Behind the Mystique

You know that feeling you get when you’ve had an intense conversation with someone and you realise you haven’t put your point across properly? You always think of that killer line, that perfect encapsulation of your world view later, often doing something mundane like watering the plants or folding laundry. It is deeply infuriating. This article is my attempt to make up for all those times over the last 30 years of conversations with Amitabh Bachchan; he would speak eloquently in perfectly constructed paragraphs and I would respond with something like, “yeah, but, you know, carrots,” and then spend hours, days wishing I’d had more presence of mind and said something even halfway coherent.

Last week, I asked Amitabh Bachchan if I could interview him for this article on the occasion of his 80th birthday about the importance of art and film in our lives. He replied, “No, no interviews, this birthday was just a lot of unnecessary fuss, sorry my dear.”

“Fair enough,” I replied, “I will just make some stuff up then, shall I?” He didn’t seem to think that was such a great plan either.

While I’ve restrained myself from flat out making stuff up in this article, I want to explore the questions I would have asked him had he agreed to the interview. I want to give the definitive response that pushes back on his assertion that his birthday isn’t important and that no one should make a fuss about it.

For me, his birthday is important because I realise that I am now almost the same age he was when I first met him and this feels like “a moment”, but aside from this personal moment of hollow laughter and the tap-tap-tap of Old Father Time, for decades, he has been a giant of film, an icon at home and abroad.

Art, culture, film—they all matter deeply to us. We spend a lot of time fussing over politics but in truth, culture is where everyone lives all the time, politics is where some people live some of the time. They are important. The Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky said, “Why do people go to the cinema? What takes them into a darkened room where, for two hours, they watch the play of shadows on a sheet? The search for entertainment? The need for a kind of drug? The essential principles of cinema, which have to do with the human need to master and know the world. I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person’s experience—and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer. That is the power of cinema: ‘stars’, storylines and entertainment have nothing to do with it.”

Amitabh Bachchan’s films have created “living experience” for countless millions. They have captured time, lost or spent or not yet had, for generations of filmgoers. It is a truism that at moments of societal crisis, it is art that helps us get through, be it the physical presence of a painting or sculpture or the storyline of a film. It opens up space and time and allows us a different way through a problem or issue. The novelist Ursula K Le Guinn captured this when she said, “science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside.”

Amitabh Bachchan has been helping us deal with the changes to our world since he was first encouraged to glare moodily at people in the early-1970s to now being kindly grandfather on Kaun Banega Crorepati—a little bit funny, a little bit stern, handing out cash to those who are deserving and getting emotional for all the right reasons. Amitabh has been part of the reworking of myths that we have put together over the years—personal myths, myths of the country we live in, myths about how our world is going to be. His persona has for much of it been someone who isn’t properly understood or appreciated—and this is perhaps the source of his enduring power, everyone feels slightly misunderstood or under-appreciated.

Add to that the fact that art—be it film or other—cuts through our daily reality and shows us eternal truths. It can hold us in the moment for just a bit longer than normal, pull us back into the ever-fleeting now in which we exist. We humans all realise that we should be paying more attention to the lives through which we so often sleepwalk, be grateful to the magical planet we exist on, and embrace the future we know we are creating for generations to come. Art helps us do that, even for moments in time.

Those who are famous and sensible (a larger percentage than you might think) know that fame itself, the constructs that people put on them, is not real. Mike Jagger, rock star, is not real; he is what we have wanted him to be, from naughty bad boy defying the system to endlessly touring money-making machine—he is a construct in our mind. But that doesn’t make him and other mega stars any less important. This is perhaps why people get so exercised when celebrities actually have opinions—it’s hard to reconcile your personal projections that help you, consciously or not, with the way you structure your world view, with someone saying something like, ‘women should have control over their own bodies’ or ‘the exacerbation of communal divisions by those who have a vested interest in stoking divisions is making my wife and me uncomfortable in our own land.’ The endless calls for celebrities to stay in their own lane; stick to acting, stick to singing, stick to cricket, stick to football, is a call for them to stay the blank and idealised screen onto which I can project.

I have argued before that part of the reasons for Amitabh’s huge fame in the 1970s was his refusal to speak to the press, that this made him the most perfectly blank canvas. Amitabh’s ability to move with the times, to change into becoming what people need him to be, is perhaps unique. It is born from his deep need, and sorry to sound insanely filmi, to be “the good son.” His job is to deliver what is required—be it an angry young man, or lovely granddad. I was told a story about him accepting the job of anchoring Kaun Banega Crorepati—he was about to pull out, he couldn’t do it, it isn’t who he is, he is naturally quite shy and quiet. His comfort zone is a snuggly sitting room space where he can watch sport on TV or listen to music and always have a box of tissues at arm’s length just in case he should need them. “Ahh,” a wily producer said (this was his story, so the punch line is obviously his), “But you can act the part of a gameshow host.” Of course, he could, he could do it with his eyes shut, and here we are decades later, with him still responding to direction and giving the country what they need, making everyone proud.

Last week in New York, I was finally able to see the magnificent Single Form by the British sculptor Barbara Hepworth. She created it for Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary General of the United Nations, a man who achieved more in his five years in the job than most of us can achieve in a lifetime. It sits outside the UN building, holding the attention of all who come there. There are a few “fans of Dag” out there and they share information and text with each other on the anniversary of his death (it’s a thing, Google why). This year, I was given some research done by one of them who had found a couple of letters from him to Hepworth in the Tate Gallery archive thanking her for her work. Like all his communication, it was a Scandinavian-level brief and to the point.

“I have now had it before me a couple of weeks, living with it in all shades of light, both physically and mentally, and this is the report: it is a strong and exacting companion, but at the same time, one of deep quiet and timeless perspective in inner space. You may react to the word exacting, but a work of great art sets its own standard of integrity and remains a continuous reminder of what should be achieved in everything.”

What are art and culture but different ways to tell the story of the world we live in?  To hold us in that moment of deep quiet and timeless perspective, the moment of awareness of that which is larger than us, “the uncanny”, as writer Amitav Ghosh puts it. It is our genius as a species to daily reinvent the language of our lives, to sing the world anew. We are the only species that is known to create and also connect around ideas that do not physically exist, such as religion, politics, legal systems, and organisations. Civilisation, as we know it, is based on the stories we tell each other.

Amitabh’s role, shifting as it has over the years, has been to tell the stories about not only where society is failing but also what we can create in our world that is right and that works for all of us. The evolution of our society, its success or malfunction and what it means for all our futures, is not a spectator sport. It is created by all the choices we make: our thoughts, ideas, actions. It is constructed by each of us and by strangers that we will never meet—choices made about what to ignore and what is a work in progress and what we need to take action on.

Right now, we need a whole new set of compelling stories that help us see the path ahead more than ever before. The question is, will Amitabh continue to help us to create the futures we need by creating the stories which will be able to help us get there? He pauses for a moment and looks in his long-suffering way at me: “Sure,” he says.

Thanks, Amitabh, and Happy Birthday.

80th BirthdayAmitabh BachchanBollywoodcinemaKabhi Alvida Naa Kehna