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Edited copy of this article was published in the OPEN Magazine, Dec 25-31, 2013 edition


Read the article here




From Bharuch, Gujarat:


“There is going to be a speech,” observed one of the three youths outside the mosque doors, leaning against his Hero Honda. In lane adjacent to the mosque, plastic chairs were being arranged in two rows facing each other. The youth stole a look at the tea that the local vendor had sponsored for the gathering, gulping it down in one swift motion from what looked like a thimble-sized cup. Though unsure of why the village square was abuzz, the trio hung back.

The evening on December 2 wasn’t typical of Nabipur, a village in Bharuch district of Gujarat. The fleeting chill of November had receded for a brief while, gearing up for a much stronger return. As people emerged out of the mosque after their last namaaz for the day, few made way for their homes. They waited in clumps of twos and threes in the narrow alleys around the mosque, the bigger of the two in the hamlet with a Muslim majority.

At the heart of the hubbub, Haji Dilawar Yakub, resident of Bharuch city, readied himself for the much-rehearsed speech. Even as he smiled through the empty courtesies with the village elders, 48-year-old Dilawar was painfully conscious of the fact that the word of the event hadn’t knocked many doors. It was one of the meetings that were hastily put together on the last minute, a let-down after the previous day when a crowd of over 2,000 had gathered at Valan village chowk.

At around 8.20 pm, his associate Ibrahim Baji took to the narrow space between the rows of chairs and cleared his throat. Slowly, a hush enveloped the crowd consisting of a hundred odd men to accommodate Baji’s sombre address. A woman in a hijab emerged along with her daughter from the balcony overlooking the street. Mohalla shopkeepers peered from between the curtains of shampoo sachets and chips’ packets or leaned over their counter for a better view. As the adults stood in rapt attention, their children grew increasingly restless and started shifting weight from one foot to the other.

“Friends, we know of what happened in Sansrod village on Eid,” said Ibrahim, referring to the communal scuffles triggered by an episode of cow slaughter in the village 13 kilometres down the highway that links the two villages. “We are here to ensure that such incidents don’t happen again.”

A day after the incident, every newspaper had carried reports of a violent mob clashing with an armed police. The reports had seared disturbing images in Dilawar’s mind. Unable to quell his unease, he had rung up some of his friends and acquaintances who decided to examine the tensions at its source. At Sansrod, an eerie silence waited for them the next day. Policemen stalked the streets, knocking on every door, demanding answers and explanations. Several men had fled the village, they were told, and their wives and children were refusing to open doors.

“There is a chapter in Macbeth,” Dilawar told me later, referring to the Shakespearean tragedy. 
“It’s called ‘Coming Events Cast their Shadows Before’. In the days leading to Eid, I had felt increasingly anxious at the reports of Muslims transporting cattle getting harassed by gaurakshaks (cow-protectors). After coming back to Bharuch, we decided that there was only one way to end the constant harassment.” On October 26, after numerous discussions and deliberations, they formed Gau Hifazat Samiti with Dilawar at the helm. Ever since, they have been hopping villages and educating people about the consequences of cow slaughter. The 15 person strong team consists entirely of Muslims, the community frequently chastised for indulgence in cow slaughter for religious reasons.

From their first ever session in Pariej village of Bharuch, the members have come a long way. In their 37th session in Nabipur, it was Baji who went first, introducing himself and the fellow members of the committee: Mushtaq Gaurji, Maulvi Lukman Bhutia and the President of the committee. Theirs was a one point agenda, he said – to promote religious harmony and peaceful coexistence between both Hindus and Muslims.

“You cannot please Allah by hurting those around you. Hindus consider cow a holy animal. Even if we don’t sacrifice a cow, we have alternatives in goats and buffaloes. All we say is, don’t eat, don’t sell and don’t slaughter,” said Dilawar as he wrapped up the meeting after about 50 minutes. “Now I would like to know what you think about this.”  


