HOW HINDI FILMS SAW LIBERALIZATION

Vi segnalo un originale articolo che illustra gli effetti della liberalizzazione economica degli anni novanta sul cinema popolare hindi, in particolare, ma anche sulla televisione e sulle campagne pubblicitarie. Il testo è molto lungo e ben dettagliato. Nel timore che in futuro potrebbe non essere più disponibile (è pubblicato da un sito tematico, dedicato alla liberalizzazione, collegato ad un istituto universitario), di seguito vi propongo qualche stralcio, ma vi suggerisco di leggere la versione integrale. “Maangta Hai Kya?”: How Hindi films saw liberalization, Uday Bhatia, agosto 2022:

'Badmaash Company (...) set in the 1990s (...) [i]s a surprisingly vivid illustration of the tectonic effects of liberalization in India. (...) As we see in Badmaash Company, the 1991 reforms and the ones that followed in their wake were dramatic enough to bring about visible and fairly rapid changes in people’s lives.

“Bollywood” today is used interchangeably with Hindi cinema. Yet the term did not exist until the mid-1990s. Before that, it might not have occurred to people in the industry to think of themselves as a professional ecosystem like Hollywood. The Bombay movie industry was a place where actors shot one film in the morning and another in the evening, where gangsters bankrolled features. (...) In 1998, the government fulfilled a long-sought demand and declared Hindi film an industry. This “industry status” allowed banks to advance loans for films, paving the way for corporate financing and professional studios and signaling the decline of private bankrollers with their attendant problems of black money and underworld pressure. Reduced tariffs lowered the costs of importing film stock, cameras, and tools for recording, editing, and mixing. Technological upgrades came in quick succession: Dolby sound, digital editing on Avid, sync sound, CGI. The industry turned a corner in 2001 with the release of Ashutosh Gowariker’s expansive Lagaan and Farhan Akhtar’s tasteful Dil Chahta Hai. Films looked and sounded different after that - and they weren’t watched the same way, either. The first multiplex, PVR, opened in 1997 in Saket, Delhi. Two and a half decades later, multiplexes have all but replaced single-screen theaters in metropolitan cities.

While these structural changes were taking place, cinema itself was changing. Much of this was tied to the visible and invisible effects of the liberalization process. Previously, conspicuous on-screen wealth had been a smoke screen for villainy or, at the very least, a corrupting influence. But from the 1990s onward, Hindi film protagonists were, increasingly, second- or third-generation rich kids. With Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (1994), Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), Dil To Pagal Hai (1997), Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), Mohabbatein (2000), and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... (2001), there was a marked tonal shift toward youth, romance, and enough money to take money out of the equation. Producers discovered a lucrative overseas market that wanted to be told pretty, reassuring tales of home. If “Hindi film” was about the working-class hero and the mass audience, “Bollywood” stood for wealth and family values. (...)

If Sooraj Barjatya, Aditya and Yash Chopra, and Karan Johar were happy to show viewers the impossible dream, a few filmmakers explored how ordinary Indians were dealing with the changes around them. Ram Gopal Varma’s Rangeela (1995) is a particularly potent encapsulation of the post-liberalization moment. The playful argument of the musical number “Yaaro Sun Lo Zara”, in which Aamir Khan’s (...) Munna and Urmila Matondkar’s (...) Mili trade verses, is the new India of 1995 arguing with itself. “Gaadi bangla nahin na sahi na sahi / bank balance nahin na sahi na sahi” (If you don’t have a house and a car, that’s fine; / if you don’t have a bank balance, that’s fine), Munna sings. Mili responds with “Gaadi bangla agar ho toh kya baat hai / bank balance se rangeen din raat hai” (It’s amazing if you have a car and a house; / if you have a bank balance your life is made). (...) In another musical number that includes a magic carpet ride from Mumbai to New York, Mili (...) challenges Munna: “Maangta hai kya? Woh bolo!” (What do you desire? Say it!). (...)

The word maang - to ask, desire, or demand, depending on the passion with which it’s said - featured in another 1990s landmark. In 1998, Pepsi debuted an ad featuring Shah Rukh Khan, Rani Mukherjee, a young Shahid Kapoor, and Kajol, with the tagline “yeh dil maange more” (this heart wants more). Like so many other “Hinglish” phrases in those early days of cable, it became a rage, supplying the title of a film (2004’s Dil Maange More!!!, starring Kapoor) and the code word used by Captain Vikram Batra in the Kargil War of 1999. The 2021 biopic Shershaah brought it full circle by having Batra, played by Sidharth Malhotra, watch the Pepsi ad.

No actor personified the drive toward upward mobility better than Shah Rukh Khan. In Aziz (...) Mirza’s Yes Boss, Khan’s advertising man is hustling his way to success. “Jo bhi chahoon, woh main paoon... bas itna sa khwaab hai” (Whatever I desire, I attain it... that’s my little dream). At one point in the song, Khan is seen rolling in a sea of cash, an image of such frank materialist desire that it would have signaled moral decay had it appeared in any film made before the 1990s. (Satyajit Ray’s 1966 Bengali classic, Nayak, has a dream sequence with Uttar Kumar running through a field of cash; it quickly turns into a nightmare.) (...)

Liberalization changed Bollywood’s attitude toward money - and its villain profile. The move away from protectionism meant that dealers in contraband weren’t needed as they had been before. This led to the fading away of the smuggler, a staple villain (and sometimes antihero) from the 1940s to the early 1990s, as well as the black marketeer (though these figures still resurface, as in the influential Gangs of Wasseypur [2012]). The corrupt politician survived and adapted, as did the Hindi film gangster. The power-hungry industrialist and the manipulative seth turned increasingly benign; the hero or heroine’s father in 1990s rom-coms was often a businessman of some kind. Wealth was no longer a red flag. This laid the groundwork for the cartel-disrupting entrepreneurs of the following decade: Abhishek Bachchan playing a version of Dhirubhai Ambani, founder of Reliance, in Guru (2007), and the young upstarts of Rocket Singh Salesman of the Year (2009) and Band Baaja Baaraat (2010).

The luxury of choice (...)

The entry of cable TV in India was as big a jolt as anything liberalization wrought in those early years. Though small cable channels had started proliferating in the 1980s, most TV viewing was still limited to state broadcaster Doordarshan. Then, as part of the 1991 reforms, the government allowed private and foreign broadcasters to start operations. Star TV was one of the first to enter, bringing with it Hollywood movies and English-language soaps and sitcoms and music. It was a whole new world.

Music channels shook up Hindi film song and dance. The flash zooms, rapid cutting, and glossy production of videos on MTV and Channel V were adopted by younger directors, technicians, and choreographers such as Farah Khan, Ahmed Khan, and Shiamak Davar. Sophisticated recording equipment became available, allowing composers to improve on the muddy sounds of the 1980s. A. R. Rahman brought energy and eclecticism to film soundtracks: Roja (1992), Thiruda Thiruda (1993), and Bombay (1995) in Hindi dubs and, Rangeela onward, original Hindi soundtracks. A pop music industry sprang up and flourished for a decade or so before being swallowed by Hindi film.

