(Ram Gopal Varma's Book Cover)
“I would say that the media is more dangerous than
terrorists because it attacks under the guise of safeguarding values.” One may
conclude that this statement is by one of those angst ridden anti-right wing
seditionists who has just walked out an Arnab Goswami shouting match at the
prime time news hour in the Times Now Channel. Surprisingly, this is the
concluding sentence of a book of memoires written by the much maligned film
director Ram Gopal Varma. Published in 2016, this page turner titled ‘Guns and
Thighs- The Story of My Life’ is full of incisive observations which only a
dare devil insider could talk about the Indian film industry (read Bollywood) which
is controlled by absolute business interests than emotional quotients of the people
involved. What makes this book a good reading is the emotional no-bar-hold-ness
of Ram Gopal Varma, who started off as a video cassette lending shop owner and
ended as an ace director of the Indian film industry.
This fifty films old director is fifty four years old now.
Like all the fathers who brought up their sons in 1960s and 70s, Ram Gopal
Varma’s father too thought that he should have a college education, which would
fetch him a good job and eventually settle him down as a good, law abiding
householder, exactly like him. However, Varma had a different plan about his
life. As he was studying in an engineering college in Vijjayawada, he spent
most of the time in movie theatres and streets. As the legend goes, he learnt
the ropes of surviving in the big bad world from the movies than from the
university. From the very beginning he was hooked to the workings of gangsters
and policemen. He hung out with local goons and in college, he himself became a
gang leader by keeping six of his well-built fellow students at the edge of
their sense. Despite Varma’s diminutive figure they thought he was a born
leader because he could make them believe that if one turns against him, he had
five of them stand for him. Sooner than later he realized that’s how
governments, politicians, policemen and the underworld kings worked. It was
simple yet a reliable method. Ram Gopal Varma, the film maker who has a special
appetite for underworld stories was born in college itself. He just needed the
right opportunity.
(Director Ram Gopal Varma)
Every week end I go to my favorite book store in Delhi with
a list of books to browse. I come out with none of them. Instead I will have something
like this book, which I have never thought of even existing. I was not aware of
Ram Gopal Varma’s books. But the chance meeting of such books always gives me a
different high. I have to confess that the best books I have picked up ever are
always out of chance meetings with them in some inconspicuous corner of a book
store. I take a fancy of these books like Varma’s because they are not the
regular writers but definitely they have something interesting to say. I have
to confess after reading this book by Varma that out of his fifty films, I have
seen only one so far! That’s ‘Company’ done in 2002, the launching pad for
Vivek Oberoi. I watched this movie not because I was so much a fan of Ajay
Devgun or the debutant Vivek Oberoi but because of the presence of Mohanlal,
one of my favorite actors from the Malayalam film industry in the movie as a
soft spoken police commissioner namely Sreenivasan. I wrote a very fulfilling
article (at least for me) at that in one of the leading journals in Malayalam
and even predicted a good future for both Mohanlal and Vivek Oberoi in the
Bollywood industry. Contrary to my predictions, Mohanlal settled back to his comfort
zone of Malayalam films and Vivek by wrongly choosing a series of movies
ejected himself out of the industry, despite his occasional efforts to stage a
coming back. Varma tried to re-launch Oberoi in his Rakta Charita in 2010 and
Mohanlal in the legendary Thakur’s role in ‘Ram Gopal Varma’s Aag’ in 2007,
both turned out to be box office disasters.
‘Guns and Thighs’ however is not a lamentation on the flops
that Varma has famously churned out from his stable. He has worked in the Telugu
industry with the stalwarts like Chiranjeevi, Nagarjuna, Venkatesh and so on,
and was also instrumental in launching many careers including that of Urmila
Mathondkar, J.D.Chakravarty, Vivek Oberoi and so on. He could easily cross over
to the Hindi movies because his way of story-telling was fresh and forceful. Varma
was game for trying out something extremely new, whether it was raw eroticism
or raw violence. While most of the Bollywood thrillers focused on the cop-thief
chase stories to a greater extent, Varma thought of the leisure times or the
scheming times of the cops and the thieves, or in other words what the
underworld kings, sharp shooters and the investigators did just before
committing a crime. Were they just normal people like us or they looked
different? Varma realized from newspapers and television that the
sharpshooters, rioters, killers, hit men and so on looked very ordinary.