***


This collage of pictures, claimed to have been taken after the Sansrod incident, is made by DeshGujarat.com. The website, in turn, claims to have taken these images from a local Gujarati newspaper


Two months earlier, on the morning of October 16, a loudspeaker mounted on the top of a minaret in Sansrod sprang to life. The clerics of the only mosque in the village in Vadodara district had begun their Eid-ul-Adha prayers. Being a Muslim dominated village, the festive vibe was all-pervading. The residents, decked up in their finest clothes, were gearing up for the traditional meat feast. Not far from the mosque, off the mouth of the lane leading to Sansrod, a slaughter house was getting ready for ‘qurbani’, the ritual sacrifice in commemoration of Prophet Ibrahim's own.

Roughly 20 kilometres from Sansrod, in a part of Karjan taluka, the situation was more frenzied. In the courtyard of the local police station, about 40 policemen were readying themselves for a raid. Out came the jeeps and out came the lathis. Soon, two teams led by with 24 armed men were cruising down National Highway 8 in the direction of Sansrod. Tailing those vehicles was Jatin Vyas, a self-appointed gorakhsak (cow protector) and a part of the religious organization Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP).

The team reached the village around 9.30 am. The policemen marched straight to the slaughterhouse. They didn’t have to look too hard for what they were tipped off about. At the entrance lay carcasses of two calves, entrails et al, blood-soaked soil bearing testimony to a violation of the state law banning cow slaughter. The men went straight in and took the guilty butchers into custody.

What followed, according to newspaper reports, was a livid mob had clashed with the cops, six of whom were injured even as one of the vehicles was torched. At the end of the mayhem, 125 villagers were booked for rioting and 76 cows, as it was claimed, were rescued. The village was combed for the next couple of days for troublemakers. In the official version of events, the defiance of locals would appear to be the cause of violence.

Narratives differ depending on who you speak to. Karjan circle police inspector (CPI) Sudarshansingh Vala told me that the police took utmost caution not to injure anyone even as the villagers attacked them with ploughs and swords. However, consensus can be established among all quarters till the point the policemen took butchers into custody.

“Things soured when the mob spotted Vyas,” said Abdul Quiyum. The slight, elderly Quiyum, known as ‘Masterji’ in his part of town, is the general secretary of Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, a religious organisation that works towards the welfare of Muslims. Sansrod is bang opposite Palej, the town he lives in.

“When the police reached the slaughterhouse, the policemen dragged the butchers out and rained lathis on them. At this time, a few villagers who were returning to their houses happened to see this. They moved closer to take a stock of the situation. The police doled out a few blows to them too,” said Quiyum. As the tempers flared, an alert villager from Sansrod informed Quiyum. Within minutes, he had kicked his motorcycle to life and rushed to the village.

That cows were slaughtered was nothing new for the villagers, claims Quiyum. But when the police started beating the civilians, it had an instant alienating effect. Word spread that the policemen were roughing up even the innocents. Eid celebration was replaced by simmering anger and a mob gathered at the place. With the sensitivity of a troll, the police lobbed tear gas shells to disperse the mob. But the situation was already out of hand. The mob had realized who had orchestrated the raid.

“A few days earlier, Vyas had himself sold about 160 cows to the butchers. People know of his reputation. That’s the strategy among gorakshaks – to make money and target Muslims at the same time. On one hand, he makes deals sitting in an auto on the highway and then comes to ruin our festival citing cow slaughter,” Quiyum echoed the sentiment fuming in the air.

The folder he had handed me contained numerous letters he has written to various governmental authorities and law-enforcing agencies of the state and the Centre. The letters are rife with incidents quoting the harassment of Muslims on the pretext of cow slaughter, the involvement of gorakshaks and Hindu right-wing organizations like Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal in promoting cow slaughter. 


***


Time and again, the practice of cow slaughter has been used to rake up communal sentiments across India. The appeal transcends class and caste barriers, instantly leading to formation of two warring factions: vulnerable Hindus vs anti-social elements, implying, in more cases than not, Muslims. Now eyeing the Prime Ministerial post, the reigning CM of Gujarat Narendra Modi has frequently revisited the issue over the years. Whether it is BJP rallies in Mangalore in May, Nandgaon of Rajasthan and Khandwa of Madhya Pradesh in November or his home-base Gandhinagar in February, the battle-cries ring similar: of Congress (a party frequently accused of minority appeasement by BJP) promoting ‘pink revolution’.