This was the first generation of Indians who could watch foreign TV shows at home. Young people learned English from reruns of Friends and The Wonder Years. Indian TV channels sprang up - some in English, but most in local languages - and society reconfigured itself accordingly. (...) This was also the first generation of Hindi filmmakers who had to deal with audiences fed on a steady diet of foreign movies. It wasn’t as easy to steal from Spielberg and De Palma when their films were playing on TV all day. Viewers had more opportunities to compare local and international films, and to ask why they should settle for drastically lower production values. Luckily, Bollywood was in a position to do something about it. Import restrictions had eased and the necessary equipment could be brought in. Almost overnight, Hindi films became slick.

It was a time of relative innocence. (...) Yet many parents in those days did a lot of hand-wringing about the “Western values” their children were imbibing. (...) Bollywood gleefully incorporated the new values as well as the conservative correction. The scene that comes to mind most readily is Shah Rukh Khan, in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, somewhat cruelly leading a distraught Kajol to think that they were intimate the night before, then turning serious and saying he knows how important any Indian girl’s honor is to her. Later in the film, Khan keeps a daylong fast on Karva Chauth [festività hindu] along with Kajol: a spoonful of allyship to help the patriarchal tradition go down. In Yash Chopra’s Dil To Pagal Hai, Madhuri Dixit goes on a shopping spree in a gift store decked up for Valentine’s Day. She’s buying presents “to make myself happy” - retail therapy articulated simply and without guilt. (...)

This idea of a mixture - Indian and Western, traditional and new - was central to the early years of liberalization. After an initial run with foreign veejays speaking aspirational but difficult-to-understand accented English, Channel V and MTV started to air shows and promos in slangy Hinglish. Advertisers slipped a bit of English into their taglines. (...) Fusion music became a big deal. Colonial Cousins, a successful pop duo of the time, switched awkwardly between English and Hindi in its songs. A particularly ill-advised cross-culture stew was the version of “Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram” in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai - half-bhajan [genere di canto devozionale hindu], half-dance pop, all cringe.

Selling the dream

Post-liberalization, a “cinema of things” emerged: cars, clothes, accessories, TVs, gadgets, computers, décor, homes. Above all, there were phones ringing louder and louder across a decade in Hindi cinema. Early 1990s films found excuses to place characters in telephone booths - ubiquitous across India thanks to a government push - that had both dramatic potential and, with their cheerful yellow color, visual appeal. (Two of my favorites: Aamir Khan in Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahin [1991] showing off for the other reporters who don’t know he’s being scolded by his editor, and Shah Rukh Khan in Dil Se.. [1997] watching a charming village scene turn tragic as soldiers shoot an unarmed man.) Then, around 1996-1997, mobile phones started turning up in films. In Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya, an ambush is coordinated - and, at the last minute, called off - via cell phones. In Company (2002), Varma’s next gangster film, phones are wielded like guns. (...)

Bollywood was eager to participate in the new consumer economy - perhaps a bit too eager. Very quickly, the capitalist drive of the market and the promotional instincts of the film industry synced up. Brand placement for everything from cars to soaps started to appear in films. In Taal (1999), Subhash Ghai constructed a love scene around a Coke bottle. (...) Nothing was beneath a plug, no matter how prosaic the product. (...) The blatancy of all this in-film branding seemed to justify the reasoning that Bollywood wasn’t just another name for Hindi cinema but something altogether more business-like: films as products in a booming market.

As brands signed actors to be the face of their campaigns, advertising and film dovetailed until it was difficult to tell the difference. Ten minutes into Baazi (1995), Aamir Khan’s cop (...) shakes the Lehar soda bottle vigorously and sprays it on his face, the Lehar Pepsi branding on a crate taking up a quarter of the screen. (...) And audiences would have immediately connected Khan the actor to Khan the Pepsi brand ambassador. In 1993, he starred in the company’s first ad campaign in India, a sensational obstacle-course commercial with Mahima Chaudhry and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, which sparked a craze for the name Sanjana. (...) Multiplexes were often located in malls, so when you exited a film, the same movie stars you’d just seen on screen were now around you in the stores endorsing perfumes and sofas. (...)

Thirty years on (...)

The scaremongering about globalization changing the DNA of Hindi cinema is belatedly coming true in the streaming age. As taste flattens across the world, Bollywood is moving toward the global mean, with its eye on the success of Turkish dizi [serie] and Korean dramas. This means slowly tamping down the musical traditions that have defined it for over 80 years. Most films still have songs but with less dancing and lip-syncing, and there are not many directors left with a conception of Hindi film as a musical form. Even the lush romantic musical - the core of Bollywood - has seen a marked dip in the past decade. (...) Films about idle sons and daughters of rich parents became increasingly popular. (...) The occupational profile of Bollywood characters underwent a dramatic change. They were no longer doctors and lawyers and mid-level managers but rebellious entrepreneurs, photographers, architects, stand-up comics, video-game designers. (...) The working class receded from Hindi films altogether. It’s only in the non-Hindi cinemas that you’ll consistently find rural characters and the urban working class.

There has, however, been a return of the middle class. This new Middle Cinema began in the first decade of the millennium with the Delhi-set stories of Dibakar Banerjee and came to prominence over the next 10 years with the deceptively modest films of actors such as Ayushmann Khurrana, Rajkummar Rao, Pankaj Tripathi, and Bhumi Pednekar. These are life-size films, less exciting than the fantasies of the 1990s but more perceptive about the economic, familial, romantic, and interior lives of ordinary Indians. As the effects of liberalization spread outward from the urban areas, small-town settings for Hindi films have become increasingly common (though villages remain a rarity)'.

MOHSIN HAMID: L'ULTIMO UOMO BIANCO (THE LAST WHITE MAN)

Un paio di settimane fa è stato distribuito nelle librerie The Last White Man, l'ultimo romanzo di Mohsin Hamid. Vi segnalo l'articolo ‘I write more with my ears than my eyes,’ says Mohsin Hamid, di Nandini Nair, pubblicato da Open il 19 agosto 2022:

'Over the years, Mohsin Hamid has mastered the art of the big little novel. In the slimmest of novels, the 51-year-old grapples with the heaviest of subjects. His themes have spanned the large issues of the 21st century - terrorism and immigration, racism and homelands. The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), which clocks in at less than 200 pages, is even today one of the most astute 9/11 novels. Exit West (2017), at less than 250 pages, reminds us that we are all migrants. His most recent novel The Last White Man (...) sticks to the slim-novel brief at 192 pages, and reminds us that race is a construct and a dangerous one. To Hamid’s credit, his novels are not vehicles for issues, even as he uses fiction to shine a light on today’s faultlines. He is a smart storyteller who never allows topicality to eclipse the narrative. Readers and critics have lauded his works, The Reluctant Fundamentalist sold one million copies, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2007 as was Exit West, a decade later.

