Desi Train

Before recalling the night of November 2006 about my chit chat with Anurag over the phone, it’s important for me to rewind back to about 10 years ago which would be around 1997/98. That’s the time when it all started. Without anyone realizing it. Destiny has some cute little ways of making you smile, when one goes back in the past recollecting those small thoughts, instances, occassions that collected to form a big wave. And when the wave came, you are like “WHOA! Where did that come from?”… and then when you look back recollecting from memories all those tiny things, you give yourself “that” smile. Small, hidden, just for yourself… yes that smile… it’s something only Dear Destiny can give you.

When I had first read the review of Satya, Sunday morning via my the then favorite critic and provider of cinema knowledge, Khalid Mohamed, I noticed a part of a sentence that mentioned that the writer had also acted in the movie, briefly.

Khalid-saab had praised the movie sky high. It was the monsoon. In Bombay. I had take 6 weeks off from my job, flown back from Taipei and decided that I no longer wanted to work in the East. The West is where I have to go. Biswajeet M my assistant to whom I imparted all my International Marketing knowledge and experience suggested a training course… so three weeks later I was learning this whole 6 weeks course at a rundown building in Andheri, a Bombay suburb. It was Monday, 24 hours since I’d read my Khalid Mohamed review.

The class had server problems. Come back a few hours later they said. A half dozen of us walked out for some “Idli” snacks with tea or coffee and decided to watch a movie to kill time. Being the foremost movie conscious guy in the group, I suggested “Satya”…

I thought for a long time (actually for a few odd years) that Aditya Srivasatav in the movie was Anurag Kashyap as I tried connecting the dots between Khalid’s sentence of “writer acts in the movie” to the characters while watching the movie. Little did I know that seven/eight years later I would be meeting the writer of the movie in person… who a few months later would start this whole new trend of blogging on the internet.

“PFC will become a movement”, Anurag mentioned to me over the phone seven odd years later. Quite honestly, my first reaction was this guy is nuts or just some psycho blabbering plane, where he has no idea what he’s talking about. The result. I didn’t call him for the next few weeks.

My bad. I didn’t see it. He could. From where he stood. And the trigger point was undoubtedly Black Friday.

“Dude can you create a blog on Black Friday on PFC. It’s releasing soon and I wanna write about it”… Sure!!!

Somehow the cult followers of Indian cinema had at last been discovered. Via Black Friday. On PFC. Never before had anything like this been observed. It was nerve wrecking and exciting at the same time. I had taken a step back to see it all happen to gain a very objective view. They were all converging. From small towns in India, from the metropolitan cities, from icy snow tops in Europe, the desert heat of Texas, Australia and even South America… they were all flooding, trickling in… all converging together as if they had found the commonality of themselves in others around the world, the true cult followers of Indian cinema had discovered themselves and discovered others like them… Online. On PFC - where I had setup the Black Friday blog for Anurag to blog on a few weeks before it’s release.

The chain reaction started. When previously I would spend hours and hours trying to convince people in the film industry to come onboard… we were now receiving requests from film makers if they could write on PFC.

Even the media discovered us. Many journalists who wanted to speak their mind out which they couldn’t in their medium requested PFC Authorships. Budding Filmmakers came in. Production houses were calling in. The cult following was just beginning to grow. I would be slashed and hammered if PFC went down even for a few minutes. I had no idea that PFC had passionate readers even in Latin America and Tokyo of all places.

“Trend”. People from the Hindi film industry had blogged randomly here and there. Aamir did a few on Mangal Pandey. Prakash Jha with his troupe did a few. But it was all promotional. A kind of another outlet Bombay was testing - the outlet of blogs. Then nothing happened. Until Anurag picked it up and made it a fashion. His reasons though are entirely different from what Aamir Khan or perhaps Anil Kapoor do it now for.

It all started with Anurag, blogging now is the fashion. The talk of the town in tinseltown. Years from now if someone records the history of blogging in the Hindi film industry, they’ll have to acknowledge that it was Anurag Kashyap who gave it the vital push.

But all this movement and fame also brought in on PFC - the ugliness. People who didn’t appreciate it. People who were sworn enemies of the blogging filmmakers now had a medium where they could remain faceless and attack. The hate, the venom has not left PFC untouched. People who felt a high being anonymous and slashing filmmakers on the blog from the cubicles of their software offices in India, Europe, US and elsewhere. Psychotically sick, I’ve always tried to keep the comments clean.

Say what you wanna say, but in the comments have the courage to say it respectfully. But in my many emotional outbursts, I’ve lost the power of my speech, wherein removing a comment has been equated to PFC not wanting an opposing point of view. That I will never agree to. I’ll always oppose the inhuman manner in which some commenters under the garb of anonymity have uttered such words that it would equate to nothing less than the devil himself. How do I keep myself in check? It has been a self discovery process and still is…

People have accused me of being Anurag’s buddy. Yeah you can say that. But I still am a movie lover at the end of the day. And if Anurag’s movie doesn’t excite me, I’m not gonna go out and say “WOW”…

People constantly ask me what’s the next step for PFC. I have no clue. Just like I had no idea what PFC would become a year later of when some eighteen odd cinema lovers started a discussion for cinema online. I know there are many more people out there who have a far greater insight, depth and view on cinema than the collective us all together. I hope to see them coming on PFC to write.

It has aged me by a couple of years. This last one year. But it has also brought joys. Finding people who worked endlessly selflessly for PFC like Kartik, Somen, Sumeet, Vasan, Ranga and many others… Before I go into the people who were the cause of my mental torture… I would like to bring to front some priceless moments, those memories that I will forever cherish… but you’ll have to wait for another 24 hours for this…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 10:19 am
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