Vishal's World

Grounded: Bhardwaj says he wanted to become a director after watching Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. 

Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint

When 19-year-old Vishal Bhardwaj returned from cricket practice that morning, his home had been emptied out on the street. Chairs, tables, utensils, clothes, photo frames—everything lay strewn on the road outside his home in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh. In the midst of it, right there on the street, his poet father—for long his best friend—lay sprawled. And lifeless.

It was one of the moments that would change the life of 45-year-old Bhardwaj, one of India’s brightest film-makers and music composers. “It was like a steady cam shot,” Bhardwaj recalls, squatted on the floor, wearing a white shirt, denims and a black jacket. He leaned against a cushion in his modest office in suburban Mumbai, gesturing the movement of a film camera with his hands. “No one said anything. They just stood there, silently looking.”
“I was very close to my father. His loss made me lose the fear of death. That is the primal, basic fear,” Bhardwaj says in an interview a few days before the release of his new film 7 Khoon Maaf. “Once you overcome that, you can take any leap, any plunge in life.”
Leaps of faith have been Bhardwaj’s favourite form of travel on his meandering journey so far, from western Uttar Pradesh to Mumbai, to becoming one of India’s most adored and acclaimed film-makers globally—a director of six well-received feature films. Bhardwaj is a true Renaissance man—he directs, composes music, writes scripts and is a singer who also writes lyrics.


The Interview ends with this:

But he doesn’t have to worry about it at all.
“I am beyond success and failure. I didn’t deserve this also. I never learnt music, I never learnt direction,” says Bhardwaj, as he slips on shoes for his next meeting.“My biggest fear is what I have seen happening to a lot of people…starting to do bad work, without realizing it.”

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