There’s a serious side to the irreverent Cyrus Broacha

Cyrus Brocha

How does one report a talk by a guest speaker who is introduced as one who is going to be “lovably, irreverently, intellectually interesting”?
That’s how Mr. Cyrus Broacha was introduced by Dolly Thakore at the last meeting – and she was as serious as a sober judge when she made the statement.

Perhaps the best way would be to attempt to reproduce the talk verbatim, without any embellishments but omitting words normally not used in family magazines, and leave it to the reader to pick and choose the portions at which to laugh, or to laugh out loud. LOL!
Of course, in the course of the question-answer session that followed he came across in a different avatar, as a serious person and with unexpected gravitas.

Otherwise, Mr. Broacha is a humorist, a political satirist, television anchor, columnist, author and perhaps one of the first stand-up comedians in India. He is also well known for his MTV show Bakra in which he performed some elaborate practical jokes on unsuspecting people and also for his programme, The Week That Wasn’t, which is telecast on CNN-IBN.
And this is what he said at the last meeting…hat a long round of applause! Thank you so much. Don’t stop, take your time! But first I would like to welcome arguably India’s greatest fiction writer since Shobha De

Dolly Thakore. I don’t know what the hell she was talking about. They were all lies.
I’m just a boy graduated from Cathedral School, went to Xavier’s College, did one year’s GLC and then got picked up by MTV because they wanted someone cheap. That’s all, nothing much.
Before we start, I just want to say that whenever I talk, I always try to remember the things that I have to remember when I am in the audience. And the first thing is that we must have rules so that we don’t behave like animals. All right?
The first rule is, please keep your mobile phones ON at all times, answer any call that comes, because I don’t have anything important to say; I do not get distracted, so you can laugh, cough, sputter, make sounds. I grew up in a house full of mechanics, so all sounds are acceptable. So please keep the mobile phones on. And in case one of your bookies calls… are you placing bets today, anyone? No? Okay. Phones on please at all times.

And the second rule, which is very important. Kidneys are our treasure, we are the number one country when it comes to kidney disease, it’s a serious problem.
So please, in the middle of the talk or the question-answer session, if you need to go, please go. It will not bother me or the august body on the stage.
Last but not the least, I don’t know how many of you come from Wharton Business School or the very refined Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, you might quote Dostoevsky and Premchand, but all men have the same problem, rich or poor, sophisticated or from the roads – we need to scratch. So please, if you feel like it, please go ahead and do it. And if you want to freelance… This is Rotary, as long as you are rich and ambitious, that’s all that counts. So please enjoy yourself.

I will now correct all the lies that have been set out… Lovely lies, by the way, Dolly. First, it was not 30 years ago (that I acted in a school play). I was about 7 or 8. I am now hardly 21.
But I want to begin by saying that my real name is Vindoo Dara Singh… and wouldn’t it have been a pleasure to have him here today? There would be so much more that he could talk about. He’s talking in the lock-up right now. There would be so much more that he could share with you.

This IPL thing, I think I will talk about it just for a second. I will then give you my background and tell you about my life and clarify things and then throw it open for questions and answers so that people don’t get too bored too quickly.
Starting with the IPL, I was a bit disappointed with the whole bookie thing, but what really upset me was that we had a South Bombay person, who grew up here, went to the same schools and colleges that most of the people in this room and their children and grandchildren have gone to, and is a bookie whose name is Sunil Colaba.

That really upset me because I was thinking that he probably went to Cathedral School, had two cars, two drivers, went to college and then to Harvard and came back and his parents had a cocktail party where they were talking to the other parents, saying things like, “Oh, Javed is a dentist?” “Yes, Percy is doing very well, he is an MBA.” “And what about Sunil? Sunil’s full name is Sunil Colaba and he’s a bookie.”
So I am a little upset about that. I just want to know if anyone here is involved with Sunil Colaba, because this is his area. Please put your hand up right now to clear the air. Anybody?
You’re smiling, Ma’am? You don’t know anybody? But you know Colaba and you know Sunil? Can we put it together, that you’re the lady! Let’s clear the air on that one!
The other scam we had from our area, about 11 dead members who came to life at the CCI. So again, are all our members alive here at the Rotary? Any dead members, hands up please! This is a good time to talk about it. Let’s keep the air clean.
Okay, the preliminaries are over.

People ask me all the time are your parents funny, because they presume that I’m funny for some reason. It’s very difficult to tell them that my parents are hilarious. They don’t intend to be, but they are ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.

I’ll start with my father. My dad is a very well educated man, a refined man; he loves his Mozart, he loves Don Bradman, he loves his dogs, these three are the father-son-holy ghost in his life. But he doesn’t dress that well. At home he wears a lungi and a sadra with four holes and which probably was a present from the British in 1947. And the lungi of course is the Marilyn Monroe variety which rises up all the time! So our female staff leave very quickly; but the male staff, for some reason, stay. I don’t know why.
Having said his piece, Mr Broacha then took questions from the floor. Most of these were posed without the use of a microphone (and so politely that they were inaudible) but he spoke about some of the interesting people that he had met or interviewed. The first name he tackled was that of Vindoo Dara Singh (now behind bars for involvement in the IPL spot-fixing and bookie racket). He said he was ashamed that even at the age of 50 Vindoo was still known as his father’s son.“He hugs a lot, that won’t be a good thing in jail.

