Amaan-Ayaan still keen on films despite aborted debut project

By Utpal Borpujari

The bitter experience of a shelved film debut notwithstanding, Sarod’s young heirs Amaan And Ayaan Ali Khan are still keen on acting in movies, even if just for some “creative flirtation”.

Amaan and Ayaan, the sons of Sarod maestro Ustad Amjad Ali Khan and former danseuse Subhalakshmi Barua Khan, were slated to make their big screen debut against twin modesl Tupur and Tapur Chatterjee in a romantic action drama by J P Dutta of Border and Refugee fame, but the project was aborted due to financial problems.

The brothers kept off their public performances for more than a year under instruction from Dutta, who wanted to reduce their public appearances till the film was released, but now they are back in action, performing in public again.

“It (the Dutta film) was a bad and a sad experience. This is the first failure venture of us, and we had a very bitter experience,” Amaan, the elder sibling, told Deccan Herald.

The latest public performance by the duo was in the capital a couple of days ago to mark the launch of “50 Maestros, 50 Recordings” authored by them and published by Harper Collins, chronicling work and life of 50 greatest classical musicians India has ever seen.

“In the run up to the making of the film, we trained hard, going to the gym for two hours every day, and waking up at four in the morning to learn horse riding. There was no time for music, and though we did not get disconnected from music completely, we were also not loyal to it,” says Amaan.

But as Ayaan puts it, both the brothers are keen to act in films despite what he terms as “the ugliest experience” for them. “We are open to film offers, because of the time and energy we have put in to prepare for the aborted project. We just won’t let it go waste,” he says.

Amaan, almost in perfect harmony of a jugalbandi, adds to it, “This was a bad experience we faced. But either you take it as a disadvantage, or turn it into an advantage. For musicians, pain is a very good thing, as music becomes more soulful. I would like to believe in that.”

“But we are not for doing films as an alternative career, but more as a creative flirtation,” he says, as both brothers point to classical music greats featured in their book who have acted in films without compromising on their music – M S Subbulakshmi, Ustad Zakir Hussain, T R Mahalingam, Balamurali Krishna et al.

(An abridged version was published in Deccan Herald, www.deccanherald.com, www.deccanheraldepaper.com, 30-12-2009)

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/43957/bollywood-still-lures-sarod-brothers.html

A richly detailed sketch of life and cinema of Mrinal Sen

By Utpal Borpujari

It has been seven years since Mrinal Sen made a film. His last film, Amaar Bhuvan (This, My Land) was in 2002. Since then, the ageing maestro has been lying low, presumably not able to undertake the physical rigour that filmmaking demands of a director. Sen, along with Satyajit Ray and Ritwick Ghatak, forms the trinity of great Bengali filmmakers that took Indian cinema to great heights. Both Ray and Ghatak are long gone, the latter’s cinematic genius recognized much after his death. Sen, quite literally, remains the last link to the golden period of Bengali cinema, which saw Bengal speak for India at international cinema platforms. If Ray was the master of the narrative in true Hollywoodean style, Ghatak was the enfant terrible, and Sen the maverick, who never compromised with his beliefs for the sake of aligning with market demands. Dipankar Mukhopadhyay’s book brings alive that very Sen, recreating his journey as a filmmaker whose convictions about how he saw cinema was unwavering come what may.

This is actually not a new book, but a revised version of the author’s earlier “The Maverick Maestro” that came out in 1995. But it still makes informative, and in parts fascinating, reading, particularly the portions that go into the details of the famous Sen-Ray squabbles over different visions of what they believed cinema should be. Sen had made a less-than-laudatory debut with Raatbhore (The Dawn) (1955) after years of pursuing his dream to be a filmmaker even as he continued as a frustrated medical representative, but soon thereafter he found his touch, coming up first with Neel Akasher Nichey (Under the Blue Sky) (1958) to get local recognition and Baishe Shravan (The Wedding Day) (1960) that gave him international exposure. The book captures Sen’s life, from the time he was a little boy in Faridpur (now in Bangladesh) to his early struggles and then emergence as a great filmmaker.

The unrelenting principled vision, the struggles, the applause, the controversies – everything about his cinema is captured eloquently in this book, which with Mukhopadhyay’s insight as a government official who worked long years with departments that had to do with cinema, provides for a good study of the filmmaker’s career graph, particularly how he developed his various projects and went on to execute them.  And then there are interesting nuggets – such as how he got inspired to develop the title character of his most successful film, “Bhuvan Shome”, a typical hardboiled bureaucrat, from a Railway official of that name who accompanied him on a trip to the Moscow film festival in 1969.

But the most fascinating parts of the book are those that recreate in detail the infamous exchange of words, through letters in the media, Sen and Ray had, first after the latter strongly criticised Sen’s 1965 film Akash Kusum through a series of letters in The Statesman newspaper, and then in 1991, a “private letter” Ray had written to a “friend” criticizing Sen was leaked to an English daily, creating a major controversy. But then, it would be unfortunate if one reads the book just for this bit, because it provides in great detail how Mrinal Sen became Mrinal Sen the great filmmaker. For any film enthusiast, this is what makes compulsive reading.

(Mrinal Sen : Sixty Years in Search of Cinema; by Dipankar Mukhopadhyay; Harper Collins; pp 316; Rs 399)

(Published in Deccan Herald, www.deccanherald.com, www.deccanheraldepaper.com, 08-11-2009)

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/34720/in-uncompromising-quest.html