is time to go looking for a new oracle. If your critic was also not canny enough to hedge her bets about superhit Aap Ka Suroor — The Moviee, tell her that what was good enough for the Beatles is good enough for Himesh Reshamiyya. Like Bharat Bhushan of Bheja Fry, the small-town viewer is confident enough to do his thing and make it work. The biggest hits of the year have been far from sophisticated: Partner, Dhamaal, Heyy Babyy, Dhol and Bhool Bhulaiyya. There is a similiar satisfaction (of just deserts, not cinematic standards) when the campless Akshay Kumar is applauded for his success in 2007. He has been the star of two of these comedies, as well as another huge hit, Namastey London. Namastey London was the NRI movie Shaad Ali Sehgal spoofed in Jhoom Barabar Jhoom but Sehgal’s Bunties and Bablies were not amused by his mocking their tastes for “ek chutki sindhoor” in Bathinda or Southall.

THIS IS the year that we had a film about a traffic signal, two movies about children with learning disabilities (Tare Zameen Par and Apna Aasman), a reasonably good May-December romance (Cheeni Kum) and a women’s hockey team. Tall, short, sexy, plain, butch, femme, we cheered for all the stick-wielding darlings, especially when they fulfilled our deepest desires by beating up loutish Delhi men. One happy effect of small cinema is that this has been a great year for character actors, people who look too much like us for us to hang our unreasonable fantasies on. Even really small character actors. Eight-year-old Darsheel Zafar shared top billing with Aamir Khan and wrung hardened hearts in Taare Zameen Par. We had Sushmita Mukherjee and Piyush Mishra return to the screen. We have had our heart’s fill of the astonishing Vinay Pathak. We can forgive him Bheja Fry.

Progressive social commentators like to fondly imagine or perhaps hope that cinema audiences are like savants who will tilt cinema in favour of the right and just. Hence it is appropriate that all the unfashionable movies were hits, and right that bloated Yash Raj productions (unless they featured sporty underdogs) and overly pretty Bhansali movies, failed. Commentators are carefully trying to find reasons for why Embarrassing Wedding Guests like Aap Ka Suroor should be treated well.

In all this the people who took the hit are filmmakers making uncharming cinema. Even Anurag Kashyap’s well-wishers would have probably preferred him to rest on the laurels of the perfectly constructed Black Friday. Instead Kashyap sent our reigning male sex symbol into a fabulous hell, located somewhere between Ghatkopar and Siberia. Fingers are cut, people are gassed, suicides are silly, wives morph into sexy secretaries and K (John Abraham) keeps emerging in his bathtub. Audiences fed on froth hated the grotesque furnishing of Kashyap’s imagination and foreign critics largely missed the jokes (Kashyap calls an abridged version of the non-smoker’s charter, a Rajagopalachari). In a world where Sudhir Mishra’s Khoya Khoya Chand, a sweet romance set in the 1950s, is being called very “complicated and layered”, what chance does Kashyap’s unabashedly surreal No Smoking have?

Kashyap is certainly a man we hope does not dwindle into bitterness. Around him there currently exists an energy of new filmmakers, new viewers and even new critics. Did they come first or did Kashyap? Does it matter while we await next year’s bounty? Perhaps it does because in the last two years we, the ever-greedy viewers, have imperceptibly raised our bar for Bollywood. And the only thing to do is raise them higher.

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Interview with Navdeep Singh

A slow-paced and seductive noir film set in a fictional Rajasthani town called Lakhot, Manorama Six Feet Under barely made a ripple when it was first released in September 2007. Nearly a year later, people are still urging it on their friends, each convinced they are the first ones to have found it. Not surprsingly, it is currently one of the bestselling Hindi DVDs. Its director Navdeep Singh, however, thinks that Manorama was a competent yet unambitious debut, daring you to make a fool of yourself by praising it. He hopes that by alternating mainstream films with his personal projects he will be able to finally make the movies crowding his head for years. He is making fewer and fewer of the ad films that he is better known for and is now finishing the script of a bigger film, Basra. A spy-thriller, it is set partly in Iraq and explores the mysterious world of a RAW agent. In case you are wondering, Basra is his offering to mainstream cinema.

It’s difficult not to wonder what kind of person made Manorama Six Feet Under. This is a man who signals the climactic revelation of the femme fatale by having her appear in a sleeveless salwar kameez rather than the sarees you have seen her in the rest of the film. As she hangs over the villain’s armchair her thin, bare arms shock you — so closely are you tuned into the morality of Lakhot’s ‘nightie’-wearing householders. In turn the scene makes you laugh because all along you felt no moral outrage when you discovered Satyaveer, the hero, a junior engineer, has been suspended for taking a bribe. Or when he continues to ride around on the bike bought with his ill-gotten gains. “I was not setting out to make an ‘issue’ film but morality has become to us only about virginity and vegetarianism. If you are a vegetarian virgin, nothing you do is immoral. You could be absolutely ruthless in making money, kill someone even.” He adds, “as long as you don’t eat the person you have killed, of course.”

