March.06 : Chairing a film festival, I always thought, would be a very simple thing: just appear and disappear at your own whim and fancy. There would be no hard work, at all. All I needed to do was give my blessings and benedictions and then move on grandly. But it’s not so simple, and especially not when one is chairing an Asian Film Festival in London at a time when Asian cinema is suddenly so attractive.
Therefore, when I asked Abhishek Bachchan almost six months ago to inaugurate the Tongues on Fire festival at Bafta (British Academy of Film and Television Arts), as well as participate in it, I kept my fingers crossed. Similarly, I was extremely nervous when I asked Jaya Bachchan to come for the celebration of a “women in cinema week” at the Nehru Centre.
But the first auspicious omen was that they were both very gracious in their acceptance —without any fuss whatsoever and, in fact, the fortuitous coming together of the mother-son duo has provided a real impetus for the festival. And then the penny dropped: this can only happen in India — where a mother and son can share a stage without any problems and with perfect humility and respect for each other. And to our further delight, and the excitement of their fans in London, not only did Abhishek and Jaya (thankfully) agree, both Amitabh and Aishwarya also decided to accompany them. So here I am on the day before the festival actually opens, getting up at five in the morning to rush to the airport to pick up four Bachchans in one go! (Did I say chairing a festival was going to be easy?) Now I am worrying about what kind of security arrangements we will need with all four Bachchans under one roof at Bafta. I know there is going to be a perfect storm.
The arrival of the four Bachchans has created a frisson for the festival. But there is particular excitement around the masterclass being delivered by Abhishek at Apollo Theatre at Piccadilly. This is something that has never been tried before: an Indian actor, from the popular commercial genre, talking about his art and craft. But I really do believe that this is precisely the sort of thing that we need to do more of, so that a new respect is born for Bollywood and there is appreciation for how much work and effort Indian actors have to put in. It is time to understand that often Indian cinema is not just cut-and-paste meaningless kitsch — but carefully planned and comparable to the best in the world.
We have many other greats attending the festival — Shyam Benegal, Sharmila Tagore, to name a few — and we also have cinema from all parts of Asia, including Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. So the next 10 days will pass by in a flash of celluloid. But I have to say that my favourite moment will remain when Abhishek will stand on stage and his parents and wife watch him perform. The thought of that moment makes me feel all silly and sentimental. This is a perfect snapshot of a great Indian family moment — which can, of course, only happen at an Asian film festival. I cannot imagine a similar event taking place in any other part of the world. You know what I mean: that peculiar sense of pure simple affection and pride that only an Indian family radiates… sigh!
MEANWHILE, I am back to my regular haunt of the West End and within three days of arriving have already devoured my first play, the award-winning grim sign of our times, Enron, based on the fairly quick destruction of the company. Unlike my Bollywood moment of teary soppiness (noted above), the play generated pure anger as we all remembered that it was careless corporates like Enron which have been responsible for destroying the ethics of management. And once the rot had set in, it was only a matter of time before recession arrived. Carefully constructed by Lucy Prebble, the play is almost evangelical in its narrative of the bad boys of the bonus culture. Written perhaps deservedly with black and white characters, it is somewhat impossible to comprehend how the seventh-largest corporate in the United States, worth around $70 billion, took just 24 days to go bankrupt. Now that we have our own home-grown Satyams we know that these episodes are everywhere.
But while the characters of Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling (once known as The Smartest Guys In The Room) are performed without any coy changing of names, I wonder how long it will before similar hard-hitting play about Raju and the Satyam/Maytas conundrum can be enacted in India? And if an honest play recording the involvement of politicians will ever be allowed — indeed, Enron explores the entire shady nexus between George Bush and the company.
It is worth remembering that Skilling was sentenced to 24 years in the penitentiary for fraud and Ken Lay died of a heart attack when finally their scams were exposed. We can never hope for a transparent sentencing of Raju but, please, can we at least turn his story into a good play?
THE OTHER side of normalcy (for me) always returns when I come back to London and attend a good House of Lords dinner, often enjoyed by members of the Labour Party who get together for a good meal — but for a change outside the confines of Parliament. Obviously this is a well-planned expedition with the permission of the whips. This time, during dinner, it was obvious that the pall of gloom has lifted from the party as the margin between the Tory Party and the Labour (depicted in the almost daily opinion polls) has begun to shrink. With the latest debacle of one of their main donors and party leaders — Lord Ashcroft being investigated over his income — the Tories are once again on the backfoot. So, after many months, there is a sense of having turned the corner. Of course, elections are still a few months away and that is a very long time in politics. But for now, we could all enjoy our wine and dessert and not worry about sinking opinion polls.
So I did what any good Indian would do. I invited the others at my table to come for the Tongues on Fire film festival. After all, what better way to celebrate than just goggle at the Bachchan clan together?
The writer can be contacted at kishwardesai@yahoo.com
Kishwar Desai
