Subhash K Jha in one of his film reviews had said about HAZAARON KHWAISHEIN AISI - "HKA has been Sudhir Mishra's most complex ambitious and politically driven film to date. He minces no words while castigating the Nehruvian "ideal" that modern India adopted, a model for governance that generated a social order that's unjust and degenerate.Subsuming the murky and incoherent politics of Kolkata, Delhi and the Bhojpur district of Bihar between the decadent decade that falls between 1969 and 1977, HKA takes us on a strange stirring and reverberant journey into the erosion of the collective conscience in modern India."
Post HKA, I have always waited to hear and read more about Mishraji. Found this interview of his on PassionforCinema.com...
Loved some of the nuggets from his rant...
1. "Every time you make a film it is a humiliating experience for me - within myself, because you have a notion of yourself and every time you feel you will be caught out this time. There’s so much mediocrity that comes out from within us. And every time you begin a film and you try to write, the first draft is so bad."
2. "Don’t make what the marketers tell you to make. Make something that you want to make and then market it."
3. "In the 1986 World cup Gary Lineker scored the most number of goals. So, they asked Gary Lineker, who scores the maximum number of goals. Is it the person who is at the right place at the right time? He said, “No…You have to be in the right place all the time. Then, sometimes the ball comes to you.”
4. "Do I think these times are any better for Indian filmmaking? This is again a very stupid notion. A notion born out of illiteracy. ‘What is the past is not necessarily a classic, what is the present, is not necessarily modern."
5. "Today, again young people say that we are changing. C’mon, every one was modern according to their time. So Guru Dutt was modern according to his time and hopefully somebody will be modern according to our time. The best films are those that cross time. The only way to know what was a good film is twenty years after it was made."
The planner in me is often searching for unique Indian voices. I find Sudhir Mishra to be one of them!
7 comments:
was about to put this one on tangled....as it falls under my jurisdiction, but then youve done the job (and i got late) :)
cheers!
m
yes technically yeh tumhara ilaaka hai... but as u can see, i have made a feeble attempt to put planning/ planner inside it LOL
as an aside, i loved 1000k (see btw how terribly i've bast'dised it coz its easier for me to pronounce n write this) - and the music. awesome stuff. definitely a great example of the though provoking/ thinking breed of indian directors.
1000K arrgh :-)...wud love to read any other stuff penned by him!
this motivates me to read a book by mrinal sen that i had picked sometime back and is still lying untouched on my book-shelf!
Have you read The Hero & The Outlaw? it's on my list...
yes...long time back! i think now the paper back is also available...
good read...
altho anything that tries to neatly divide brands and people into boxes/ archetypes/ segments...i dont agree intuitively...
last 5 years the book has been fodder to lots of planner ppts across agencies in india LOL
I'd just like to add a minor caveat to the last bit - the really good ones (films) remain timeless, and surprisingly relevant across the ages.
Funny in a way, because i've spent today watching the Star Wars trilogy, and now listening to music from Pyaasa!
Excellent movie, and some brilliant acting in there. In particular, Shiney's character - who really goes potty in the end. Kay Kay's character is the survivor, and in a sense the Shiva archetype - "destroyer". Chitrangada remains the all-suffering woman, true to form.
If you guys read Edward Luce's book - "In spite of the gods" you might start seeing Hazaaron Khwaishain in a very different light.
The Nehruvian "ideal" was an alien notion, and the opposite of the Gandhian ideal. Ideals are driven by the man, and not neccesarily a by product of some process.
Manish, you'd know of the poverty in Orissa, Bihar - and why, even eastern UP. So it's really reflecting that very reality.
Edward's book works well, precisely because he's a Brit who's able to examine our country in a fresh light. It helps that he's also the FT bureau chief for S.E. Asia, and is married to an Indian!
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