No compromise with Modi govt, says Bhatt after court proposal
Suspended IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt refused to make any compromise with the Gujarat government after a local court proposed that if he went on police remand for about three hours his bail plea could be heard today itself.
The response by Bhatt, who has accused Chief Minister Narendra Modi of complicity in 2002 post-Godhra riots, came after Sessions Judge G.N. Patel made the proposal during hearing on the state government's revision application for his remand.
"I cannot compromise with those goons. Whatever wrong the government wants to do I do not care. I will tolerate it," Bhatt said in the open court.
Bhatt's lawyer Sayed said: "The court suggested to Bhatt that he should go for two or three hours remand and his bail application will be heard later in the day.
"To this suggestion, Bhatt told the judge that he would not go for any compromise on this. Bhatt further said to the judge that he believ
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Sayed said Bhatt is ready to be in jail for a longer duration but he will not compromise on his principles and was confident that the rule of law will prevail.
The court reserved the order on the state government's remand revision application of Bhatt for October 7.
Bhatt has already filed a bail plea before Sessions Judge V.K. Vyas who adjourned the hearing for tomorrow. The Gujarat government had yesterday challenged in the sessions court a magisterial court's order denying remand of Bhatt, arrested last Friday for allegedly threatening and forcing a constable to sign a false affidavit.
Judge Patel reserved the order on the remand revision application for October 7.
During the hearing before Judge Patel, Sayed contended that the revision remand application of the state government was not maintainable in law.
He cited a Supreme Court judgement which said that granting or rejecting of remand was an interlocutory order and there cannot be revision of that order as per section 397(2) of the CrPC.
Sayed said that in view of the apex court judgement the government application is not maintainable and should be rejected.
On the government side, public prosecutor Pravin Trivedi argued that the state government has a right to seek revision of the remand once it is rejected.
After the order was reserved, Bhatt who was present in the court told the judge that he would like to assist the court and remain present during pronouncement of the order but the judge said that his presence was not required and he also asked the jail authorities not to bring him to court on October 7.
Bhatt was arrested in connection with an FIR filed against him by police constable K.D. Pant in June for allegedly threatening him and making him sign false affidavits regarding a meeting called by Modi on February 27, 2002, hours after the Godhra train carnage.
On October 1, Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate B.G. Doshi had rejected the state government's demand for seven days police custody of Bhatt and remanded him in judicial custody.
The government had challenged the magistrate's order and sought Bhatt's custody on the grounds that it wanted to know how the IPS officer had used the affidavits signed by Pant.
The government contended that Bhatt's custody was required to find out about others involved in the conspiracy, and also to ascertain whether the IPS officer had sent the affidavits to somebody using emails.
The government further said that it also wanted to know how many bank lockers did Bhatt have and what was inside them.
The other side of Mr Bachchan
In Ramapriya, a dilapidated theatre in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, for the first time I began to understand the phenomenon of Amitabh Bachchan. In Khuddar, Amitji barges into a discotheque where his liar of a brother is grooving away with a girl. He looks at his brother with hurt-soaked eyes, a gang of bouncers move towards him. He warns them that he will break their legs if they try to stop him. The audience gasped.
Not many in Vijaywada can follow Hindi. Yet they could connect to his anger and the hurt he communicated through his body language, voice and eyes. Everyone in the audience wanted a brother or a friend or a leader like him. When I realised my dream of working with Amitji in Sarkar, I began to see a very different side to him. Behind the obvious power and intensity, there was a vulnerability. As a filmmaker I became greedy and dumb enough to experiment with him as an actor which resulted in Nishabd and Aag.
Amitji’s make-up man, Deepak, told me on day one of the shooting of Nishabd that it would flop. No one would accept Amitji in a role of a man attracted to a nubile girl. Perhaps as a viewer, I wouldn’t like that either. Yet I think it is Amitji’s finest performance. It demanded complexities which the so-called art-house actors won’t even begin to understand in their lifetime. Similarly in Aag, as a director I can judge an actor by what he does with the material given to him. The viewer merely sees the final result, without knowing that I could have botched up the screenplay, made a mess of the editing, and miscellaneous blunders. The audience reacts to the effect, whereas I know the cause. If anyone argues that Amitji had no business to do such a film, yes he is guilty of misplacing his trust in me. But he is not guilty of not doing his best.
