Tera Kya Hoga Johnny

Was reading Sudhir Mishra's post on the making of 'Khoya Khoya Chand'. You can read it on passionforcinema.com

Tucked at the bottom is this small reference to his forthcoming movie - 'Tera Kya Hoga Johnny' - a film about three people who wonder what’s going to happen to Johnny, this little street kid who sells coffee on the road.

He wonders what’s going to happen to them. They are all going haywire.

It’s about Bombay now. It’s also interesting to capture this transitory phase in Bombay. How it’s changing. The whole city is changing, in terms of architecture, the spaces. How they are being occupied by one kind of thing – malls, offices, commercial complexes.

The city is being taken over and in this transitory phase there’s this little kid who sells coffee.

Some time back, I had had similar thots on/about Bandra. How the quiet, quaint bylanes have been taken over by the builder lobby. Small cottages being razed to make way for ugly(mostly), glass-n-chrome highrises!

Steel over sensibility, aggressive architecture over aesthetics, business clamour over creative calm...Tujhe Kya Ho Gaya Bandra:-(

Mishraji Ki Baatein

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!