The Last White Man opens with a Kafkaesque premise; “One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.” At first, he thinks there is an interloper in the room, only to realise that the interloper is him. When he looks at his reflection in the mirror, “He wanted to kill the coloured man who confronted him here in his home, to extinguish the life animating this other’s body, to leave nothing standing but himself...” With time, others in the unnamed city too begin to change colour. Some reconcile to the new reality. Others resort to violence and arson. And a few recoil and turn against themselves as well. The novel’s opening gambit propels it forward. As a reader, one gets invested in the lives of Anders and his at-first-friend and then loving-partner Oona. What is to become of them, as the occasional flareup and then the riots engulf the town? What would happen if one’s skin colour changed, what would happen if everyone’s skin colour changed?

The novel often feels like a Black Mirror episode with menace lurking in the quotidian. Peril is ever present, always threatening to whisper boo around the corner. This doomy air is dispelled only by the growing relationship between Anders (a gym trainer) and Oona (a yoga instructor). In Hamid’s novels - whether Exit West or The Last White Man - the couple coheres even as the world unravels around them. Just as in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), Hamid reminds us that in the final reckoning the only thing that matters is the knowledge that “you have loved,” similarly his other novels raise companionship above all else.

Recently, speaking on a Zoom call, from the US, the Pakistani-British writer says that after completing Exit West he had initially thought of writing a book on “technology and our relationship with it,” but that soon morphed into something else, something that was, perhaps, bigger. The idea that was “calling out to him” had to do with technology and categorisations. He explains, “Technology encourages us to sort things and sort people in particular, liking something, unliking something, following somebody, unfollowing somebody. And I’m interested in the idea of messing with that, trying to disrupt that. And so this notion of a world where it becomes impossible to sort people by their racial category, was calling out to me more than a novel about our relationship with technology, in general.” Hamid started work on The Last White Man with the title already fixed in his mind.

The evolving relationship between Anders and Oona centres the novel, while their relationship with their parents bolsters it. Oona’s mother (who has recently lost her son to an overdose) is a conspiracy theorist who spends hours watching television and believing that a plot to end her “kind” is near. Oona tries to extract her mother from these theories, but barely succeeds. Anders’ father is dying, he was once a strong robust man, who is now only a man in pain. Even as Oona and Anders try to feed their own relationship they must also tend to their parents and witness the travesties of old age.

Speaking about the relationship between the characters and their parents, Hamid says, “I suppose the novel is a eulogy. It’s a novel about loss, and it’s a novel about people who lose things, lose people they love and also who lose something that they’re attached to, which is this sort of racial identity. Anders is grappling with the loss of his father, alongside the loss of his whiteness.”

Hamid’s novels walk this tightrope between loss and hope. The loss is that of a world changing beyond recognition, a loss of identity and self. And hope is always born from the camaraderie of the couple, whether it is Nadia and Saeed of Exit West or Oona and Anders of The Last White Man. Hamid says, “life is a kind of calamity,” and elaborates that living is about reconciling with the fact that while there is “beauty and poignancy” we will all grow old and die. “We’re here as impermanent beings - is one of the fundamental tasks of being a human being,” he says.

This has, of course, been the eternal conundrum of human life, but perhaps, in recent times, the rate of change has accelerated. In order to deal with these changes, Hamid feels we tend to look back at a past with great nostalgia, whether it is the “Golden Age of Islam or some imagined golden age that Hindutva is rooted in, or Britain before migrants arrived. Or America in the 1950s”. Our spiritual traditions - whether it is Hinduism or Sufiism or Islam - try to show us ways to deal with the drama and impermanence of life. He says, “In my novels, what I often try to do is to explore those ideas, against this dramatic backdrop, which in the novels is even more dramatic than just the fact that we’re all getting older. I want to see what are the ways to transcend this and to move beyond it.” He has always been fascinated by the literature and poetry of the Sufi tradition, where love “is the way to transcend the terror of being a temporary being.” He says, “So, each of these novels is in its own way a love story. And in Exit West it’s a love story very much about letting go and letting go of each other. And in The Last White Man, it’s maybe three love stories. The love of Anders and Oona, who actually come to see each other more clearly as the novel progresses. But also the love of Anders for his father and Oona for her mother, both of which are also playing out against the backdrop of all this change.”

In The Last White Man, Oona’s mother is revolted by the darkening of people, and Anders’ father is uneasy with it. But it is this change that brings Oona and Anders closer together. While the world spins senselessly, they find solace in each other. With Anders and with time, Oona finds that she can “shed her skin as a snake sheds its skin, not violently, not even coldly, but rather to abandon the confinement of the past, and unfettered, again, to grow.” Optimism is essential for Hamid’s enterprise. It is his way to push back against a nostalgic politics that harps on the past. He says, “All around us we see environmental degradation. We see rising inequality. We see rising intolerance. That does predispose us towards a kind of nostalgic politics, to people who say, ‘Oh, the way it used to be 50 years ago or 500 years ago or 1,000 years ago was better,’ and we should use that as our inspiration of where we need to go. That’s very dangerous because usually the past wasn’t really all that good. We need to resist this profound nostalgic political impulse. You can’t really resist it unless you find something else to attach your imagination to, and I think unless there’s some sort of optimism about where we might go, it’s very difficult to attach our imaginations to things. What my novels often try to do is to win through to a kind of optimism, not a naive optimism that everything will be fine, but an optimism that if we imagine differently, different things could happen. So, an optimism of action, not an optimism of just passivity. That is very important to me.”

Hamid is perhaps better suited to write of homelands and borders than most, as he has spent chunks of his life in the US, the UK and Pakistan. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, he wrote his early novels while working as a management consultant. Back at Princeton University Hamid was in Toni Morrison’s class. One of the possessions he holds most dear is an early draft of Moth Smoke, edited in her “beautiful handwriting in fountain pen”. He worked in London in the early noughties and moved back to Lahore with his family in 2009.

Living across the globe, Hamid has written from different vantage points. Moth Smoke published in 2000, is set mainly in Lahore, and was written largely when he was in the US in his 20s. He spent his 30s in London, writing The Reluctant Fundamentalist that was mainly set in the US. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia never named a city in particular but was clearly about an Asian city and was written while in Lahore. His last two novels have similarly pushed back against particular geographical names and locations. He says, “I needed to resist the instinct to be representative of this place, to say, ‘I can describe this place’ or ‘I’m reporting from this place’, because I think that is quite dangerous to allow yourself to imagine that you can be representative, and so I intentionally despecified the place of that novel.” The Last White Man was written in both Lahore and New York. He adds, “The power of literature is that we can imagine ourselves into existences that are different from our own, into lives of people who are not us, and so that’s what I really wanted to do with this book.”

Hamid’s signature style, perfected over time, is his reliance on the comma and his neglect of the full stop. His writing day is spent pacing up and down in his study and reading aloud every line to himself, rather than simply clacking at keys. He says, “I write more with my ears than my eyes,” adding, “the way we process language is through our aural circuitry. The circuitry of our hearing. And of language.”

In order to create a musicality to his text, he uses proper nouns repeatedly. To take a random example, on page 162 of my proof copy, a single sentence runs for 28 lines without a full stop, with close to 30 commas and 10 mentions of the name Oona and three mentions of Anders’ name. Hamid explains his technique, “I’ve tried to lean heavily on the comma. A comma is a kind of forward leaning pause. It’s a pause, but you keep going.”

