Past Present

Take care of your memories, guest speaker Nasreen Munni Kabir told Rotarians, last Tuesday

Many of us must have photographs of our parents or grandparents. Do you look after these photographs well now because technology allows you to digitise everything? But the one thing you must remember is if you have a grandparent, you must ask them to name everybody in the photograph. Because once they are gone, no one will know who is in that photograph. Value family because the children and the grandchildren will want to know.

Thus, archive is to keep and preserve the past. There is the global past and there is a personal past. Therefore, I implore you all to go home and look at those photographs, try and caption them. Put the names of everybody, scan them and preserve them. The weather here is very harsh so to preserve a photograph you need to keep it properly. If you have a negative, it is a blessing because if, in the near future, you want to have an exhibition of your aunt and if you have a digital photograph it might be too small to blow up, so it is best to have a negative. One day it will be much more valuable to you than a Rolex watch. I think personal history is more important than material history.

People are much more conscious today; there are many sites on the net where they have histories and film interviews, interviews with writers and politicians and others who affect our lives. There is much more today because of the internet. But it is so much that it is baffling. It is not what they call curated; it is indigestible information. So you have to add your viewpoint to it. When I was interviewing film people, I realised that one should always surprise them so that they think about something in a different way. The other thing is that you should never be doing any research on camera. You can’t go and say, ‘tell me how many films you have made’. That it is insulting; it is like saying you don’t even know the basics about this person. So if you find out they always like the questions how why and when and people love the how. For people who are creative or artists of any kind, if you ask them how do they do a particular thing, they will be interested and open up and talk to you. That interest is fascinating. I have been doing these documentaries and I have realised that today it is difficult to do documentaries because there is so much on the net.

If you have to compare Dilip Kumar vs Shah Rukh Khan vs Amitabh Bachchan, how would you compare these great personalities?
To get an interview with Dilip Kumar, you had to phone his house 25 times. The cook would answer the phone and say, sahab nahi hai. Next time around, sahab bathroom mein hai, sahab abhi bahar gaye hai. So, one heard a gamut of excuses. But I am a stubborn person and I would keep phoning. One time I said, abhi bathroom se nikle hai ki nahi? But then he would come. One thing about him, it was very difficult to get hold of him because he has his own style but he was a very deep thinking man. So we would talk about things that surprised you, he would talk about philosophical things. He talked like a poet. So seeing and interviewing him, you felt like you were in the presence of a very thoughtful and profound human being. I remember Dilip saab talking about Bimal Roy’s Devdas, ‘In Devdas, the question was of not doing rather than doing.’

Then you have Mr. Bachchan; he is a man of very few words. We followed him for nine weeks; this was in 1989 and Mr. Bachchan is very moody. Sometimes he does not feel like talking and sometimes we will talk. When he is very relaxed, he is very funny and will make lots of jokes. And ’89 was the time when he was with his peer groups: Manmohan Desai, Ramesh Sippy, Prakash Mehra – these were the people who made Mr. Bachchan. So the relation on the set was very casual and with friends. Today, it is a totally different situation; it is the young generation who are dying to work with Mr. Bachchan. I think Mr. Bachchan is more reticent and if you ask him what he brought to the scene,; he will not really tell his true contribution. In his interviews, he is guarded in many ways. Then you have Shah Rukh Khan, he is somebody who talks a lot. So you don’t have a problem. You have a problem with editing. And he is very intelligent, he thinks on his feet. Yusuf saab would take a long pause between his words, he would be thinking. But Shah Rukh is going 120 miles per hour. And one question I asked him, he gave a wonderful answer such as I had never heard in my life. Everybody knows that Shah Rukh Khan comes quite late; if he says one o’clock it will be four o’clock. So one day, I asked, on a film, Shah Rukh, what does time mean to you? He stopped and then answered, ‘Time starts when I get there’. Now that is an extraordinary statement. I have never heard anything like it. So it is very difficult to compare people but ultimately we are reacting.

You did a documentary on Shah Rukh Khan; do you see doing the same with Amitabh or Dev Anand?
The trouble is when they are no more, everything becomes hear-say; history is subjective. When a person tells you a story of how you behave on some days, you hear that story and repeat it that that is the story you lived. But it is actually somebody else’s story. When you are talking about Smita Patil, who is a common friend of mine and Munna, there are so many stories and memories we remembered as I was talking to him, but if she was here today it would have been a different book. I think I am better with the living.

Do you think enough is being done in archiving the information?
There is too much talk and very little archiving. In other words you can see an interview with any of the stars anytime but you cannot sit through that interview twice because it is on one lever or layer. It’s contrary to some old movies like Mother India, Devdas or Pyasa which, every time you see them, you find something new because they have many layers and that is how good films are.

Would you like to share about the time you have spent with Lata Mangeshkar’s documentary?
I have done a documentary on Lata Mangeshkar. She was the most intelligent woman I have met in my life. With her extraordinary work and life, in terms of her grasp, the music composers would say the moment she would come and hear the tune, she would hear it once and she would be ready. It is like a photographic memory of the melody. Then she would recite and she would write the words in Hindi and she would put dots under the words that she had to stress. Her technique was simple and effective, but her voice is beautiful. You have to admit that in Indian cinemas a lot of the films are not at all good but what is very good is the music. That, I think, is original and of excellent quality. Lataji is very intelligent and witty. Interestingly, there are two people who have a child-like, innocent laugh: one is Lata Ji and the other Is AR Rahman. And there is a superior sense of focus; she could see what is essential. If you hear today’s songs some of the words may get lost but if you hear songs from Lata ji’s generation, any singer, there was a pure diction. In the documentary she says that it was Ghulam Haider saab who had told her that pronunciation should be saaf. Everybody should understand every word. If you understand the words you will be moved emotionally.