Sometimes a gangster could live next door and you would never come to know
about his real identity until one day he is implicated in a heist or a hit. If
so, what did this ordinary looking people did when they were not hitting or
shooting? That’s why he came up with movies like Shiva, Satya and Company.
Varma was a hit maker.
(Company film poster)
Varma is very philosophical about many of life’s accidents
and chances. According to him a good failure is better a bad success. It all
depends on who talks about success and failure. If a successful person is
successful, he says, that there should be a reason. Somebody who aspires for
that kind of success should silently watch what makes the other successful and
if possible emulate and improvise upon the given. Varma has always been doing
that. He hates the ‘inbetweenists’. According inbetweenists are those people
who have a very flexible philosophy and always want to be in the right side of
things. They could be the nastiest people and most often they remain where they
are in their lives. Varma quirkily points out that what makes the successful
people successful because there are more inbetweenists in the world than the
real achievers. Inbetweenists always have an opinion on anything and
everything. And if that opinion goes absolutely wrong, they don’t have any
problem to go back on their stance and come up with some pedestrian philosophy
to explain why they are so. One cannot do nothing but agree with Varma.
The book progresses through various anecdotes both comic and
tragic but Varma never tries to judge any of them. He only judges once that too
his wife of that time for her insisting him to stay back at home for
celebrating her birthday than going for a recording in Chennai. One should listen
what Varma has to tell her in this matter: “I don’t celebrate my birthday in spite of
having achieved whatever little I have, whereas you have achieved nothing so
why do you want to celebrate your birth? If you think the mere fact that you
were born calls for celebration, don’t forget that when your parents had sex,
the last thing they would have had on their minds while doing it was sot
conceive you in particular. Your dad had a desire and your mom obliged, and it
was sheer accident that the particular spermatozoa which managed to enter your
mom’s womb just happened to be you. Your dad could alternatively have gone to a
prostitute and the particular spermatozoa through which that woman might have
conceived could have been you and you could have ended up in a brothel. In
effect, when you have absolutely no control over or no contribution to the
process of what, who and why someone gave you birth, why should you make such a
big deal about celebrating it?” Varma says further to us: Needless to say, she
slapped me. Let me quote further: “I believe that the obsession with birthdays
is primarily a function of the fear of most individuals have that their
existence might not matter to anybody else. So on that one particular day if an
X number of people greet them, it makes them feel stars for at least that day
and then they can wait like nobodies for another year to go by to become stars
for yet another day.”
(Cartoon on Varma's visit to the Taj Hotel with the CM on 26/11)
Does it sound too chauvinistic? But the truth is those who
have gone through this horrendous experience of their womenfolk bringing the
house down for forgetting their birthdays or greeting them on that day or even
taking them out for a dinner or buying them a new dress, know for sure that all
those go with a birthday thing of a non-achiever is total waste. Like Varma
says, one should celebrate whatever little they have achieved. Irrespective of
gender people should celebrate the days that made sense to them rather than
celebrating a birthday.
Coming back to the opening sentence of this essay, which
happened to be the closing sentence of the book, I would say that it was not
Varma’s views on the right wing media but on the media in general that is
hungry for making nothing out of something. On 26/11, when Varma visited the
Taj Mumbai where there was terrorist attack, along with the then Chief Minister
Vilasrao Desmukh and his son and film actor, Ritiesh Desmukh, the media went
hysteric saying that there were nefarious plans behind Varma’s visit with the
CM’s contingent. In fact, he says, he was tagging along and the places that
were shown to them were already been cleared of investigations and were already
shown in television for mass consumption. But the media, instead of discussing
vital issues pertaining to a horrible terrorists’ attack, spent many precious
hours discussing the inanities of Varma’s visit to the place. Let me conclude
my views in this book with the same sentence once again: “I would say that the
media is more dangerous than terrorists because it attacks under the guise of
safeguarding values.”
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