Akhtar, Gulzar in a battle of wits

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What do you think happens when two Bollywood titans meet? On Monday, day four of the Jaipur Literature Festival, Javed Akhtar and Gulzar shared the dais, along with lyricist Prasoon Joshi and director, writer and music composer Vishal Bhardwaj, to discuss “Kahani Kisko Kehte Kain? Script, Story, Screenplay”.

The energy on the stage was electric. Everyone was animated and making clever, engaging arguments, starting with the narrative structure of Indian stories which, they said, have a “three-act structure” — who is it about, what happens to them, and what’s the result.
Joshi said, the human mind creates stories out of everything. “We have stories about birds, religion is a story, Hitler was a storyteller. We sometimes tell stories to motivate, sometimes to demotivate, often we tell stories to keep history alive”.
Vishal Bhardwaj said that stories can be about anything — a character, an incident, even a location. “But what’s most important to me is the resolution of a story, the climax. It’s easy to make the first two acts interesting. But, jab patte khulne lagte hain tab pata chalta hai kahani mein kitni depth hai,” he said.
All brilliant and smart stuff, but the lead actors of this session were Javed and Gulzar. Professional rivals both, but one a gentle and self-deprecating genius, and the other a flamboyant, trumpet-tongued commercial diva.
First was Akhtar’s turn. He said, our narrative form is “not invented, it’s inherited, from Ramlila, Krishan Lila and nautanki, with some influences of Victorian theatre. That’s why even in our Urdu-Farsi theatre, if hero was Marcus and heroine Helen, she would say, ‘Saiyan abhi nahin aaye’.”
The structure of Hindi cinema story, he said, is 3,000-3,500-years-old, and it has survived because there is magic in this structure. “Hindi cinema is the only cinema in the world that has been able to stand the onslaught of Hollywood... Ours is the structure of a novel, it is not a short story. But, with the younger generation being exposed to and influenced by Western cinema and literature, which has a short story structure, this structure is changing... They are embarrassed about songs so they are relegating them to the background... But we have been brought up as a nation on sagas and epics... jab tak do-teen generation ki kahani na ho, hum ko maza nahin aata.”
“Jaise,” he went on, “ek subah ek railway station pe ek ladka aur ladki aate hain, train ka intezar kar rahe hain. Sham ko train unki bhi aayi, inki bhi aayi, aur donon alag-alag chale gaye. Ab hamein yeh nahin jachta.”
The mike then passed to Gulzar, who said, “I like short stories... Ab woh donon jo platform pe baithe hue the, woh kaise wahan pahunche, woh apne-aap mein ek kahani hai.”
“The boy has been thrown out of his house, and the girl has run away. Both are at the station, waiting, and it seems they are in love and will leave together. But, going by today’s reality, the girl is sitting there, thinking, he doesn’t have a job, I will have to work. This means, I will have to take care of myself and him. Toh hua yun, ki jab do trains aayin, woh usme chali gayi, aur woh usmein.”
The crowd roared with laughter and claps, and Javed Akhtar, perhaps forgetting that Gulzar’s Ijaazat had begun at a train station with a man and a woman in the waiting room, joined to cheer Gulzar, and immediately started narrating the story of the hare and the tortoise, adding a twist in the end.
But it was too late. The nimble samurai had won this round with one delicate strike. The Ramlila swordsman, as they say in Hindi, hawa main talwar chala rahe the.