His choice of punctuation is for reasons of both style and content. The lack of full stops endows the text with rhythm and slackens resistance. Hamid says, “You don’t stop to resist the sentence until you’ve gone quite a long way. And that’s nice because it continues to carry the reader along through ideas that may be strange, or maybe initially, off putting. If the musicality of the ideas is one that you accept, you may very well choose to accept the words”.'

Aggiornamento del 16 gennaio 2023: L'ultimo uomo bianco, pubblicato da Einaudi, da qualche giorno è in distribuzione nelle librerie italiane.

ALIA BHATT: DIECI ANNI DI CARRIERA

Per la talentuosa Alia Bhatt il 2022 segna il decimo anno di carriera, un invidiabile percorso professionale contrassegnato da successi - solo un paio di passi falsi - sia di pubblico che di critica. Diverse testate indiane hanno dedicato ampio spazio alla giovane attrice. Vi segnalo alcuni articoli:

- Is there anything Alia Bhatt can’t do?, Kaveree Bamzai, Open, 15 agosto 2022:

'Alia [Bhatt] always wanted to be a Hindi film heroine. Her father [Mahesh Bhatt] insists her upbringing was not “filmi”. Alia agrees, “I didn’t grow up on a film set. I knew my parents would go away for a while but it was only much later that I realised my father was related to movies and my mother [Soni Razdan] did theatre and TV shows. Growing up, I remember they would play a lot of music, there would be music sittings for movies. But my relationship with acting started with television. I was in my own la la land, watching Karisma Kapoor, Govinda, David Dhawan movies. I would watch Ekta Kapoor’s TV series such as Kasautii Zindagii Kay. I discovered Mahesh Bhatt’s cinema much later. But by the age of four, I had decided to become an actor.” She was seven when she saw Zakhm (1998) and sent her stepsister Pooja Bhatt a note on it. “I remember Pooja telling me she was stunned by her sensitivity at that age,” says Mahesh Bhatt.

As a child, she got many offers to be an actor. “But my mum wanted me to live the life of a child, and not start so young,” she says. When she was nine, her mother took her to [Sanjay Leela] Bhansali to audition for the role of the young girl in Black (2005) that finally went to Ayesha Kapur. “My mum was very keen on me being part of his movies. I had no clue I was going to that meeting. It was only when we were entering Sanjay Sir’s building that she told me. It was where I met Ranbir for the first time. He was taking pictures of me, very eager, being the assistant. I remember Bhansali telling my mother, ‘This girl will be a heroine one day.’ (...) Life does not go according to plan. And sometimes, as women, we forget to define who we are in our own roles. (...) The way I’ve chosen my roles, the timing for my film releases, nothing has been planned. I got married at 29 - I thought I would not get married until much later. Very early on, in my career and personal life, I realised you had to go with what happens naturally, to go with your gut feeling, to go with what feels right as opposed to what you think is right.”

Her greatest gift is her intuitive ability to understand a script, says her mother, actor Soni Razdan. (...) “Student of the Year hadn’t come out but there was something about this child-woman that struck me. I offered her the role of Veera in Highway and asked her to read the script,” he [Imtiaz Ali] says. She did, and loved it, though she was apprehensive about being in every scene of the movie. “My team was not convinced though,” says Ali, and he asked her to the office one day to tell them the story of Highway as she understood it. They were blown away,” he says. 

Gauri Shinde, who directed her in Dear Zindagi (2016), says she has everything one needs to be a great actor, “She is damn real, unafraid to show vulnerability both onscreen and offscreen; highly sensitive and intuitive at such a young age; is sharply focused on her craft; and has a natural charm, energy and honesty that is so appealing that one can’t help but fall in love with her.” She also has the gift of listening, says her Darlings director Jasmeet K. Reen. “When you tell her about the character, you can see her mentally taking notes. Even in readings, she just reads without expression. When the camera starts, she just explodes,” says Reen. (...) Her mother says Alia has a photographic memory that helps her in her performances. (...)

When she finally did get a role in a Bollywood movie, she was 17. It was after a series of auditions and Alia still remembers going to meet [Karan] Johar in his office after she was selected. “I was still in my school uniform,” she says. Johar remembers it slightly differently. (...) “I had met her when she was very tiny because she would come to the film set as Bhatt Sahib has directed two films for my dad. I had not kept in touch. Then I called up her mom and asked whether I could have a meeting. By then, we had auditioned 300 girls for the lead in Student of the Year. Alia walked in and she was really chubby and cute. She had come in her school uniform (...) and we chatted. There was something extraordinary about her. After that, she did the audition and it was amazing,” he says. He then told her he would want her to get into workshops for fitness and acting. Three months later, when they did photo shoots, he knew she was a “bona fide movie star”. He feels she is the finest actor in the country currently, and he means both men and women. Razdan acknowledges his role - he is really like her second father, she says. (...)

Until Student of the Year happened, Razdan says the family was all set to send Alia to the UK or the US for a year’s acting course. She remembers holding Alia’s hand for the first two years of her career, because she was so young. But after the initial phase, Alia took her own calls, says the mother. How different is her stardom from that of her immediate predecessors, the troika of Deepika Padukone, Anushka Sharma and Katrina Kaif? Unlike them, she is not a particularly gifted dancer. (...) Unlike the three of them who relied on the Khans for their initial stardom, she didn’t have that choice because of her physiognomy. So, either by choice or coincidence, she challenged the Khan patriarchy. Gauri Shinde’s Dear Zindagi featured Shah Rukh Khan, but in an avuncular cameo. Luck and timing are also on her side. She is in the industry at a time when stories are the priority. (...)

Alia’s stardom is also carefully constructed as a conversation with the audience on social media. When her first appearance on Koffee with Karan revealed her lack of general knowledge, she converted it into an opportunity and made “dumb” her calling card. In 2014, the popular YouTube channel, AIB, collaborated with her to create a video called “Genius of the Year”, a spoof of the event. (...) Around the same time, Alia received both critical acclaim and commercial success for her performance in Highway followed by Udta Punjab (directed by Abhishek Chaubey, 2016), and later, Raazi (Meghna Gulzar, 2018). Suddenly, from an entitled star kid she came to be seen as a real actor. (...)

She lets the world (with 68.3 million followers) into her life with Instagram. It is very different in the case of both Deepika and Anushka, whose stardom was more controlled, the lines between personal and private clearly drawn. (...) Add to that a careful balance of commercial cinema and middle-of-the-road movies. (...) And there is a burgeoning career that keeps her priority front and centre, the desire to entertain. For Alia, the last 10 years have gone by very fast. “When I’ve made a mistake, I’ve moved on. I don’t reflect too much, nothing happens for a second time. It’s a different day, a different step. There’s still a lot of work to do, especially now. Maybe, I have the ability to make things happen. I can make a film like Darlings, act in it, co-produce it. I like the idea of showcasing a new director and a new script. That has always been the endeavour. I loved the experience of putting together Darlings, from okaying the script, to working on the story, to the way the film is presented. It makes me so proud to see the human spirit in collaboration. I love that dynamic,” she says. (...) Alia’s heritage is multicultural. On her father’s side, a Muslim grandmother and a Gujarati Hindu grandfather; and on her mother’s side, a Kashmiri Pandit grandfather and a German grandmother. (...) Alia has the thirst to do much more, says her father. She’s looking beyond the horizon. In a battered Bollywood, perhaps her cooperative way of working will usher in a new era'.