Being an ultra-professional, he succumbs to the vision or the lack of vision of the director. His close-up at the end of Nishabd, when Jiah Khan is leaving in the climax, demanded an extraordinary understanding of human emotions, compared to him saying “Tujhe bhi karne nahin doonga” (“I won’t let you do that either”) in Sarkar. But sadly, the impact of that line in Sarkar will become cinematic history but Nishabd’s close-up might go unnoticed.
He has never ever failed as an actor. It’s only directors, including myself, who fail. Karan Johar’s favourite films of his are Silsila and Kabhie Kabhie. I loathe Silsila which I compare to my favourites Deewaar and Zanjeer. I dislike seeing Amitji in movies like Last Lear and Black whereas Rituparno Ghosh and Sanjay Leela Bhansali might not want to make a Nishabd with him.
Amitji allows himself to be molded in any which way by the director. And that’s why everyone of us wants him as a brother or a friend, the way they did years ago at the Ramapriya in Vijayawada.
Chetan Bhagat slams Narayana Murthy after IIT comment
Chetan Bhagat, an IIT alumnus turned-celebrity writer, took umbrage at Infosys chairman emeritus N.R. Narayana Murthy's 'sweeping' comments on the quality of engineers churned out by premier IITs.
Slamming Murthy, Bhagat said today that such comments should not have come from a person who runs a 'body shopping' company and calls it 'hi-tech'.
"It is ironic when someone who runs a body shopping company and calls it hi-tech, makes sweeping comments on the quality of IIT students," said Bhagat in a tweet on the microblogging site Twitter.
Taking up cudgels for the students from the country's centres of excellence, Bhagat referred to the contribution of IIT students in the making of Information Technology(IT) major Infosys.
"IITians have made a great contribution in making Infosys what it is. Hope people remember that," said Bhagat, who did his Mechanical Engineering from IIT, Delhi.
In Bhagat's view, Murthy should not have been so 'sweepingly highanded'.
"Mr Murthy had a point, but wish he wasn't so sweepingly high handed. Fix the system. No point judging students," he said.
Voicing his displeasure over the quality of engineers that pass out of the IITs, Murthy said the majority of these students fared poorly at jobs and global institutions of higher education.
Addressing a gathering of hundreds of former IITians at a 'Pan IIT' summit in New York, Murthy said the quality of students entering Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) has deteriorated over the years due to the coaching classes that prepare engineering aspirants.
It is for the second time that Bhagat has reacted strongly when questions were raised about the IITs.
When the outspoken Union Minister Jairam Ramesh kicked of a controversy with his remark that the faculty at the country's premier engineering institutes, the IITs, is not world class, Bhagat rebuffed him asking how many politicians in India were world class.
Ramesh had however said that students of the IITs are world class.
Meet the in-betweenists
There are people who do and people who don’t, but the majority can’t decide what to do. I call these procrastinators the in-betweenists because they are neither successful nor failures. I have met many of them in the course of my life and continue to meet them till today. Funnily although they cannot make decisions about themselves, they all have a very strong opinion about what I should be doing and what I shouldn’t even think about. But when I ask them about themselves, they go blank. Despite that, they still have an opinion on every subject under the sun, moon and stars. What’s more, they defend their opinion with a seemingly unshakeable conviction.
These in-betweenists are the same kind of people who talk about why America should or should not have gone to war with Iraq, why a certain cricketer should not have hit a certain ball, why a film should not have been made in a certain way, and more etceteras than you could possibly count. The amazing thing about the in-betweenists is that they can change their opinions and convictions so very rapidly depending on the outcome of their soothsaying. These altered views are in complete contrast to their original convictions.
I remember a meeting with film distributors in Mumbai, one evening. They were about to release the Hindi remake of a super-hit Marathi film.They told me about a scene in the original film: a stepsister ties a rakhi around this guy’s wrist. The rest of the nasty family believes that the step-sister is big-time bad luck. Inevitably, the rakhi recipient soon loses his hand in a car accident.
When the family attacks the step-sister for being a jinx, the guy raises his hand which still has the rakhi tied on it. He says that it’s the rakhi which saved one of his hands at least. The distributors were ecstatic. They told me that this one scene was enough to make the cash registers ring across the country. The film bombed. A few days later I was with the same group of distributors. One of their friends told them they must have been mad to invest in a film which had such a stupidly melodramatic rakhi scene. The distributors remained silent. A few more days later, I overheard the same group of distributors ripping apart the filmmaker for including such stupidly melodramatic rakhi scene in the film. A perfect case of in-betweenists without a brain cell in their heads.