For Modi, it’s only ideological homecoming. When it comes to crusading against cow slaughter, Gujarat has always had a chip on its shoulder. Right from 1954, the state has had a complete ban on the slaughter of cow and its progeny under Gujarat Animal Preservation Act. In August 2011, members of Maldhari community staged massive protests on the grounds of illegal cow slaughter taking place across the state. An indigenous tribe in Gujarat, Maldharis – literally, ‘owners of livestock’ – had then alleged that the culling took place in cahoots with the police. After two months of relentless agitations, the Act was amended in October to include a ban on transportation of animals for slaughter. A six month jail term was increased to seven years and the fine was increased by fifty times up to Rs. 50,000, applicable as per the gravity of offence. This, in spite of beef being the largest consumed meat in India, as a study conducted by United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation shows.

In spite of the law giving more teeth to the administration, it had little impact on the incidents of cow slaughter. “Nobody is really interested in cow protection,” Ram Puniyani, a prominent human rights activist, told me over the phone in early December. “Organizations like VHP and Bajrang Dal try to extort money in the name of go-raksha. When the law was passed, religion was only used as a pretext. There were a range of political and economic reasons behind it. In fact, Gujarat hasn’t showed any reduction in incidents of cow slaughter than any other Indian state.”

Puniyani, who has extensively researched and written about the issue, said that there have also been instances where dead cows have been picked up and Muslims have been accused of bovicide. Often, polarisation is done through word-of-mouth propaganda or through pamphlets. 

“It’s a case of vote-bank politics. Most of the gaushalas (cow shelters) across the country are ill-equipped. A person running a gaushala once told me how several of such shelters themselves give away the cows they cannot accommodate. But the communal forces only target Muslims. As a result, they are always on the defensive,” he said.


A scrap dealer by profession, Jatin Vyas comes with a chequered past. Accused in a couple of cases of extortion and kidnapping, he is best known among those I spoke to in context of a similar high-profile incident of cow slaughter. Back then, the place was Tankaria and the year 2002; three days shy of Godhra riots. The common thread in both occasions: Vyas had acted on the eve of Eid.

“Before you ask me anything, tell me, are you going to take a positive angle or negative angle?” Vyas asked me over the phone in the third week of November. I had only introduced myself and the scope of the article. “I ask because people speak to butchers and print wrong things,” he said, citing a regional newspaper that is known to do so.

Based in Vadodara, Vyas has been active in the field since past 15 years. Gaurakhsa is a voluntary activity without any legal recognized or an umbrella organization, though many of them hail from right-wing groups like VHP and Bajrang Dal. Vyas calls their actions as those done out of goodness of heart. Most of the vehicles carrying animals come from Rajasthan. Ergo, most of the crackdowns take place on the highways along the state border. It’s a common practice among the volunteers to inform the police about the leads they get and accompany them to the spot, claims Vyas. This is ostentatiously done so that the rescued animals can be escorted to animal shelters, locally called panjrapols. Vyas refused to discuss his informers, referring those who had given him the heads up in Sansrod as, “They were just some nice Muslims from Sansrod.”

“The police stop the trucks we have been informed about. Almost always, we find that there are some 20-40 cows stacked together in these vehicles.”

“But how do you know they are being carried for slaughter?”

“But this is still a case of animal cruelty. Then we ask the drivers if they are taking them to qatalkhana (slaughterhouse). They say, yes. That’s how we know.”

I expressed my disbelief at the simplicity of the exercise. “Try coming to the field and you will know,” he replied.

Vyas denied any possibility of their being any racket with police, cow shelters and gaurakshaks being hand-in-glove, calling it a tactic of maligning those working for the cause. “There might be corruption in other areas but there just cannot be any when it comes to cows. A cow is a mother,” he reasoned.

For all his denials, numerous locals and activists say that the modus operandi of the racket is “common knowledge”, even if few efforts have been made so far to document it.

“I have received numerous complaints from activists about the gorakshaks being involved in such incidents. While the investigations are ongoing, the application has been filed based on hearsay. With Jatin Vyas, we are taking his criminal past into consideration,” DSP Sandip Singh, who manages the rural Vadodara, told me in December over the phone. He added that the complainants, however, didn't have any proofs to back their claims.