- Aila, Alia!, Mayank Shekhar, Mid-Day, 20 agosto 2022. Il testo include il video dell'intervista integrale:

'[Udta Punjab] Bhatt recalls her trainer [Pankaj Tripathi], whom she’d meet every day, mastering body language, Jharkhandi dialect, down to how her character sits on haunches for hours. It’s the only time in her career that Bhatt confesses she went “method” on herself. Meaning, abandoned cell-phone, never stepped out of hotel room, consumed no entertainment, spent time interacting/empathising with local youth, never switched on the TV, and simply marinated in the character, until the shoot ended. Why? Because she wanted to prove she was “a chameleon as an actor.” To whom? To herself, she says. (...) She had in fact read the said script, through Shahid Kapoor, her co-actor in the romantic fantasy, 'Shaandaar' (2015), that they were shooting at the time. She actively went up to [Abhishek] Chaubey, asking him to consider her for the battered female lead. The initial look-test didn’t wholly convince him either. She even learnt to play hockey for a month, which is only part of the character’s back-story, not even in the film. The effort totally matches the outcome. Although she says, “There is a part [of me] that says I won’t do it again; of course, never say never. I only played that part for 20 days, which was great. I don’t know how I would have survived it for, say, 60 days.” (...)

With Gangubai, Bhatt reveals about Bhansali being the performative inspiration: “I took so much of Sir’s personality and put that into Gangubai’s character - the way he speaks, thinks, has a certain attitude. (...) Because it is in his head. Film is the director’s medium. And then it’s the written word. The actor has to collect all those things and place it in front of the camera.” (...)

“I am very open to people’s opinions. That is the only way a person learns. But there is [this] humbling part [in my personality] that also comes with my upbringing, and the people around me. I am not the first member of my own fan club. I do not believe the sun shines out of my backside. I genuinely believe I am here to do a job, and must continue to do it well, which is a by-product of a lot of people doing their job well. It is not just me. I value that. (...) I recently realised that I have literally not been a ‘present’ friend for 10 years. And they let me be ‘unpresent’, because they knew I was chasing something. And you have to make sacrifices to try and get what you want. I have the same [set of] nine friends I went to (...) school with. At the end of the day, I feel most comfortable with them. There is a certain version of myself that I have to be in a public space, which I don’t, in their company. What matters to them is me, being me. That’s very grounding. The reason I have not lost them, is because of them. Because they have been so understanding, supportive.” (...)

Here’s Bhatt, the actor, with a house, car, checked, before 21; Bollywood debut before 20; started a film company, and then married, and is even expecting a child, before she turns 30! Is she following some timeline - yes/no/maybe?

Bhatt says, “Contrary to the character in Darlings, I don’t have a list. I have never had a plan. In fact, I used to think I will get married very late. I was one of those girls, who didn’t really talk about marriage much. But it is totally different, when you fall deeply in love, and you also feel like, okay, no, you want to get into that next point of your life. That happened very naturally with Ranbir [Kapoor]. I don’t know why. It just happened. And I am not feeling like my work will stop, pause, or change. I will continue to work till the very end. But that [raising a family] section of your life is something that you have to give your time and energy to. It is not going to happen by itself.” As for manifesting life events, here’s something that can’t be denied about her relationship with her now-husband, Ranbir Kapoor. Over the past decade, pick up any interview, especially the rapid-fire round type stuff that’s common on YouTube chats. Every time she’s been asked about a crush, someone she’d like to date on-screen, etc - inevitably, her answer has been Ranbir Kapoor. Which is mildly strange, since both of them had been dating other people, all through. It’s almost like she set her eyes on this guy, and simply announced to the world that that’s the one she’s gonna end up with. Bhatt laughs, “You know, it is really weird. I was saying it as a regular ‘cute girl’. I was not actually chasing Ranbir on the side, or plotting to get Ranbir; none of that was happening. The fact that I was saying it obviously means I was not thinking about it. Sometimes when you think about it, you never say it. It is beautiful how it naturally worked out, when we started working together on Brahmāstra. For the longest time, we were socially meeting each other. But we had our own lives. There was no interaction, nothing. There was not even a friendship. I could not even call Ranbir a friend. But it naturally happened on that one flight to Tel Aviv, when we both were not seeing anybody. Both of us were single. Both of us were like, ‘Oh my God, what were we doing all these years?’ ‘Why aren’t we together?’ It was a question he kinda asked me. I was like, ‘I don’t know!’ So that’s what I was talking about. You cannot plan something like this”.'

ANURAG KASHYAP, THE GODFATHER

[Archivio]

Due giorni fa è stato distribuito Dobaaraa, l'ultimo film diretto da Anurag Kashyap. Quale migliore occasione per riproporvi un lungo articolo del 2013 dedicato al talentuoso regista. Anurag Kashyap, the Godfather, Parul Khanna, Brunch, 7 luglio 2013:

'Anurag Kashyap, godfather to aspiring filmmakers, a writer-producer-director whose stature has reached almost mythic proportions among his fanatic fans. Kashyap has scripted a success story fit for a Bollywood blockbuster. (...)

He was the youngest in his class, (...) didn't have enough facial hair to prove his machismo, wasn't confident enough to talk in English and was often at the receiving end of severe ragging. He would run and hide in the school library. Sexually abused and bullied as a child, he brooded over his anguish - for years. Kashyap created a whole parallel world inside himself. He wrote stories with unexpected twists and surprises, stories that would one day come to define his style of filmmaking. All of this has shaped him into the man that he is now. "My survival instincts were always very strong. To avoid the bullies, I would go to places no one would go to. I would read. And till a student fell ill for an inter-house race and I stepped in and won, nobody knew I could run, too. That's about all my achievements in school," he says, grinning. For his father, he was always the prodigal son. He was brilliant (he could remember the entire contents of his Biology textbook without trying too hard), but he never studied much. He could have done so much, but he drifted. Till he found himself. (...)

A troubled childhood

All of 41, with a life studded with enough twists, turns and struggles, (...) Kashyap is nonchalant about all that fate has thrown his way. "Sexual abuse is common in schools, especially residential ones. It's not the children's fault, it's the system that's faulty, but that I realise today. Then, I was deeply affected by it," he says, sipping French coffee in his Versova home. (...) The walls of his no-fuss home are littered with posters of films he has loved all his life, (...) along with snapshots of iconic New Wave French-Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. Photographs of Kashyap with wife Kalki Koechlin, and daughter Aaliyah, sit on a side table, adding the finishing touch to his living room. The only hint of indulgence (something he has been accused of in his films by critics) is a small cushion with a caricature of his face on it.