Here is his pet theory: “The baniyafication of our culture has ruined our movies. So I can stand on my terrace and listen to families fighting, calling each other maa-behn gaalis. That is real but producers used to tell me that my movie about a father-son relationship was too westernised because the son talked back to the father. Perhaps it does not happen in the joint families of our mercantile class but it certainly happens in India.” But no sooner than he’s given it, he retracts it, saying he’s being “rude”.

As an ad filmmaker, Navdeep is smack in the middle of the consumerist deluge that he worries about. “There was always rich and poor. But now the spending is more visible. Sooner or later someone will catch on that walking down the street is a pair of shoes that costs three times his income. Why not knock out the wearer and steal the shoes?”

Singh’s enjoyment of the ridiculous is voluptuous, like someone rolling their tongue around a boiled sweet. Mocking himself, he tells you about the script he had written, and abandoned, as soon as he arrived in Bollywood. “It had a Russian gangster, his porn star girlfriend and the porn filmmaker who falls in love with her. I thought I could adapt it for India. I thought Mumbai would be like New York but with more Indians.”

AFTER GRADUATING in Delhi, he and a friend started an animation studio, one of the first in the country. “We were self-taught but did quite well. We made logos fly,” Singh says with a straight face. At 27, he decided that he wanted to study design. But later, on an impulse he decided to go to film school. I was married, my wife was pregnant and my father-in-law was very concerned. But they say you only regret the things you don’t do, not the things you do. So we went.” Singh went to Pasadena, California at the Art Centre School of Design, a school as well-known for producing automobile designers (including Dilip Chhabria) as artists and filmmakers (Zack Snyder and Tarsem Singh). For a decade he worked in LA and in London, and returned to India to make movies in 1999 at a time no one would even admit to watching Hindi films. After Satya and Hyderabad Blues many were holding their breath wondering whether alternative cinema had actually returned. Singh came to Mumbai and was astonished, like others before him, by its insularity. “I got ad films almost immediately. But Bollywood was suspicious and unfriendly. All the great art movements have come out of creative people sharing their work, their preoccupations, and ideas. But nobody here seems to get that.”

Today, at a time when criticising Bollywood is almost treason, Singh radiates deep dissatisfaction both with the industry and the aspirational culture on which it sits. “I hate living in cities cut off from any culture other than Bollywood. “What I miss most about living abroad are the libraries and museums and music. My children definitely have less access to culture or intellectual activity than I did when I grew up. Newer spaces like Gurgaon are completely devoid of anything even remotely cultural. If we must import from the West why not import the best? I certainly don’t miss McDonalds. Why not be like China and have great philharmonic orchestras? Forget art, we don’t even have pop-culture. That’s why we have movies like Dhoom. Where in India do we have motorcycle gangs?”

Singh was an army brat, the resident of many small towns and big cities. While Lakhot inspired an uneasy loyalty in Satyaveer, many viewers would have sympathised with his wife’s desperation to leave. Would you find serenity or claustrophobia in Lakhot, you wonder while characters stare into goldfish tanks. Singh insisted on shooting Manorama on location horrified at the idea of doing it on sets in Mumbai. One of the scripts he is working on is set in a travelling circus. His Andheri apartment has the odd, hand-painted signs he collects but he denies a fetish for small town life. “Small towns just have more colour. Most big cities look like each other.”

The absence of place in Bollywood annoys him tremendously. “Movies are either in New York or in Never-Never land. You look at characters in a movie and you don’t know who they are, where they are, where they are from.” He compares it to regional cinema. “Say you are watching a Tamil film. It has a well-defined catchment area. So the location of the characters, caste, class, everything is very clear. The problem for Bollywood is this. Who is its natural audience? Who speaks Hindi? Nobody does. When I had two minutes of Hindi as its spoken anywhere in Rajasthan in Manorama. People complained that it’s a dialect and that they couldn’t understand it. So we have movies about nowhere for people from nowhere.”

So why has he stayed put and not gone back to LA or London? “Where else would I get away with such mediocrity?” he responds, leaving you to your quiet shock. Having almost convinced you that pursuing realism or even good cinema in Bollywood is hopeless, he doubles back. Because, as he admits, he keeps swinging between hope and despair about Bollywood. “The cultural class will start exerting their own tastes. So for a long time no one watched Bollywood or thought it was kitschy, cool fun. After a while you get sick of kitschy, cool fun and you look for meaning. And so we start making movies we want to see. I hope.” The white heat and shadows of Lakhot hides many private jokes but Navdeep Singh’s amusement with the world’s vagaries is far more obvious. •

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Interview with Imtiaz Ali

I ONCE FELL IN LOVE with a Malayalee girl in Delhi. I had a terrible fever and couldn’t get out of bed. She lived across the wing and would come sneaking in the dark, a dupatta over her head, to bring me food. She didn’t want to be seen coming into our flat. Especially because she had a big Jat lover in the building. I was very feverish so all I remember was her face and the way she hesitated before putting her palm on my forehead. I didn’t know her name but was completely in love with her.”