Singh has acted upon numerous cases of cow slaughter over the years. He stated that the number of cases filed about cow slaughter has showed significant decrease in the recent times. “One of the reasons that such incidents take place is the ignorance of the law. Those involved are mostly from the lower middle class. Their livelihood is based completely from such activities. So when there is a crackdown, they oppose it,” he said. Singh denied any knowledge of gorakshaks or cow-shelters being involved in facilitating the racket.


***




Haji Dilawar Yakub (centre), the President of Gau Hifazat Samiti, with his associates Lukman Bhuta (L) and Mehmoob Master (R)


Located on the banks of the river Narmada, Bharuch is the neighbouring district to Vadodara. The heavily industrialized city, famous for its salted peanuts, houses a population of over 4 lakh. Near the outskirts of the city, in nondescript building located at a particularly noisy railway intersection, Yakub runs his scaffolding business.

When I met him for the first time in the third week of November, he was waiting for me with four other members of the committee. His associates – middle aged men are mostly from the city and neighbouring villages – were all dressed in the traditional attire of skullcaps and kurta-pyjama in varying degrees of white. There are professionals, engaged in insurance companies, municipal schools and other jobs. They let Yakub do most of the talking, with a nod or a murmur of assent every now and then. An engineer by qualification, Yakub is visually impaired, although that does not keep him from reading and occasionally quoting a shayari or Shakespeare to make a point. 

“It’s no secret. In Gujarat, the ban on cow slaughter is only as effective as the liquor ban,” he said. 

“This issue remains pertinent because no matter which quarter supplies cows for slaughter, there is always a Muslim at the end of the supply chain. The community of butchers are almost all Muslims. Our religion regards beef of cow as halal (fit for consumption), so there is always a market among our community.”

The economics of owning cows and bullocks (from the cow family) has become knotty since the Green Revolution. The cattle-owing class has always been farmers who used cows for milk and bullocks for transport and tilling their lands. As tractors and trucks started intruding in the space traditionally held by animals, bullocks started getting redundant. Over time, slaughterhouses remained the only place raising a bullock would promise any returns.

Locals say there is more to the incidents of cow slaughter than blatant disregard of the law. In a visit to Panoli, 36-year-old farmer Hanif Haslot told me that it’s a simple case of economics. Muslims are under a religious obligation to sacrifice an animal for Eid. In Gujarat, the standard practice is to sacrifice a goat, a bullock or a buffalo. Since cow slaughter is outlawed, the demand for other animals shoots up, leading to shortage and high prices.

“During Eid, goat meat is available for Rs.400/kg. On the other hand, bullock and buffalo meat come at Rs. 120/kg. You have to pick between breaking the law of the state and breaking the codes of religion. It’s not always an easy choice,” said Haslot.

Panoli was one of the villages covered by the Samiti in the latter half of November. However, that session, like each of the 36 sessions held in various parts of Bharuch, Surat and Vadodara district, didn’t involve discussions about the racket or the economics. Nevertheless, the locals I spoke to were extremely suspicious about my intentions, hesitant to speak of what has always been said in whispers.

“Besides, that’s not the point of the sessions,” said Yakub. “The racket is an area of common knowledge but we don’t have any evidence to prove it. We tell people what they should do, what they shouldn’t and why it is for their own good.”

I asked if they have ever tried to make efforts to get any more evidence than verbal testimonies.

Yakub gave me a wry smile. “Mera munshi bhi qatil hai, kya faisla dega woh mujhe?


***



As Dilawar finished his address with an open ended invitation, the crowd burst into an enthusiastic applause. The sarpanch seated in the last row stood up. “If it happens, we will make sure that we call the police to take him away.” Another round of applause followed along with several murmurs of agreement, this time waking up the only person from the front row who hadn’t raised his hand.

A day after the session, we are at his office again discussing the previous night and the way ahead. I ask him about sentiments palpable in the audiences he addresses.“The main problem is that Muslims are still afraid,” he says, “those who aren’t guilty, even more so, for they fear they might be picked up for something that wasn’t their fault to begin with.”
“Every now and then, people walk up to us and congratulate us for the message we are trying to spread. Often, they come from neighbouring villages and want us to come to theirs. We tell them it’s not possible for us to visit each and every settlement. When we go to a place, we expect those in attendance to tell ten more people, till it becomes a movement and Gujarat becomes a model state.”
  