Originally from Varanasi, (...) Kashyap spent a lot of time in places like Anpara and did a few years of schooling in Obra, Faizabad, Dehradun, Gwalior's residential Scindia School and Delhi. After school, he decided to go to college in Delhi in the late '80s, because that's what everyone around him was doing. "As a direct effect [of the abuse in school], I built muscle in college, started playing sports, and would often be seen with a hockey stick in hand. I would get out of the oppressive college cliques, and form my own parallel world, all the while protecting those who weren't strong enough," he says. In 1992, after finishing a BSc in Zoology from Hansraj College, Delhi University, he was lost for a while. He cleared the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) exam in Delhi - because the college girl he loved (but who didn't love him back) had got admission there. He decided to back off, got through the Short Service Commission of the Army, but didn't join. In the midst of these existential dilemmas, Kashyap discovered international cinema. A new world opened up to him, with stories he couldn't relate to but stories which affected him. And even now, he searches the Internet for some of the films he saw back then. That's when he decided - he would go to Mumbai!  With dreams of becoming an actor, Kashyap came to Mumbai in 1993 with just Rs. 6,000 that he took from his father. Because that's all that he thought he would need! But he ran out of the cash quickly.

Struggler in Maximum City

A friend (...) offered to let Kashyap stay with him at his cousin's place. But the cousin turned him out. (...) Some days were spent on the streets of Mumbai, at forgotten nooks of Andheri where cars were less likely to run him over. On other days, the same friend ('a predator in a good way') would hook up with a girl who had a place to stay and often, would ask Kashyap to stay over, or invite him for breakfast. "The days she would refuse to let me in, he would be with her, and I would just sleep on the roof (...) in her building," he recalls. On better days, when he had Rs. 30, he would sleep in a lodging house right outside Dadar station in a room that already had several people in it. Belongings were to be kept in the pocket, as even underwear would get stolen. But Kashyap loved these experiences, "These experiences are now a part of my filmmaking. In Murabba (his story in Bombay Talkies) (...) I recreated that world. So many people had slept on the mattress that it would stick to your back when you woke up in the morning," he laughs, oblivious to the grossness potential of his statement.

Back in his Delhi University days, he fell in love with a girl, would stare at her in class, and tell everyone she was his. (...) These are the little moments he recreates in his films. Dev's alcohol-induced trips in Dev. D, his walking around the city, his sudden realisation he didn't love Paro are all things Kashyap has been through himself. "People say you don't realise something suddenly, it's a gradual process. But believe me, it happens in a snap," he says. (...)

Kashyap was a natural at writing scripts. "Soon after I arrived in Mumbai, in the '90s, cable TV had just come in, and there were these shows - Superhit Muqabla etc - for which votes were counted a day before, and the script had to be turned in fast. I became known for churning out scripts for two episodes in a night. So writing started to sustain me," he says. Kashyap would write for everyone, sometimes without remuneration and often even without credit. This irked his brother, director Abhinav Kashyap, known to be better with money dealings. By the time Kashyap was able to sustain himself with writing, Abhinav too had come to Mumbai to prepare for the IIM [Indian Institutes of Management] exam. The brothers took up a flat on rent and Kashyap realised there was a lot of money in writing. "Though I would often refuse people whose script ideas didn't excite me. But Abhinav figured it was Rs. 10,000 a night's work for me. He would accept it on my behalf, write it himself. Slowly we got a fridge, then something else in the house, and I'd be wondering where the money came from," says Kashyap. Abhinav bought a house in Mumbai 15 years ago, but Kashyap did so only recently. His father often worries about his finances. Kashyap's business partners put a salary in his bank account, enough for his expenses every month. "They know any extra money I get, I'll give it to someone to make a film," he says laughing.

The making of brand Anurag

Today, Anurag Kashyap has arrived. He completes 20 years in Mumbai, and finally Mumbai is giving him his due. He is now a filmmaker who is expected to give viewers something edgy, something different, something cerebral in his films. Even people who don't like his films, watch them. Strong in content, casting, music and visuals, he's known for breaking the myth that audiences only like films with big stars. Credited with making unknown faces - Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Huma Qureshi, Richa Chadha - overnight stars, and rebuilding flailing careers, Kashyap is 'The Man' to go to. During the four hours I was at his place, he was inundated with calls from people who wanted something or the other from him. (...)

Gangs of Wasseypur is a huge commercial and critical hit. Legendary Hollywood filmmaker Martin Scorsese wrote to Kashyap, saying how much he loved Gangs... and Dev. D. The two will be spending 15 days together at the end of the year. Kashyap's first big-budget film, Bombay Velvet, being co-produced by Fox Studios, went on the floors this month. He's getting to direct Amitabh Bachchan, whose movies of the '70s greatly influenced him, for a fiction TV show. Megastars such as Shah Rukh Khan are keen to work with him. "An Amitabh and a Ranbir working with me means they are coming midway, they want to do something different and don't want to be slaves of their image. That says a lot. We both are meeting midway. A Ranbir is as good or an even better actor than a lot of those on the fringes," says Kashyap.

The production houses Kashyap floated with the intent of maintaining creative freedom, (...) run like well-oiled machines. "I have spent many years trying to get other people's films out. Now, I want to only focus on directing. Even in the production houses, I focus on the creative aspects, my strengths - casting, reading scripts, and deciding the music. My weaknesses are taken care of by everyone else. They don't even take me for the money meetings because I am a liability there," he says.

Breaking the jinx (...)

Mention his tales of epic struggle and he says, "Who doesn't struggle? People just love these stories. Those were the fun days. And those are the experiences that I borrow from now. If Paanch (the first movie he made in 2000, but which didn't get any backers and still remains unreleased) had been released, I wouldn't have been half of what I am today." He then started work on Gulaal, completed the script in 2002 and the film in 2008, but nobody wanted to distribute it. He finally got it released only after the success of Dev. D in 2009. For seven years, he struggled to get his 'stuck' films released. Alongside Gulaal, Kashyap worked on Black Friday, which too got mired in legal hassles and released only in 2007, after being blocked for two years. It was his first release, but the third film he had directed. "People believed I was jinxed," (...) he recalls without a trace of residual hurt. When Black Friday released, it got tremendous critical acclaim. That was when people in the industry started warming up to him. Dev. D became a critical and commercial success. It still remains a cult classic for the Kashyap fan club. This was the film that made India sit up and take notice of this director who could give an old tale of love and loss a gritty touch. (...) Then there was the over-indulgent No Smoking, which left most people wondering what they'd just seen, and the not-so-great That Girl in Yellow Boots. Eventually he released Gulaal in 2009. The film earned rave reviews. Critics called it 'compelling.' 'Trust Anurag to give something different' and 'courageous,' they said. He'd had his revenge.

Poster boy to mentor

It was time to break the pattern, again. Kashyap noticed many others like him who were new to Bollywood. Creative, brilliant freethinkers who were fighting to get their films out to an audience that existed, but faced rejection by distributors and producers. He came across debutant director Vikramaditya Motwane's Udaan. "No one was willing to touch it. It got picked up by UTV only after it went to the Cannes International Film Festival. I wasn't a producer but I backed it," he says. [Guneet] Monga [produttrice, partner di Kashyap] came onboard and helped him raise funds for That Girl in Yellow Boots, through Facebook, the Internet and even internationally. Soon everyone - his assistant directors and crew members - started giving him scripts. From then to now, he's become a talent-churning factory. There's Michael, Peddlers, Monsoon Shootout, Shahid, Haraamkhor, The lunchbox. (...)

