A Knight In Comic Armour - Raju Hirani's incredible life story

Tracking director Raju Hirani’s incredible life story, SHOMA CHAUDHURY discovers his light, feel-good cinema disguises an urgent moral vision

TO BE unconventional about success has always been difficult. In circa 2010, it’s almost impossible. With gilt images beaming down 24/7 from television and multiplex screens, only hyper fame and money define success today. There can be no other parameter. Certainly, for a Sindhi man — whose community stereotype demands that money and convention play a key role in the great scheme of life — directing the biggest grosser in Bollywood history, earning Rs 20-odd crore from it as a director, and having a shiny trail of two earlier megahits behind him should have meant a very big deal. But ask 44-year-old Raju Hirani what success means to him and the miracle unusualness of the man and his art kicks in.

Hirani’s latest film, 3 Idiots, has been having what stock markets would call a historic bull run. In just 18 days, it has mopped up Rs 350 crore — double the entire business of the last record-holding film Ghajini (which in turn had done 50 percent more business than all the films that ranked below it). Numbers aside, the film seems to have uncorked a dormant emotion in society, and its upbeat slogan “All is well” has become the unchallenged anthem of the season. The film had 21 nominations at the Screen Awards and won 10, including best film and best director. Hirani is undoubtedly the big man of the moment.

Yet the affable, mild-mannered man sitting unassumingly at a coffee shop in Delhi under the TEHELKA office seems peculiarly untouched by the applause around him. He’s been quite happy to trek across the city for his interviewer’s convenience rather than insist on the star’s prerogative that we go to him. Sundry people are swarming around him, jostling for autographs. For a film man, it should have been a cinematic moment. More than 20 years earlier, Hirani had opened his autograph book in the anon - ymity of his room in the Film and Television Institute in Pune (FTII) and signed with quiver of excitement: Raju Hirani: editor, director, producer, 1988. The world lay headily at his feet, he was sure he was going to conquer it. What a self-fulfilling proph - ecy it had turned out to be.

But for Hirani, of the many major “plot points” in his life, the public success of 3 Idiots features nowhere. His idea of success lies in other, much more poignant, autobiographical moments. The moment he first told his father that instead of studying to be an accountant, he wanted a career in cinema. The exact moment he received a tele g - ram from FTII telling him he’d been selected for the editor’s course (NSD and FTII had both rejec ted him first time round when he applied for their acting course). The first 5-min - ute student film he made on a Chekov story, The Bet. Powerful moments of escape, selfrecognition, arrival — many of which imbue his film with the searing conviction and tension of lived experience.

“You cannot imagine what it meant for me — a middleclass Sindhi boy in Nagpur — to be set free by my father,” says Hirani. “I was so scared and then so relieved, I went up to the terrace and flew a kite.” This incident was so seminal for Hirani, in fact, its powerful emotional duet — fear and release — reasserts itself again and again in the film in varying combinations. The road taken; the road not taken. And all its varying consequences. Virus’ son committing suicide; Farhan Qureshi telling his father he wants to be a photographer not an engineer; the acceptance letter from Hungary; Rancho’s immense pleasure in nurturing his high-school in Ladakh, his inevitable material success as the scientist Phunsukh Wangdu; Pia risking social censure to seize love over convention. In fact, if there is sometimes an over messianic, almost didactic zeal with which Hirani goes about delivering his message in 3 Idiots—“Follow what your heart wants” — it is bec - ause this freedom to make films was the primary, enabling miracle of his life. It released him from the self-hat - red of low grades and the grinding mediocrity of a borrowed life. It gave him back his identity.

Apart from this, the film’s peculiar didactic energy probably also draws from the fact that though Hirani got lucky on the professional front, in his private life, he knows the pain of looking back on a road not taken. At a crucial juncture in his life, in a personal episode he would rather not make public, faced with a life-defining choice, Hirani fatally chose pragmatism over his heart. The vacuum and lingering loneliness of that decision dogs him till this day. He has felt the soul-draining dread of going into someth - ing knowing it was wrong for him, the dread of caving in to please those he loved and to accommodate the constraints of money. This rebuking memory imparts an extra urgency to 3 Idiots.

In fact, part of the explanation for the film’s astronomical success may lie in the fact that, by excavating his own autobiographical emotions, Hirani seems to have divined a massive common nerve in Indian society: the humiliations of living a life you don’t want, regret for the unlived life, and the empowering potency of being shown you can choose otherwise.

Hirani has divined a huge nerve in Indian society: regret for the unlived life

AT FIRST encounter, you could dismiss Raju Hirani as merely a simple man. His films lead you to expect someone wholesome and kind, and wholesome and kind he seems. But his friends have other, more illuminating, des criptions. Abhijat Joshi, his co-scriptwriter and creative soul-mate, calls Hirani “ET”, evoking his otherworldly optimism and childlike heart. Aamir Khan likens him to director Frank Capra (whose films always had a message about the basic goodness of human nature). His younger sister Anju and director Sriram Raghavan, friend and one-time roommate, speak of him as a “consummate prankster”. And producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra extols his utter and inviolate honesty.

