It was just another day. I happened to be in the company of a man called Haneef Lakdawalla at a film producer’s house. Haneef was the owner of Magnum Video, he had been in jail for the Mumbai 1992/1993 serial blasts case for five years. Talk was that he was very close to Dawood Ibrahim.
Out of curiosity and my obsessive tendency to know and understand the psychological aspects of criminals, I got talking to him. In the hour I spent in Haneef’s company he told me about how the underworld operates. Also, those were the days when the media was full of stories on the war between Dawood Ibrahim and Chota Rajan.
In that context, he told me, “So many people on both sides died because of the rivalry. They so desperately want to kill each other but Ramuji I am telling you this — even today if Dawood calls Rajan on the phone, and if Rajan is smoking a cigarette he will drop it and say ‘Haan! Dawood bhai!’ That is the ingrained respect he has. They hate each other because they love each other.”
Those words of Haneef triggered my film Company. The same words can probably inspire dozens of underworld stories which can keep me employed till my dying day. But similar rivalries and power struggles exist in any company, in any office including my own.
Everyone involved in work — good, bad or ugly — is an individual with a relative level of intelligence compared to the others.
But at the same time, some elements are common among those working in a group: ambition and the greed to reach the top. Although an office establishment may be working towards a single goal, its people are in constant conflict with one other. Result: politics at the workplace, frustration and jealousy.
In a normal company, if you make a serious mistake, you’ll be fired. In the underworld you will be fired at. In personal relationships too, there is a conflict, be it within the family or in a marriage. Two individuals will always have differences, they cannot possibly think alike and live alike. One may want a certain space of one’s own in a relationship or in marriage. When that space is denied, or grudged, either ego clashes or indifference lead to unpleasantness.
Commitment is facile word, it means nothing. At least I can’t understand its meaning, never have and perhaps never will. That’s why I like to think of myself as a loner.
Happiness to me means making as many films as I can as long as I live. As long as I am healthy and fit, can wake up in the mornings, do the kind of work that gives me a kick, I need no one and nothing. Fortunately for me, and maybe unfortunately for those who detest me, so far I have led my life on my own terms. I have never fallen ill, except perhaps for toothache. Then I bite back into my obsession with film-making, and the cavities are filled. It’s as simple as that.
Incidentally Haneef, the originator of Company, was shot dead a few months after I met him.
The last thing he told me or rather advised me about making a film like Company was not to waste my time doing dark films. Instead, he felt that I should make a romantic musical with music by Nadeem Sharavan. Perhaps he was bad company but for me that evening, he was perfect company.