gulzar |
Tuesday, July 15, 2003
Gulzar to bring Munshi Premchand alive - The Times of India:
"MUMBAI: For poet, lyricist and film veteran Gulzar, life and literature are inextricably linked. He has now decided to adapt Munshi Premchand's stories for TV, and the decision coincides with the passing away of literary doyen Bhisham Sahni whose Tamas was serialised with haunting effect for the small screen. Gulzar speaks on what Sahni's death would mean and also about how cinema could carry the literary legacy forward. .. Q: It's believed that audiences don't want to watch literary works? A: It's up to the filmmaker to make the work interesting enough for the audience. If a child insists on eating noodles for every meal, do you stop serving him daal and chawal? Every medium of art has its own criteria for success. When I was offered the chance to do a literary adaptation on television, I was all for it. I was first asked to adapt Rabindranath Tagore's stories on Doordarshan. Then I was told to do Premchand instead and let a Bengali director do Tagore. I wonder why we need to restrict literature in this way? Didn't Satyajit Ray do Premchand's stories in Shatranj Ke Khiladi and Sadgati? I agreed to do Premchand on the condition that I would get to film Tagore's narrative poems subsequently. I want to prove Bengalis are not the sole custodians of Bengali literature. It took over two years for the project to concretise. I feel serious-minded filmmakers like Mrinal Sen, Adoor Gopalkrishnan, Gautam Ghose, Amol Palekar and Shyam Benegal should take literature to television as a collective movement." Monday, April 07, 2003
Screen > The Business of Entertainment: Gulzar
contd. from previous post .. I’ve bunked work because I want to watch the England India test match on TV. Gavaskar has made 223 runs. I feel jubilant. There’s a personal pride in Gavaskar’s achievement... Nothing is as fabulous as being able to defeat these haughty, horrible Englishmen! I feel a sudden relief as if a long-cherished desire has been finally fulfilled... the venom has been simmering for so many years. Actually, I would have felt a greater thrill had Gavaskar picked up his bat and hit all of them a couple of times on their swollen heads. No treatment we give them can be worse than the humiliation they’ve made us suffer. I burn when I think of those days. The wounds are still raw... the memory ripe. ... In retrospect, when I think of all the brainwashing that was attempted, “I’m surprised that there is any residue of intelligence, talent or wit... The Whites wanted to crush every grey cell is us and turn us into vegetables. In Std. III, I remember I was forced to learn poems like “Chanda choo... chua choo... bada ho ke main dhobi banoonga’. Goo handwriting was another fetish. Learning to think was ignored completely... And why not? All they wanted was good clerks. My handwriting was atrocious. Every evening, I was punished to write 200 lines. Finally, my father who was frustrated watching me write these lines, come to school and asked my teacher, “Do you have any tablet which can cure my boy’s handwriting...?” ...
Screen > The Business of Entertainment
... In his poems he appears to be obsessed with the moon. Draws all kinds of analogies. Romanticizes it. Compares it to the face of his beloved. At home, he removes his spectacles and asks, ‘How many years ago was it that Armstrong landed up there?’ In magazines, he is always linked with his heroines to whom he writes love poems and songs. In Pali Hill, he lives in a deserted bungalow, filled with furniture and paintings, looked after by dozens of servants, but impoverished by the lack of a woman’s touch. Mysteriously unpopular with men, irresistibly popular with women, Gulzar lives in the mind of people either as a conman or a lover in solitude.. Dashing heroes found it unsettling competing with an unglamorous writer. They would have preferred him to have been less arresting. But what makes Gulzar special, is his sensitivity. His enemies said he was so sensitive that he wrote more like a woman, than a man. Gulzar never tried defending his stand. Never bothered to explain his image. He remained aloof from the unchivalrous details of growing scandals. He cast a long shadow of silence. And silence is a repartee that evokes more hostility. It gave dimensions to Gulzar’s aura. A sensitive poet. A shy man - a distracting image. ... Monday, December 30, 2002
Communal divide in Gujarat anti-human: Gulzar : HindustanTimes.com
Well-known lyricist, filmmaker and writer Gulzar has said politicians are responsible for the "anti-human" communal polarisation of Gujarat. Gulzar, who was here to attend a function organised by Unicef to interact with deprived children Sunday evening, also expressed concern at the India-Pakistan divide. He released a book of poems by Bihar legislative council chairman Jabir Hussain. The poems refer to the communal killings in Gujarat and also tension between India and Pakistan. He hinted at working for the child victims of the Gujarat sectarian violence. "For me children are neither Hindu, nor Muslim, neither Gujarati nor Bihari. There is a need to change the mindset, elders must think of change their attitude towards them," he said. Gulzar criticised the federal government for not promoting films for children. He stressed the need to make more children's films. "There is an urgent need that all states should set up a children's film society to promote films for this section," he said. He lauded moviemaker Vishal Bhardwaj's effort in making "Makri", a children's film, a commercial success. Thursday, December 26, 2002
Gulzar wins Sahitya Akademi award - The Times of India
NEW DELHI: Partition, the local trains of Mumbai, Bimal Roy... these are the focus of some of the short stories in Gulzar's Dhuan. The anthology has won him the Sahitya Akademi for Urdu, while Amit Choudhuri wins it for the English novel, A New World, and Mahesh Elkunchwar for Yugant, the play in Marathi. These are among the 22 awards announced by the Sahitya Akademi here on Saturday. At the same meeting the executive board selected 17 books for the Translation award initiated in 1989. The awards, of Rs 40,000 for writing and Rs 15,000 for translation, will be presented on February 17, 2003. Ami O Banabehari, a novel by Sandipan Chattopadhyay; the Malayalam poems of K G Sankara Pillai; Mahat Aitijya, criticism by Assamese writer Nalinidhar Bhattacharya; Do Panktiyon Ke Beech by Hindi poet Rajesh Joshi, Tattvamasi in Gujarati by Dhruv Bhat and Gandhi Manisha, an Oriya biography by Sarat Kumar Mohanty are the other winners. Qurratulain Hyder, Indira Goswami, Ashokamitran, Ashok Vajpeyi, Damodar Singh, and Jetho Lalwani were in the panel of judges for the different languages. Books in Dogri, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Manipuri, Nepali, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil and Telugu have also been awarded. ... Saturday, October 19, 2002
Gulzar to direct campaign for healthcare business - Oct 1, 2002
The advertising campaign for Ranbaxy’s new consumer healthcare business has been directed by noted lyricist Gulzar. “The television campaign consists of two television commercials — one in Hindi and the other in English — of 40 seconds each,” Atul Malhotra, head, global consumer healthcare, Ranbaxy, said. The commercials, which will go on air on October 7, have been conceptualised by the healthcare division of Ogilvy & Mather (O&M). Besides Gulzar, who has also penned the lyrics for the Hindi version of the campaign, there are many other big names of the film world associated with the campaign. The commercial has been produced by Bobby Bedi of Train to Pakistan and Bandit Queen fame.