Sitting over a coffee, you also get sudden sneak previews of Hirani’s famously dry humour. We are discuss ing the many controversies his film has been surrounded with. Soon after its release, 3 Idiots’ dream run was marred by an unpleasantly pesky shadow. Writer Chetan Bhagat, whose book Five Point Someone the film is loosely based on, alleged the producer and director had cheated him of due credit. The claim was unreasonable and Chopra and Hirani threw book and contract at him. But the controversy refused to go away till, having raked its benefits, Bhagat agreed to subside. Barely a day later, another controversy popped up. There was a ragging incident in a college in Maharashtra. Talk went around that the incident was inspired by 3 Idiots. Ludicrously, media reports said the state government was planning to summon the film to see if it had encouraged bad behaviour. “Soon I’ll be responsible for everyone’s farts,” Hirani laughs self-deprecatorily (a reference to Chatur’s character in the film, who’s beaverish desire to succeed is only matched by the offensive surround smell of his flatulence.)

All these qualities, and more, imbue Hirani’s cinema, and like Munnabhai MBBS and Lage Raho Munnabhai, 3 Idiots is undoubtedly a warm, life-affirming film. But as Boman Irani — who has played pitch-perfect antagonists in each of Hirani’s films — says bemusedly, “I loved all three films and am thrilled this one’s doing so well. But if you ask me why we’re being treated as if we are the Beatles, I have no answer!”

The bemusement is wellplaced. In cinematic terms, Hirani’s films are not – and do not aspire to be — pathbreaking in any way. They are firmly middle-road, firmly familiar, and very firmly, happy. In fact, the phrase “feel-good cinema” that everyone, including Hirani, casually uses to describe his work, captures the danger of banality on which it hovers. Small offen - ces are cured by small palliat i - ves, and you know before you’ve begun that by the end of the film, the good guy will prevail. In fact, in less affect i - onate hands, Hirani’s biggest gifts to contemporary popular imagination – “Jaddu ki jhappi”, “Gandhigiri” and the rebel cry “All is well” — could easily have become the trite tropes Bollywood co medy is infamous for.

So, contrary to evidence, it’s not the obvious attributes of Hirani’s cinema that explains its tremendous popularity. It’s not just the syrupy resolutions or the great gags subor the whip-crack humour. It’s not just the creation of the inspired pair, Munnabhai and his lovable sidekick, Circuit. Or the hyper-intelligent but less empathetic prankster, Rancho. Individually, each of these accomplishments could have wound up on the overstacked shelves of forgettable Bollywood comedy.

Art apart Raju and wife Manjeet in their Bandra home

The real key to Hirani’s cinema then — the reason why his audiences (probably unconsciously) have more than just a passing engagement with his films — lies in their unusual and strong underlayer of moral anger. At a time when all conventional signages point in a different direction, Hirani dares to be a Romantic. He dares to rail against the general human condition. You would never imagine it at a first meeting, but Abhijat Joshi says, “Hirani is full of revulsions. And religious superstition absolutely tops the hate-lists.” Joshi also admits of himself, “If a film doesn’t explore social truths, half my interest immediately evaporates.”

Indeed, if you go back to any of Hirani’s films — the two Munnabhais or 3 Idiots — you will find that alongside the spinal plot of the film run dozens of other tertiary preoccupations: greed, abandonment, callousness, cruelty to parents, corruption, superstition, slavish bondage to convention, parental oppression. In another age, a more biting cinema would probably have been Hirani’s most natural medium: Hindi heartland satirists Sharad Joshi and Harishankar Parsai are big inspirations. But driven both by his own temperament and the intuition of the genuine mass-media communicator, Hirani realises that contemporary audiences would reject anything too obviously dark. So over a complex and collaborative process of scripting that often takes more than three years and is conducted trans-Atlantically, the US-based Joshi and he turn his original impulses into unabashed, pre-modern feelgood melodramas — full of great jokes and sunlight and improbable, extreme situations. In the process, they slyly hold up a mirror to middle- class venality and the middle-class is gently nudged to transform itself without even realising it.

(Interestingly, many of the incidents in Hirani’s films are based on his own life. In one such incident, Hirani’s airhostess wife, Manjeet, was seriously ill, suffering from partial amnesia. Despite repeated visits and tests, a neurologist at a prestigious hospital kept treating them with supreme callousness — interrupting his sick wife’s narrations with social phone calls and brusque orders. “At one point, I got so mad, I stood up, grabbed the phone and banged it down hard on his table,” remembers Hirani. Triggered by this and other encounters with heartless doctors, Munnabhai MBBS started out as a visceral diatribe against the medical profession. But narrations to friends quickly showed Hirani he was getting no takers. He went back to the drawing board. By the time he was ready to go on set three years later, the anger had been wrapped in sweet gauze, coated in laughs, and served up as a hugely enjoyable, easy-to-swallow pill. The only indication of that first anger was the conceit of Munnabhai himself — a criminal more compassionate than medics. And the offending neurologist, whose memory is served up as a cameo in a ragging scene where senior doctors are stripped to their undies. Lage Raho similarly had more prickly origins, with a young man knocked on his head in 1947, emerging from a coma 50 years later to the utter despair of modernday India and the betrayal of what Gandhi had stood for. But Hirani and Joshi worked on this original idea — sometimes over 17-hour stretches a day — till they came up with the highly soluble message of sending floral bouquets as a modern-day equivalent of satyagraha.)

Ordinarily, “sweet” is an appellate that would kill any self-respecting satirist. But having transformed themselves into doctors of sweet angst, Hirani and Joshi’s cinematic vision is rescued by the subterranean moral clarities that flow beneath the fun. As Boman Irani says, “They have real insight into the darker side of human nature.” Part of Hirani’s inimitable formula then is that while watching his films and laughing in the dark, middle-class Indians feel subliminally grateful that at least someone is bothering to acknowledge they are ill and doling out “get well soon” messages to them.

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