Kashyap became the poster boy for the indie film movement, breaking through the stranglehold of big-budget, star-studded films and family-run productions. Anyone and everyone who had a story had Kashyap in mind. Though that's coming to bite him now. Kashyap groupies are crying foul that he's sold himself out by agreeing to do the big budget Bombay Velvet. Kashyap, a little irked, says, "I didn't ask anyone to make me a poster boy. Because poster boys always end up on dart boards," he says. "Once people see the film, they will calm down. Fans are your greatest enemies because they tend to bracket you. And the moment someone expects I should do something, I break out. I often tell fans who say, 'make a Gulaal 2 or Gangs 3,' that I am living my dream, not theirs." Being from a small town himself, Kashyap has also become the face for a movement that is encouraging people from India's small towns to get their individual, interesting voices on the big screen. (...)

Kashyap lets first-time filmmakers be. He believes they make the most unadulterated and honest films before they are corrupted by the demands of the audience or commerce. (...) He has an almost abnormal sense of justice and fair play. He cast Tejaswini Kolhapure in Ugly because she'd worked for him in Paanch, which never released. Music composer Amit Trivedi gave music in Dev. D and Udaan for a pittance, but Kashyap promised to work with him next when he could pay him well. Trivedi is now doing the music for the big-budget Bombay Velvet. Democratic, a visionary and a mentor, he empowers everyone around him. "Anurag stands by silently, collaborates and lets you make your mistakes, and helps you get up," says Monga. He is the most unalloyed form of movie lover. His only agenda is movies - to watch them, make them and let others create them too. A familiar joke Kalki cracks about Kashyap goes like this: "If you want to see him head over heels, turn the TV upside down with a movie playing on it."

Inside the aesthete's den

Thousands of DVDs line one of Kashyap's rooms, hundreds of books another room. A connoisseur of noir, with a predator-like craving to discover newer places and experiences, Kashyap has films and books from all across the world. (...) He points to a rack and says, (...) "I get to know so much about a place from the pulp writers. It's unadulterated knowledge. I love travelling and most scripts have been written while I have been travelling. Dev. D was partly written on a plane, Gangs... was written in Madrid in a hotel full of transvestites," (...) says Kashyap, before he heads to his room for a bath. He hands me a copy of the graphic novel Persepolis. "Read it, you will start to love graphic novels." The key to having a good conversation with Kashyap is to never ask him 'how'. He doesn't have a method to anything. He's a natural at what he does. As actor-lyricist-musician Piyush Mishra puts it, "He's a genius. (...) He has that something extra. One Anurag Kashyap is a necessity for us, but two would be too much," he says seriously. 

Once out of his bath, Kashyap rolls a cigarette, and then goes to the kitchen to check on the chicken and meat dish he's making. Cooking is a big de-stressor for him. He often lures friends and co-workers to his home on the pretext of giving them good food, and then bounces ideas off them. They have no choice but to be his captive audience. He's one of the very few people in the industry who takes opinions from everyone. "Even his office boy can tell him, he's made a f**k-all film. He's that nervous about a product, as well as that sure of himself," says [Vikas] Bahl.

After his bath, Kashyap has changed from shorts and T-shirt to denims and a black shirt. "I only dress up when Kalki is around," he smiles. The women of his films are like the women in his life. They are strong, give men direction and teach them a thing or two about life. Sardar Khan (Manoj Bajpayee), a trigger-happy, hardened criminal in Gangs of Wasseypur I, literally pisses in his pants in front of his wife Nagma (Richa Chadha). In Gulaal, women play an important role in the student politics. Paro (Mahie Gill) in Dev. D and Durga (Reema Sen) in Gangs Of Wasseypur I, are sexual, sensual creatures. From a shy boy, for whom holding a girl's hand was tough, Kashyap has grown into a man who embraces and respects women's sexuality. It's a lesson he learnt from the many interesting women he met in his life. "My education from women started with sex, and then it went on to other things. I could always be around women who had a reputation. You'd never feel conscious about what you were saying. And that's how my evolution happened. Today, I cannot be around boring women or people who take on this mantle of judgment. It's just so dull," he says.

All the struggle he underwent couldn't dampen Kashyap's spirits, but his marital separation from film editor Aarti Bajaj did. Angered when his films weren't releasing, he sought refuge in alcohol, which eventually led to his divorce. He discovered jazz, on which Bombay Velvet is based, while on a trip to America, after his divorce. That's where he fell in love with a jazz singer. "I followed her around the whole night, till we got together. She made me see a world I had been dreaming about recreating in India," he says. And just like it happens in the movies, he met to-be-wife Kalki when he returned to India, and things were never the same again. "When you have a void, you fill it up with everything external. I drink now too, but it's controlled. Love did that to me," he says. At least some clichés are universal, I think.

Life, good wine, single malts, movies, movies, movies, travelling and freedom matter to Kashyap the most. But some things keep changing. "I have lived films all these years. Now I want to spend time with my daughter Aaliyah, who, when she turns 13, will no longer want to see me. Kalki nearly dumped me last year because I was so busy with films. Now I want to just direct movies (I have so many stories I want to tell), and be a hanger-on when she's shooting, just sit in her room and read," he says. "And travel and discover," he adds as an afterthought. It's this child-like enthusiasm for discovery that keeps him doing ten things at the same time. "Through movies, I have met nearly everyone I have wanted to, except Woody Allen," he says. (...) What has been the big learning of his life? "Things are as you see them. If you set out to set them right, they become right. Have conviction in yourself, because otherwise nobody else will. And, take responsibility. I do that for all the people who believe in me".'

THE ERA OF RANBIR

[Archivio]

Il suo ultimo film, Shamshera, distribuito un mese fa, non ha incontrato i favori del pubblico, quindi ora tutti gli occhi sono puntati sulla prossima pellicola, Brahmāstra - Part One: Shiva, nelle sale fra qualche settimana. Comunque vada, il 2022 rimarrà memorabile per il sempre talentuoso Ranbir Kapoor: in aprile l'attore si è sposato con Alia Bhatt (sua partner in Brahmāstra), e la coppia sta aspettando un bambino. Proprio la settimana scorsa i due erano in vacanza in Italia, una sorta di brevissima luna di miele incastonata fra i rispettivi impegni professionali (clicca qui). In attesa di applaudire nuovi trionfi, vi propongo un lungo, entusiastico articolo dedicato a Ranbir pubblicato da India Today il primo luglio 2013, anticipato da un editoriale e, naturalmente, dalla copertina. L'attore era allora in corsa per il titolo della più giovane superstar del cinema hindi popolare contemporaneo (buon sangue non mente). Cos'è successo in seguito? La carriera di Ranbir ha sperimentato alti (Tamasha, Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, Sanju) e bassi (Besharam, l'intrigante Roy, Bombay Velvet, Jagga Jasoos), oltre alla concorrenza di un certo Ranveer Singh.