Published in OPEN magazine in Dec 25-31, 2013, edition

Read the article here


                                                                                                     Courtesy: Ritesh Uttamchandani / OPEN



Shubhashish Bhutiani is anxious at the prospect of talking about himself for 90 minutes. “What do you want to know,” the 22-year-old filmmaker asks. “Seedha saadha ladka hoon main (I am a simple guy).” It is after nearly two weeks of email exchange that I have managed to pin him down to a date and time. But the chase isn’t without its reasons. Shubhashish has been flooded with requests from film festivals and has been coordinating with several quarters – cast, crew, festival managers and his producer parents – to get his debut film Kush maximum visibility.

Getting your film shortlisted in the Academy Awards does that to you, I suppose.

As we speak on Skype, I can see exhaustion writ large on his face; the contents of his white coffee cup having to work extra hard to restore his watery eyes. It is the second week of December and I have caught him is at the apartment he shares with a friend in New York, in a room where the walls are bare and only his bookcase is visible. He has had a long night at the South Asian Film Festival where Kush was premiered the previous evening. As we speak, he admits to counting days till he comes back to Mumbai, his hometown.

“I wanna just read a book or something,” he says. “Maybe watch a movie. I am tired. Maybe I will just go to Goa.”

It might just be a much-deserved break for the youngster who has spent every one of his earlier vacations working on a film set since the age of 16. A graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York where he had been studying filmmaking for last four years, Shubhashish has devoted a better part of last one and a half years in a single-minded pursuit of perfecting his 25 minute thesis. Set in 1984, ‘Kush’ is a time capsule to the turbulent times that saw massive culling of Sikhs after the assassination of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Lavishly shot and crisply edited, the bittersweet drama unfolds in the hills of North India, the geography established only by the accent of the characters. It is the tale of a teacher struggling to protect the 17 children she had taken on a field trip from communal frenzy that endangered the life of her only Sikh student, Kush.

‘Kush’ is largely a true story, says the director, based on the experiences of his economics professor. The incident was mentioned only in passing in one of her classes she took at Woodstock School in Mussoorie. Though it had lodged itself in his mind then, it was only a year later in 12th grade that Shubhashish realized the cinematic appeal of the story. Since then, he has been chewing upon the idea, always one step short of taking the ambitious project head on.

Shot on the fringes of Mumbai and Lonavla, the shoot took all of five days in January earlier this year. The next five months were spent at the chopping board, assembling the film together. “We were rolling all the time,” says Shubhashish, which is why the editing was a gargantuan task. In September, the 70th International Venice Film Festival happened.


***




The trailer of 'Kush', the short film selected in the top 10 for the Academy Awards, 2014


On the bookshelf, kept between an 8 mm film projector and a box that looks like a small treasure chest, is a typewriter. Is he old-school in his approach to writing? Not really. “Sometimes, I do it for fun. I feel cool when I do it,” says Shubhashish.

Shubhashish is at ease with how he has shaped up, accepting his insecurities without any attempts at cover ups. He is as much in awe of the works of Wong Kar Wai and Asghar Farhadi as he is of the chick-lit Mean Girls. “I love Mean Girls. I can quote Mean Girls. It’s great filmmaking.” Even as he says that, you know it’s not just the intellectual in him being gallant about his choices.

In his days in the United States, the running joke was to make him the stereotype that is the flavour of the season. Over the years, he has answered to all kinds of names – Slumdog, Pi and now, Miss America. “All of us are the biggest racists with each other,” he laughs, referring to his college friends. All bases were touched when in the graduation ceremony, out of nowhere, the speakers burst into the song ‘Jai Ho’.

Having been a writer for several years, filmmaking was only a natural progression for Shubhashish. At the age of 16, Vishal Bharadwaj took him under his wing for a brief while on the sets of Kaminey. The sheer amount of work was an eye-opener, breaking any romantic perceptions he had. But that only spurred him on and a year later, he directed a cast and crew of 100 people in a stage-adaptation of Peter Pan in the final year of his school. Seeing this, his parents decided to approach career choice in a different trajectory from the standard convention of Asian parenting.

