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8:17 PM

India’s Short at the Oscars

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

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                                                                                                     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.



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12:19 AM

The YouTube Guru of Small Things

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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.


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11:47 AM

The Art of Storytelling

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As published in FPJ Weekend on November 10, 2013


                                                                                            Courtesy: Neha Mendiratta Khullar

Participant Anisha Sharma narrates her story 'The Insomniac' at the Tall Tales event held on September 28 at Studio X, Fort 



Do you have a story to tell? Not the one when a man walked into a bar with a Democrat, Republican and a polar bear. Not even the time you got high at a cocktail party and went around telling whoever would listen why ‘bubbles’ is a funny word. Stories that are more than snippets or a series of events where you lived the highest highs to the lowest lows; stories now seem like they were born to be told, ones that will pop out a chuckle or a plop out a tear at a moment you least expect it to.

“I have seven such stories,” says Michael Burns, a documentary filmmaker. At 36 years of age, you might wonder if Burns has led a particularly uneventful life. But on Friday, October 25, at a storytelling event ‘Tall Tales’ held at Studio X in Fort area, as a motley audience of hundred odd people heard Burns narrate the time he had was staring down the barrel of a revolver pointed at him, struggling to stifle his laughter because of the ridiculous engraving of a tree, a wild stallion, a hill and native-Americans on the handle of the gun, all doubts were laid to rest.

“There are stories that are just a list of things that happened,” Burns had told me a few days before he was to go on stage. “And then there are great stories.” At Tall Tales, a live storytelling initiative that Burns started in the month of June this year, the endeavour is to share such “great” stories that might come from just about anyone who is willing – be it your high school physics teacher or your regular dhobiwallah who fights crime by night. “You would be surprised at the range of unique experiences people have had and want to share,” said Burns.

Storytelling in itself is not a particularly new form of entertainment. However, most of what one encounters is cloaked and layered in various other art-forms: novels, poetry, dance et al. Tall Tales takes it back to the basics where all you have on you is a spotlight, a script if you need one, a little pre-performance grooming and a rapt audience, hanging on your every word. In such an ambiance, complete with wine and nibbles, stories spring from every strata and genre.

Last Saturday, for example, in his story titled ‘Tea and Me’ the bespectacled investment banker Anurag Byas narrated the time of his first rendezvous with a cuppa: “In my adolescence, I never drank tea. I had a belief that God grants your wishes if you give up stuff.” Over the next ten minutes, Byas went on to narrate how he finally managed to break the shackles of his “tea celibacy” and lead a life that involved downing more than 15,300 cups over the years.

“Back home, I used to listen to this public radio broadcast called ‘This American Life’,” said Burns, who hails from Connecticut region of United States. “In every show, they had stories based on the theme-of-the-week. That was the primary influence for Tall Tales.”

Other than the radio show, live storytelling – whether in the austere form or spoken word poetry – is quite a norm in various parts of the US. When he moved to Mumbai in 2011 with his partner, Burns found it striking that there were hardly such platforms in the city. When he had settled down in the city, his second job as a lecturer in English at YMCA going steady, he decided to collaborate with two of his friends Kaneez Surka, an improv actress, and Vishal Jadhani and launched Tall Tales. Contributors were invited from across the city. Burns curated and edited stories they submitted, drew from his own experience from the days he was an improv actor to train them before finally holding the first edition earlier this year.

Conceived as an occasional event, Tall Tales has snowballed into a bi-monthly. Stories, says Burns, are now received every other day. Each session features 4-5 storytellers, their narration ranging between 10-20 minutes. It has even caught the eye of the organisers of Mumbai Literature Festival that will be hosting some of them in their upcoming edition in December.

“When it comes to live storytelling, there is a direct relationship waiting for you in the audience. All you have to do is embrace it,” said Burns. The team has decided to take it up a notch and launch ‘Small Tales’ in the coming summer, aimed at children below 15 years of age.

Other than a distinct addition to the city’s culturescape, the initiative has gone a long way in enriching some of the participants’ lives. Take Rohit Nair who had never had any prior public speaking experience. Since June, he has already featured in three of the sessions, one of which was an encore. “I never knew I had this capacity of impromptu shenanigans,” he says, half-embarrassed. It’s no wonder that when Burns took to the stage on Saturday, Nair’s cheer rang the loudest – “Michael for President!”


To participate, email your story to story@mumbaistories.com or call 9769725776.

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11:23 PM

Vada Pav: Zara Hatke

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As published in OPEN Magazine on October 20, 2013.


                                                                  Courtesy: chowdersingh.com



The first bite reminds you of sambar. In the second, the sliced coconuts hit a home run. It is the usual potato stuffing, but with a distinct South Indian touch. By the time you finish, it’s hard to believe you just ate a vada pav.


The vada pav has come a long way over the last four decades. Today, it is as synonymous with the city of Mumbai as the sea. A typical vada pav consists of a potato patty dunked in gram flour, deep fried and served piping hot, nestled in a bun with some chutney. With time and a growing breed of entrepreneurs, a new pedigree of the snack has emerged over the years.


The South Indian vada pav in question is the brainchild of Nilesh Gupta, kitchen manager of a recently-shut shop in Ghatkopar. “Before I came up with such dishes,” he says, “I went on a tasting spree. Eventually, I realised that not a lot of innovation has gone into making a vada pav.” While he was in business, Gupta also sold a Jain vada pav made to suit that community’s dietary restrictions. Its patty was made of raw bananas, using a completely different palette of spices.


Though these flavours are quite unheard of, the concept isn’t. Chains like Jumbo King Vada Pav and Goli Vada Pav No.1 have been doing it for years. The vada pav sold at these chains range from the interesting to the bizarre, with Chinese, Punjabi and Western influences. There’s Goli Mix Veg Vada Pav with a patty made of green peas, carrots and beans and coated with crumbs. Corn Palak Jumbo King has a corn and spinach patty and is served with mayonnaise. The double decker Tandoori Paneer Jumbo King is served with Thousand Island sauce. The chains offer a mish-mash of other flavours, even a customised patty. But these innovations come at a price: as opposed to a roadside vendor who sells a conventional vada pav for no more than Rs 10, Jumbo King’s Tandoori Paneer vada pav costs Rs 80.


Thankfully, the experiments are unlikely to drive the classic into retirement. Says Dheeraj Gupta, founder of Jumbo King: “60 per cent of our business still comes from selling regular vada pav. High-end ones like the Tandoori Paneer barely account for 1 per cent.”


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