Or take the case of the film Gentleman which was based on the subject of capitation fee. Many in the South Indian film industry, including myself, sniggered after seeing its preview. We wrote off Shanker’s debut effort, saying that capitation fees were a trivial matter, not worthy of being blown up into a feature-length, commercial film. When it released and smashed all box-office records, our same group said that capitation fees were a very topical subject. Everyone in every family could connect to it, especially students and their parents.
Now the Hindi rights were purchased. Shanker’s film was made with Chiranjeevi and was directed by Mahesh Bhatt. It was expected to be a humongous hit going by its popularity in the south. The Hindi version flopped. The unanimous feedback was that capitation fees were too trivial for commercial film.
The point I am making is that the in-betweenists keep rapidly changing their opinions before the fact, during the fact and after the fact — with as much conviction as they had before they changed their opinion! There can be two reasons for this. One is that they feel they must have an opinion on everything because they do not want to feel dumb. They believe that they can predict success and failure. Foolishly, they cast themselives in the role of Nostradamus.
Second reason: they do not want to feel embarrassed and silly when their opinions are way off the mark. So if their prediction goes wrong, they pull out an alternate theory. They consider themselves to be the representatives of the fair and the just. And their belief systems, however temporary they might be, are strangely even stronger than those of the people who succeed and also the people who fail in trying to succeed.
The in-betweenists invariably hate anybody who questiond their values. The fact that they can not ever really answer pertinent questions arouses the guilt factor within them. It also induces anger which makes them spew venom. They keep waiting for the person who is climbing up the ladder to fall down. His fall makes them feel as if they have risen higher.
In-betweenists don’t realise that they are in-betweenists. Their convictions keep changing with time, situations and to their benefit. Eventually, they don’t really matter since they don’t ever possess that one genuine conviction that could place them on the first step of the ‘success’. I am very glad that a vast majority of the people in the world are in-betweenists because then, there is that much less competition in climbing up the ladder.
No regrets
I came back from my engineering exam and told my father that I had done the test so badly that if I pass, then anyone could. Later I realised that it was a terribly insensitive thing to say to my middle class father who was struggling to make ends meet.
My father told my mother that he had given up on me. He felt that I had done the test so badly because instead of studying I was watching films. Cinema is where I really wanted to be. So once I became a film director, I bragged to my father that if I had studied, I would have been earning in thousands, but now I was earning in crores. To that, my father agreed, adding quickly that if my first film had flopped, then he would have been right in his belief that I was good for nothing.
Throughout my life, I have taken decisions, irrespective of their outcome. And the results have been both positive and negative. When someone asked me to name the worst film I had ever made, I replied that it was Drohi. But it was Drohi that was responsible for two of the best films of my career, and whatever standing I have achieved in Bollywood.
I had travelled from Hyderabad to Mumbai to sign Madhuri Dixit for Drohi. Her secretary told me her dates were not available for six months. Boney Kapoor recommended a new girl called Urmila Matondkar who had done a film called Narasimha. When I saw the film I didn’t think much of her but I was in a hurry. I had got Nagarjuna’s dates and since no other heroine was available, I signed Urmila.
The film failed. She was written about negatively too. During the course of making Drohi, Mani Ratnam and I wrote a script called Gaayam. Mani suggested Urmila for a supporting role, not because he thought much of her either. He felt she might just be okay for the role. Now while shooting Gaayam, Urmila did a certain dance movement. I was so mesmerised that I was inspired to make Rangeela.
I had liked a James Hadley Chase novel in which a gangster falls in love with a girl. She does not know that he is a gangster. By the time he wants to give up crime, he dies. I had used this story for Drohi. When it failed I changed the backdrop and years later remade it as Satya. So in effect Drohi was responsible for the making of Rangeela and Satya.
Similarly when I came to Mumbai to screen Gaayam for Sanjay Dutt, he wasn’t keen to do its remake, which at that time was titled Nayak. My financiers were not keen on Rangeela but were gung-ho about Nayak. Reason: Sanjay Dutt at that time was a much bigger star than Aamir Khan. Since I insisted on doing both the films, they reluctantly agreed to fund both the projects, thinking that Nayak would cover the losses of Rangeela.
After shooting for 15 days for Nayak, Sanjay was arrested in the blast case and was in jail for a long time. Meanwhile Rangeela was released and became a blockbuster. Also in the same waiting period I did the fun caper Telugu film Anaganaga Oka Roju which became a super hit. By the time Sanjay was released from jail, I felt instead of making a serious dark film like Nayak, let me scrap it, and make a fun caper film like Anaganaga Oka Roju and ended up making Daud which flopped. Years later I remade Nayak as Sarkar.