“My dad said, math to aata nahi hai, science nahi kar sakta, history mein kuch kar nahi sakte, economics mein duba dega. Filmein bana (you can’t manage mathematics, science, history or economics. Go make films),” he chuckles. “But honestly, it’s all I have known. Every time I have spoken to my dad, even when I was I was a kid, we used to talk about movies. I like working with people. So it was right up my alley.”

Shubhashish doesn’t think much about all the aces his film has been scoring. Even as Kush has festivals at Moscow, Tokyo and Milan lined up for the next two months, he has a dismissive take on things: “I’m just lucky right now.”

“I have seen the movie so many times... last night I saw it again at the festival. I couldn’t watch it. I saw so many mistakes in it. If you ask me what I was doing yesterday, I was editing the film. I do that because if I see flaws, I don’t want to ignore it.”

Back in school, Shubhashish would never have imagined to find himself at the geek table. But college changed that. “Everywhere I went I had a backpack with me. I had a laptop, I had two books at all times – I could be bored of one book but I’d have another option. I’d always have 5-6 DVDs. That was like my woman’s bag with all the essentials in it. That’s what New York provided me – I didn’t have to think of anything but movies,” he says.

Kush took him almost 2 years of writing while simultaneously battling the other demons. It wasn’t just the budgetary constraints but the logistics and the sheer scale of the movie. He was bent upon getting everything right but he was still short of a cinematographer to compliment his vision. A month into his thesis, he found the perfect fit.

“One day, I was moving from the dorms to my first apartment in New York. I had packed my suitcases and it started raining. The apartment was 5-6 blocks away. The bags were heavy so you are dragging it all the way because, paise bachane hai taxi ke (to save money on a taxi). Then I saw a car pull up in the front of the dorm. (Inside) I see this guy who I know from the elevators. I said, ‘Look, I will give you 10 bucks or 20 bucks or two beers or something, can you drop me to my apartment?’ He looked irritated but dropped me to my place.”

“That’s the first time I met Mike Mcsweeny,” says Shubhashish. “He is the man I call on a rainy day.”


***


“The first time he told me the story, I told him we should abandon it,” Sanjay Bhutiani, his father, producer and the owner of the production house Red Carpet Moving Pictures, told me a few days later. We were in his 7th floor apartment in Jogeshwari, sitting in the living room of his 2 BHK house. The winged lion trophy won for the Best Short Film at Venice looked regally at us from the showcase, accompanied by various other awards his son has won for direction and acting. Shubhashish is resolutely looking away; visibly awkward at the full-throttled praise both his parents have been lavishing on him for quite some time now.

“I loved the script. But if we were talking of so many people, we couldn’t afford it,” explains Sanjay. But Shubhashish was bent on making it happen. It took three grants from his cinema school and a generous contribution from his grandfather that made the project costing around Rs. 10 lakh to unfurl. As he started landing filmmaking grants that his college gave to select students to fund their projects, Sanjay had a change of heart. The prospect of flying down Sweeny from the US, having a lights technician from Sweden and assembling a cast and crew consisting of over 60 people was taken in a stride.

With his parents having matched up to every one of his birthday wish-lists over the years, from a walkman to a portable DVD player to an iPod to a camera and finally, his labour of love – Kush, it is of little surprise when Shubhashish says, “I am very fortunate.” The hiccups to realizing his passion are confined to his high school days, when his hostel warden used to keep taking away his portable DVD player. “I don’t know how we were caught every time. He would keep it till the (semester) break. I would beg him but he would never give it back. They kept it in a safe they had for confiscated goods.”

“That’s my struggle story,” he grins. “It was an endless Tom and Jerry going on.”

For now, the family has their minds locked on January 16, 5 pm IST, when the final nominations of Oscars would be announced. So far, so smooth. But the journey has only just begun.




Published in OPEN magazine in December 25-31, 2013, edition.