Imtiaz Ali looks at you with the lowered head and squared shoulders of what the Brits call a wide boy, a man who lives by his wits, wheeling and dealing. It does not quite prepare you for Ali’s gift for a purely urban genre of romance. His two movies have had varying fates but the second one Jab We Met, was a sleeper hit that took him straight into Bollywood’s A-list.

During the interview, his phone rings and he unconsciously straightens his posture as he speaks to an elder statesman of Bollywood. “No, I will come to see you. Definitely,” he says unhappily. As the director of Jab We Met, the director of a forthcoming film with Saif Ali Khan and Deepika Padukone, and a more than ordinarily personable, 30-something male, Ali is quite feted. The hesitation with which his earlier movies Socha Na Tha and Jab We Met was promoted is a thing of the past. He has taken to the media whirl with pragmatic friendliness, but he is not too thrilled with the side-effects of being on the A-list. “Now everybody thinks I should direct their film. Look, there is a limit to the number of films you can make. When you are making a film it is your entire life. And some people simply should not produce films.”

Jab We Met had a title that inspired much eye-rolling but it struck no false notes in its telling. Not overly ambitious in scale, it managed to please all but the most hardened. Ali has a way of investing the commonplace with fresh charm but anchors his romances in a real world. Ali’s Geet Dhillon was the first time in a long while that we had a Bollywood heroine who was vivacious without seeming like she was on speed. “It would have been useless if I had just told Kareena: ‘Be vivacious’. I told her about a certain kind of Punjabi girl you’d meet on a bus: within five minutes she’d be telling you about her periods. I told Kareena what their lives were like, what they thought about, what they worried about, their body language.”

Ali learnt to direct a long while ago. As a child in Jamshedpur he was addicted to theatre; he scripted and directed plays endlessly. At 16, Ali had a ticketed public performance: Romeo and Juliet wake up to their own existence as characters in a play, try to outwit the playwright but die anyway. Ali’s father saw then that his IIT ambitions for his son would have to be shelved. College in Delhi meant more theatre, a life in Mandi House and more writing. Then Ali did the customary migration to Mumbai.

At 22, Ali became a producer for Zee’s Purushkhestra, a chat show for men anchored by Kirron Kher. “I was fascinated by all the different kind of people who came to the show. I wanted to know what it was like for a man who was married to an extremely beautiful woman. I wanted to know whether women with big tits thought differently from ones with small ones.”

His warm interest in strangers led to Jab We Met. “When I travel by train I always wonder about co-passengers and their lives. You look out of the window and there’s a child crossing a field. You might become close to someone while travelling but then you forget about them. My Tamilian cameraman had a name for that sort of relationship railu sneham — love on the train.”

Ali was drawn into prolific television serial production with Anupam Kher’s Imtihaan. He was offered more shows but frequently told “almost as a criticism, that my work was too cinematic.” He even received offers from people asking him to direct the first five episodes of shows that he could then hand over to a director who would expend less time and effort. “You couldn’t blame them really. The target for the serial was a woman who was cutting onions, talking to one child and supervising the homework of another. If you were subtle, she’d miss it.”

He began looking for people to make movies with. “Everybody I met was different and interesting. Mahesh Bhatt, the first person who wanted to work on my script, can’t bear sustained eyecontact. So he makes you narrate your story for three straight hours to his assistant. When Socha Na Tha evolved, I decided to cast Abhay Deol. Sunny heard about it and said, “Who the hell is this guy who is casting my cousin? I want to see him.” So I went to this house with these big men — Dharamji, Sunny, Bobby. I was very worried because Abhay gets beaten up in the film! I found that they were really reeflaxed. Halfway through the reading, Sunny agreed to produce the film. He didn’t even meet the heroine, Ayesha Takia, till we started shooting.” Socha Na Tha, Ali’s first cinematic venture didn’t do well at the box office but it has acquired a fan following over time. The movie is carried along by Deol and Takia’s beautifully played air of disbelief that something so outrageous is happening to people with such well-ordered worlds as theirs.

Even a short conversation with Ali makes it clear that far from a quick-witted wheeler-dealer, he is that strange creature — a man who sells romance to the masses and also believes in it himself. What he most clearly resembles is Fernando the Bull who didn’t want to fight, just wanted to smell the flowers. He says, “It is natural that our movies are better at discussing relationships than Hollywood’s plastic romances. We’re obsessed with relationships of all kinds. Anthony Minghella — now there was a man who understood love. But he was Italian. He had namak in his culture.”

Ali talks earnestly of how important his friends are to him: Anurag Kashyap (in whose movie Black Friday he was persuaded to play Yakub Memon) Shivam Nair (whose directorial debut Ahista Ahista was scripted by Ali), Sriram Raghavan and Sudhir Mishra. “We see each other’s films, we critique each other’s works in progress.” But Ali is different in one way from these men, all movie-obsessed and all strangely boyish, “I am not a movie buff. I didn’t go to film school and I don’t go to movies to criticise them. I make movies to entertain.” And so he does.