rediff.com: Water in melancholy, a new sound
Excerpts from a Rediff interview with Gulzar about "Udaas Paani" - his new album with Abhishek Ray I ran into Abhishek Ray in Delhi. He wanted me to hear some of his compositions; I gladly agreed. That is how we decided to collaborate on Udaas Pani. This album can neither be called a music album nor a poetry album. The music and poetry merge with seamless splendour. It is not an album where listeners stop short in the tracks to wonder, 'Ab beech mein poetry kahan se aa gayee [How did the poetry fit into this]?' .. "I see Abhishek as a composer of emotions. He reminds me of Salil Chowdhury. Abhishek's compositions are intricate. He is crazy about Nature and wildlife. He goes on tiger-counting expeditions. Last year, he was injured when he was chased by a wild elephant. Both his parents are classical musicians. So he has inherited a flair for ragas. "Abhishek's father has played the sitar in Udaas Paani. Abhishek has also studied in Western classical music. So he has imbibed the best of both the worlds. Ultimately he will be absorbed into film music. He deserves it."
Rediff interview with Gulzar (January 1999)
You are quite taken up with Bengali literature... Is it because you worked with Bengali film-makers like Bimal Roy and Hrishikesh Mukherjee? Certainly not, because I even married a Bengali! It's the influence and the fascination of Bengal that made me marry one. Since my schooldays, I've read the translations of Bengali writers. I'm Punjabi, but I read a lot of Bengali and Urdu literature. But somehow I wanted to read the original Bengali literature. That forced me more into the language and, finally, Bengali food --macch bhaat. She (Raakhee) fed me machand... that's how it came about. I had also read translations of Tagore and the modern poetry of that period that I also translated for a Urdu magazine. I made Ijaazat from a novel by Subhodh Ghosh who I called the Maupussant of India. Bengali literature was one of the richest literatures and it is very fascinating. I think only two languages have contributed to children's literature, which is again very fascinating -- Bengali and Marathi. You said once that you wanted to be a poet. How did you become a film-maker? I only wanted to be a litterateur. I wasn't very keen to become a film-maker. I fended off many offers from my friends who were in films then -- people like Salil Chaudhary who I met in Bombay, in IPTA, Balraj Sahni, Shailendra... I was working in a motor garage that time as an administrator. I was there because I knew I'd have more time to read and study. My friends were working with Bimalda at that time. They took me over to him to write a song for Bandini. That was the beginning. He asked me to be his assistant. I don't know, maybe I should have blushed. But he did give me that offer. I thought that writing lyrics wasn't poetry and so wasn't keen. He told me that he was starting a film called Kabuliwalla and that I should be his assistant there. I agreed. .. Your first film Mere Apne was a remake of a Bengali film Apunjan. My first film was a remake of a Bengali film in a way. But I really did not base it on that film. I based it on a short story on which that film was based by Inder Kumar Moitra. When will you direct your next film? At the moment I am not working on any film. I am committed to writing scripts for my daughter and my associate, Salim Arif. After these two scripts, I'll consider making another film. Till then, I'll enjoy my unemployed state.
Rediff interview with Gulzar (April 1997)
"Libaas is about a husband and wife relationship, it has great performances by Naseeruddin Shah and Shabana Azmi," says he, about the film which is yet to secure commercial release. "How we admire the great works of fiction, and how when fictional circumstances become real we react differently, is what the film's underlying theme is." ... And what of his own films? Which, we ask, are his favourites? And why? ''I like Ijaazat for its mood, the relationships between its characters. All three angles in the triangle are positive characters who care for each other's happiness, and through this film I brought out of the closet for the first time, on screen, the live-in relationship which has now become quite common." ''Kitaab is, for me, special because of its observation of the growing up of a child, of what children observe when they are growing up. The film is obviously subjective, when I myself was growing up what I observed was the high-handedness of grownups and this has been reflected in my film. Its like, they would gift me a costly pen, then keep it locked in the cupboard. This would make me fume, because no matter how beautiful the gift, it meant nothing unless I could use it." ''Then there was Namkeen - again, special for me because of the relationships it explores, and for its delicate screenplay. The film is about a relationship between two cousins - not an affair, but something much more delicate and sensitive. I think this is the best screenplay I have done. ''Lekin, for me, is special because of its element of mystery. Usually, when you make a mystery film, you provide a solution at the end. Lekin however doesn't - it just leaves you wondering." |