Read the article here                                           


                                                       Courtesy: Greg King / Wilbur Sargunaraj

YouTube celebrity Wilbur Sargunaraj performing at a concert in Toronto, Canada, in 2010 


Late in the morning of 1 December, at a postcard-perfect bayview restaurant in Mumbai, a young mother walked over to a man a few tables away. Her son’s a big fan of his, she said. Would he allow a picture? “Of course,” the tall man with a French beard beamed. Together, they walked over to a side of the patio and posed for the camera-phone. One could see that the kid looked more flustered than happy. His mother, on the other hand, looked delighted. It was difficult to say who the real fan was.

On seeing this, a woman having a brunch of Caesar salad with her husband at the table next to mine turned to me. “Who is he?” she asked curiously.

He was a man I had been following for almost three years, a man who has one of the most popular YouTube channels run by an Indian. The answer should have been on the tip of my tongue. But how does one condense the hysteria accumulated over years of online presence into a line or two?

“That is Wilbur Sargunaraj,” I said. “He is the man who teaches you how to do your business on an Indian toilet.” It was an honest answer, but I had to reassure her that I wasn’t joking.

My answer is perhaps not a unique introduction. And to field exactly such queries, he has made a helpful video titled, ‘Who is Wilbur Sargunaraj’.

“Is he just the toilet man who shows people how to use the Eastern latrine on YouTube?” the voiceover asks. The voice refers the internet surfer to one of the most popular videos Wilbur has made and starred in: ‘How to use an eastern latrine’. It features a 33-year-old Wilbur, his pants well up to his waist, entering a typical Indian potty and demonstrating the right way to squat, wash and clean. “We take some water, we take the left hand and then we pour,” he says with a deadpan expression.

Its success is evident in over 1.3 million views, not to mention the inspired spin-offs that describe the correct way to use European and Japanese toilets. Some of his other videos are titled, ‘How to tie the lungi’, ‘How to eat with the hands’, ‘How to light firecrackers in India’, ‘How to do the shaving Tamil Nadu style’ and ‘How to drive Aston Martin car in Oman’.

A native of Madurai, Wilbur, now 36, knows where his appeal lies. The only child of a couple working for an NGO for the elderly, Wilbur was schooled in several cities including Varanasi, Darjeeling and Kolkata before he settled in Madurai. It was back in 2007, during a stint in the hospitality industry, that he started releasing a series of videos that he clubs under the tagline, ‘Making the common extraordinary’. It’s a broad term and Wilbur has made a career of it. In his repertoire are tutorials that teach you how to ride a bullock cart, pluck a coconut and even carry a baby like Africans do (“The baby is folding!” as he puts it).

Then you have Wilbur’s music videos, ranging from the wacky to those bordering on the sublime, like an ode to ‘Chicken 65’ or his irreverent ‘Love Marriage’, each honoured with more than a million views on the internet. Auto-tune plays a considerable role in Wilbur’s success. As does coconut oil. String all that together and you could find yourself at Artisans Centre, an intimate art gallery in south Mumbai, where I found myself catching the premiere of Simple Superstar on a November evening, a biopic that is part autobiography, part road-trip and part instructional-video. It was an eye-opener.


***



     The poster of Simple Superstar, a biopic that is part autobiography, part road trip and part                                                                               instructional video


They say a camera always adds a few kilos. In our simple superstar’s case, it was the opposite—unlike the lanky man in his videos, I was face-to-face with someone well-built and broad-shouldered at the screening. Yes, the bushy moustache was still there. He was dressed in a white shirt, dark sunglasses and trousers ending in a pair of Bata chappals. He had traded his black trousers for what he called ‘lungi-pants’, a pair of pyjamas with a texture typical of a lungi.

“Everyone was calling me a superstar,” Wilbur explained. “I wanted to do away with this notion. What is a star? A person who is different from a common person. So I said, call me a ‘superstar’, but realise that I am a simple person—and that simple is the new cool.”

Cinematically, the biopic is not something to write home about. Starring Wilbur Sargunaraj as himself, it’s a journey of a man who has built an identity for himself by reconnecting his roots and helping others in the process. Up to that point, be it his music or instructional videos, with Wilbur, what you saw was what you got. This movie, however, is a departure from his wafer-thin style of narration and attempts to pick on bullies and the pan-India obsession with fair skin, climaxing with a feel-good message of following your own dreams.

