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.
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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."
posted by v9y at 10:53 AM

Screen > The Business of Entertainment: Gulzar
contd. from previous post
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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.
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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...?”
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posted by v9y at 11:36 AM

Screen > The Business of Entertainment
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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.
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posted by v9y at 11:32 AM