But it’s strange, because when you look at all these guys, they have a standard of living that they have to keep up. So perhaps that’s why all this (fixing and so on) is happening. I can’t say for sure, maybe yes, maybe no.” Turning to batting legend Sachin Tendulkar, he described him as very nice, extremely short and touchy about it; he probably wore inner heels to obtain some height. The first thing he had noticed the first time he met him, was that he spoke in an almost child-like voice. But over the years his voice had changed and become deeper. But the one thing that stood out about him was that when he came out to bat at the Wankhede Stadium and when everybody was standing up and clapping, the greatest batsman of his generation constantly adjusted his box-guard. Children all over India did the same thing! “I mean no disrespect, I just find it amazing when you have real talent, real genius, these things don’t matter but it’s amazing… if he wasn’t a good batsman, you would think he was a paedophile or something very dangerous. Imagine when he bats so well, scoring 240 runs, but how many times has he actually played with the ‘little Sachin’!
The man who made a ‘Bakra’ of many, has “But a great man, very nice, very humble. We’ve interviewed him a lot of times, no change from the first to the last and the only thing is that like L.K. Advani he is going to go on forever,
it doesn’t look like he is going to retire from Tests. And don’t ask me about L.K. Advani.”
His experience with former US President Bill Clinton was different. While working with MTV, he went to Barcelona for a UNAIDS short, to create awareness about AIDS. The Chairman was Bill Clinton. His group was told that Mr. Clinton would arrive at 3 o’clock sharp and he had given just 11 minutes when he would talk with a lot of children. Mr. Broacha said he was very nervous, after all, he was the most powerful man in the world. But he had to visit the men’s room. He went there and noticed that it was very huge, the size of New Bombay. He kept saying to himself that it was Bill Clinton and he should not do anything stupid or use bad language and be very careful about the sex, drugs, homosexual angles.
Suddenly, many huge men, all of them 7 feet tall, came into the room. He was so tense that he nearly froze. Besides, he was feeling crowded in that huge men’s room.
And then a man entered singing and whistling the song “Out in the West Texas town of El Paso, I fell in love with a…” There were dozens of urinals
in the room, but that man, Bill Clinton, came and stood at the one next to him. He was 6 feet and 2 inches tall, whereas he, Mr. Broacha, was a mere 5 feet and 8 inches. And Mr. Clinton rocked front-to-back while emptying his bladder. Suddenly, he noticed Mr. Broacha and said, “Hello, little guy”. That froze him even further and his bladder suddenly dried up!
“He was great. And what I liked about him, I can’t tell whether it’s political or he’s really good with people, but he remembers your name, he calls you by your first name. When he spoke about a country’s problem, he spoke to the politicians from that country by their name. So he did his homework very well, a very impressive man. But I would not like to be caught in a urinal with him again, that’s for sure. And this was before Monica Lewinsky, mind you!”
Angelina Jolie, Richard Gere and Nelson Mandela, Mr. Broacha recalled
meeting only the latter two. He met Mr. Gere at a very crowded function
but managed to approach him with his camera team and said, “Mr. Gere, I’m your biggest fan, I have seen all your movies and I love everything you do”. But the actor looked at him for a second and said, “Can you get off my foot?” That was his only interaction with the sexiest man of the 80s.
Even with Nelson Mandela, the meeting lasted just a few seconds while doing a programme on AIDS awareness. He just said, “Hello, Sir, I’m from the land of Gandhi”. At which Mr. Mandela said, with a twinkle in his eye, “Land of Gandhi? And lots of pretty girls”. In spite of all the racial discrimination, in spite of all kinds of problems and 27 years in jail, his ideas and his mind were still fixated on women which was something to remember and respect. He was about 78 or 79 years old at that time.
Asked about his most famous show, MTV’s Bakra, Mr. Broacha said that he had come to hate the show. Recently, he was at Kemp’s Corner trying to park his car when a parking attendant pulled a fast one on him. He had just parked for 15 minutes but was asked to pay Rs. 100. Are you serious, he asked. Yes, said the boy, at which stage he lost his temper and started using bad language.
The attendant looked at him for some time and then said, dead-pan, “What’s so great? We also do Bakra sometimes!” That was very embarrassing
for him; he felt like an idiot and a lout. So he just smiled and paid.

On another occasion, when he went to a hospital to see someone, the staff surrounded him and started asking about Bakra, taking his pictures and so on. That was another embarrassing episode.
But his team soon turned paranoid, so that after shooting they started attacking each other and trying to make a Bakra of each other with a camera. Everyone was always worried that something was going wrong or something was happening, so it was best to keep calm.
Pointing at a member, Mr. Broacha said, “I think you are the first person who has yawned. Can you please put your hand up and can we give him a round of applause, please? No, it’s not sarcastic. I want you to just relax and have a good time in this room. I don’t like rules. And if this is the time to rest, by all means please rest. Only for this meeting, for the next meeting you can do what you want.”
Roda Billimoria wondered whether it was fair to say that 11 out of 10 Parsis were ghela (not quite there). Mr. Broacha said that living in the present times, with Naxalite insurgence,communal tensions, bookies going mad and destroying a beautiful