He is no Oprah, but the Wilbur package comes with helpful nuggets on life. My favourite is his spontaneous discourse in a video released last year that probes poverty. After trawling through slums and sewage canals, speaking to everyone from roadside shopkeepers to pavement dwellers, Wilbur lands at the house of a farmer in a small village. But this time, he is not interested in vox pop. “Many people are striving to be very very rich. Even poor people want to be rich. The rich want to be richer,” he begins, before the camera faces a couple of goats tied to a pillar, bleating merrily. “But in life, you should be content as these two goats. See how content they are. They are happy with their life, happy with their food, happy with their house right here. So be like a goat.”

It’s not easy to put a finger on why Sargunaraj attracts such a vast following with his thick accent, amateurish videos and lyrics that usually take a line and flog it throughout the song (the track Please Check My Blog repeats this plea 63 times over four minutes). But it doesn’t matter in Wilburville, where everything is ‘very very first class’, be it the lives of people living in slums or the Mediterranean cuisine he has had for breakfast.

***


In person, Wilbur is nothing like the buffoon one is led to picture by his antics on the web. His fortunes took to the sky when he decided to go online. Since then, he has accumulated over 29,400 followers on his Facebook page. He is, of course, a YouTube view millionaire. Outspoken and articulate, he underlines the mantra to his success lucidly: “I really don’t think too much.”

“Nothing gets shelved,” he says. “Something will just hit me and if I think I can do it, I will. If I look at a theme and go, ‘Oh, that’s funny’, I go ahead and do that. It’s all about having fun.”

This results in random flights of fancy leading his way. When he thinks of a concept, he sees it through. There is no script to his self-help videos, only the seed of an idea. That’s how he decided to make a video on how to tie a veshti (the Tamilian dhoti), a “tube-like structure”, in the middle of Times Square in New York. The idea of juxtaposing rural Indian life with hi-glam Western modernity was irresistible, and he flew to the Big Apple to execute it.

His tutorials are the products of one man flying solo. But who manages the camera? “Common people on the street shoot the videos. I randomly go up to them, put [the camera] in their hand and say, ‘Please shoot them.’ I don’t even have a tripod. My mother shot ‘How to eat with hands’. She had to hold the camera for six minutes.” Apart from being a one-take artist, Wilbur is an auteur of sorts—conceiving ideas, editing footage, composing music and posting videos, albeit minus a team of minions to get him his filter coffee shaken not stirred.

It would be misleading to say Wilbur makes a living of peddling Exotic India. He also uploads clips with instructions on how to navigate an aeroplane or negotiate some mean Michael Jackson moves. A cursory glance at his YouTube channel reveals people crowding his comments box with criticism for perpetuating Indian stereotypes. For Wilbur, however, it is about adapting to a new life without losing pride in one’s identity.

“It’s not like I have set out to take Tamil Nadu to the world,” he says, “My roots inspire me to write the songs I sing. In my childhood, I used to visit coconut plantations. There used to be lots of cobras there. That’s where I got the song Cobra Cobra from. Then one day I thought of making a video on climbing such trees to pick a coconut, so I did.”

Robert Stephens, a friend and the co-producer of Simple Superstar, is a Canadian architect who now lives in Mumbai. It took all of three hours for Stephens to decide that he wanted to fund the biopic. It was an investment without any hope of financial returns, he confesses. “Wilbur Sargunaraj is a nobody,” he says. And yet, Stephens dipped into his life savings to fund the entire post-production process. “Before I met him in person, all I knew of him was through his videos. I didn’t know the script of the movie. But I knew that this man had a message that can change a life, a confidence that is out of this world.”

It is this confidence that has taken Wilbur from his debut concert atop a truck in Madurai to packed auditoriums in Toronto. And throughout the journey, he has kept up his campaign to promote cultural intelligence. Years after he made his most famous video, it’s common for people to approach him and ask how to use an Indian-style latrine.

‘What if we are left handed, Wilbur?’ said a recent comment on his ‘How to eat with the hands’ page. Trick question. Wilbur has already said that it’s impolite to wash yourself with your right hand as that’s what you use to greet people. Pat came his reply, ‘Use the gloves ;)’, smiley wink well in place.