This is why I have no regrets about any single decision I have ever made. As long as you keep making decisions, something or the other will materialise. That’s because decisions create work. And even if the results turn out to be bad, they just might turn out to be damn good at some other point.
Man ends life in Hyderabad; Telangana angle suspected
In what appears to be yet another case of suicide for the cause of separate Telangana, a 45-year-old man today hanged himself here, police said.
Locals found the body of K. Chandramouli hanging from an electric pole near municipal office on Uppal Road, and alerted the police.
A photo copy of the ration card of Chandramouli, who worked in a private firm, was recovered from him.
A Kanduva (scarf) of Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) was wrapped around his body and 'Jai Telangana' (popular slogan of statehood supporters) was found written on one side of the photo copy, they said.
As the body was brought down from the tower, pro- Telangana activists reached the spot.
Police dispersed them and shifted the body to a nearby hospital for post-mortem and later handed it over to his family members, an officer said.
Further investigation was on. There had been sporadic reports of Telangana supporters committing suicide since last year in support of the statehood cause.
Bruce Lee is my God
Action movies are supposed to be the new flavour of the season. But nothing compares in my years of movie-watching to Bruce Lee handling the bad guys with his fists of fury.
Back in the 1970s, all of us youngsters in Hyderabad’s Panjagutta colony were affected by this buzz about Enter the Dragon starring Bruce Lee whom we had never heard about. I had never heard of the words karate and kung fu either. When I saw the film, he just blew... or should I say… kicked me to another stratosphere.
To say that I was awestruck and mesmerised would be an understatement. I used to cycle all the way to Narayanaguda’s Sreenivasa theatre, which was seven km away from my home. I saw Enter the Dragon 17 times and after that Return of the Dragon 23 times. I had this compulsive obsessive disorder about Bruce Lee.
I believe if Bruce Lee had been six inches taller he would not have become the legend he did. He was 5’7” and so small-built that everybody aspired to become like him. No one will aspire to become a 6’2” heavyweight boxer like Muhammad Ali. That’s because Ali looks almost unreal and unreachable, whereas an average guy would be the size of Bruce Lee. That explained the rush of millions of Lee-wowed people across the world to join martial arts schools. I was one of the millions. For me he was as rock solid as Howard Roark from Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead.
Needless to say, after a few sessions of trying to learn martial arts, and a sprained leg, I realised that it was impossible to reach anywhere near my God. I abandoned my dream of becoming Bruce Lee and settled for the much lesser painful and the much easier art of filmmaking.
Yet despite abandoning martial arts, Bruce Lee and his interiorised thinking and concentration created a huge impact on me which, over time, has influenced both my life and my films.
Lee who died in 1973, had stated, “The true understanding of the art of fighting begins when one sheds set patterns. True freedom of expression in art occurs only when one is beyond systems. Regardless of their many legendary and colourful origins, styles are eventually created by living men. Hence nothing should be taken as the gospel truth. Man, the living creating individual, should always be more important than any (already) existing style.”
These words made me understand that there is nothing wrong with being different. Being different means being an individual. If I can’t be an individualistic martial artiste, at least let me be an individualistic filmmaker. “I am all styles and no style,” remarked Bruce Lee. That’s where the various styles of my films have come from.
Mao said, “Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless.” Lee extended this point by stating, “... and add specifically what is your own.” This too has had a strong resonance on my attitude, approach, or whatever you would like to call it.
Regarding existential discipline Bruce Lee had said, “A violin string if free is not free to do what it is supposed to do. Only when it is tightened, does it become free to be a violin string. Otherwise it will remain just a string.”
The fact that the greatest fighter with the fittest body ever and the soundest mind ever could just die because of a bodily reaction to some stupid painkiller remains absurd to me. I can’t ever forget the grief I felt on his death. It was a mixture of stunned belief and the feeling of being betrayed. The fact that a man like that at the age of 32 could die just like that, was shattering.
The most obvious example of Bruce Lee’s impact on me is that I copied the plot line of Return of the Dragon for my debut film Shiva. In both the films, a guy comes newly into town and stands up to the bad guys which set off a series of action sequences. The climax is a one-to-one fight between the hero and villain. Having said all this, and in spite of how much I grieved over his death, and however harsh this may sound, I am glad that he died young. No way in hell, would I have ever wanted to see a 70-year-old Bruce Lee.