EDITORIALE, Aroon Purie:

'Every superstar in the Hindi film industry has banked on a formula to become a national icon. If Rajesh Khanna was the eternal romantic of the 1960s, Amitabh Bachchan embodied the repressed anger of a young nation in the 1970s. The 1990s belonged to Shah Rukh Khan, who represented a post-liberalisation globalised generation. He gave a new twist to the romantic lover boy, naughty and passionate, yet totally devoted to Indian values. Ranbir Kapoor, the new superstar of Indian cinema, doesn't have a formula to his stardom.

He is just 30 and has done 10 films since his towel-dropping debut in Sanjay Leela Bansali's Saawariya in 2007, but it's impossible to slot him in any particular image. From the goofy salesman in Rocket Singh Salesman of the Year (2009) to the scheming political heir in Raajneeti (2010), from the good Samaritan in Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani (2009) to the superstar rocker in Rockstar (2011), from the aimless and confused youngster in Wake Up Sid (2009) to the ambitious traveller in Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani (YJHD), his roles are as varied as that of a seasoned character actor.

Some may argue that the credit should go to the new environment in Bollywood as several talented directors are experimenting with subjects and forms that don't conform to type. But such experiments have rarely created superstars. "I challenge any star from my time till now to take the kind of risks this boy has taken," his proud father, actor Rishi Kapoor, says. With the risks have come great rewards. His latest film, YJHD, grossed over Rs 170 crore in three weeks. His previous release, Barfi!, was also a Rs 100-crore blockbuster.

This is a rather curious phenomenon in the Hindi film industry which is likely to be worth nearly Rs 30,000 crore next year. Ranbir defies almost all the market tricks supposed to ensure an entry into the coveted Rs 100-crore club-six-pack abs, gravity-defying action sequences, mindless comedy, provocative item numbers and songs with beautiful women in foreign locations. Movie-goers paid to watch him not utter a single word in Barfi! and lose his girl in Rockstar. This is where Ranbir has evolved beyond his star power. His biggest USP is perhaps this element of unpredictability. Viewers still don't know what to expect of him.

Deputy Editor Kunal Pradhan spent 50 hours over four days with Ranbir to decode the man behind the star. He followed the actor to his film shoots, discussed film promos in his vanity van, worked out with the actor in the gym and even spent time with him in his first-floor room. In his real world, the reel superstar is quite predictable. He still lives with his parents, is obsessed with video games, watches football with friends and is terrified of his dominating father. "Interviewing Ranbir feels like hanging out with any regular person just entering his 30s. He is unafraid to reveal himself, which is a rare trait in any public figure, particularly an actor," says Pradhan.

Being on the cover of India Today was one of Ranbir's four wishes when he joined films. With this issue, his wish gets fulfilled twice over. We put him on the cover first in our June 21, 2010, issue for being the boy wonder who dared to shun formulaic films. Three years later, that risk-taking ability has allowed him to be emblematic of new-age Bollywood. The real big test for the actor is what he will do from here. As his friend Ayan Mukerji, director of YJHD, says: "To see how he changes as a superstar will be interesting. When he's 40, will he still be open to meeting a young, unknown director with a new script? That will decide whether he becomes the next Shah Rukh Khan or someone even bigger." That's for later. Let's revel now, in the new superstar hero who's defying every stereotype of superstardom'.

STAR NEXT DOOR: RANBIR KAPOOR, INDIA'S NEW ACTING SUPERSTAR, Kunal Pradhan:

'Ranbir Kapoor, 30, is India's new acting superstar. His latest film Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, released on May 31, has notched up collections of Rs 170 crore at last count, on the back of another Rs 100-crore blockbuster, Barfi!. His new custom-made Mercedes Benz G63 AMG now gets chased down the Bandra-Worli Sea Link by teenagers who recognise him through his lightly tinted windows. There is a gaggle of girls waiting at the gate of his Pali Hill bungalow for an audience; some so persistent and regular they're on first-name terms with his watchman, particularly because Ranbir gets pictures clicked with each one of them. (...)

But in the middle of all this adulation, Ranbir seems strangely unaffected. "I don't know what's wrong with my son," his mother Neetu Singh, 54, tells India Today. "This boy is as relaxed when his film doesn't do well as he is when it's a smash hit. I sometimes wonder if I gave birth to a yogi." His father Rishi Kapoor, 60, a bullish patriarch who admits he had gone on a wild streak after his own debut film Bobby had smashed box-office records in 1973, describes Ranbir as his polar opposite. "I marvel at what keeps him so grounded," he says, swelling in equal measure with pride and bewilderment.

Ranbir (...) jokes about how his state of Zen is being seen as a character flaw. (...) But stoic or not, Ranbir is more calculating, and unabashedly chasing success, than he lets on. Afternoons in his vanity van are spent cruising through one film promo after another. He watches them again and again, seeking opinions on how they are. "Did you see the Chennai Express spot?" he asks about the new Shah Rukh Khan movie. "Good or run-of-the-mill? What about Lootera?" That's the new Vikramaditya Motwane film starring Ranveer Singh. His Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani director and closest friend Ayan Mukerji, 29, says it is Ranbir's way of constantly testing waters, analysing, and trying to break down how his own promo will stand out from all the others. "He has his ear to the ground," says Mukerji. "How can my film be different, that's the only question on his mind."

It's this constant craving to be different that allows Ranbir to do the kind of roles he's done: from Rocket Singh Salesman of the Year in 2009 to Barfi! in 2012, at a time when everybody around him was telling him not to. "I challenge any star," says Rishi Kapoor, "from my time till now, to take the kind of risks this boy has taken." Rishi, sitting in a vanity van next to Ranbir's on the sets of Besharam, which also stars both him and his wife Neetu, is now speaking with a passion that automatically amplifies his volume. "A lot of people did different cinema but that was when they were working with four other regular films on the side. They didn't put their careers on the line like Ranbir has, working on one project at a time," he says, getting louder with every pause. "I can't tell him what films to do now, because what the hell do I know? A lot of people prove their detractors wrong, but he has proven his well-wishers wrong."

Not prone to such passion when off camera, Ranbir looks at his odd choice of roles a little differently. "The first time I thought I should be an actor was in school. I thought at least this is something for which I won't have to study," he laughs. "But I've realised that an actor needs to be constantly unsure about what he's doing, and about what's going on around him. The moment you think you've nailed it, you're dead."

As a Punjabi boy from Bandra, Ranbir, who went to study film in New York, admits he doesn't fully understand the world outside his tiny bubble. "What do I know about my character from Rockstar, (...) or Rocket Singh, or Samar Pratap (Raajneeti, 2010), or the deaf and mute Barfi? The idea is to use the experience of the people who do know. I can relate to Sid (Wake Up Sid, 2009) or Kabir from Yeh Jawaani but that's about it. I'm fortunate to be working with directors who're willing to invest in my education," he says. Anurag Basu, who Ranbir calls Dada, talks to him regularly about new ideas and new characters. Imtiaz Ali, concerned that he doesn't have the command over Hindi or Urdu needed for good diction, and by extension good dialogue delivery, sends him books by Premchand or poetry by Faiz. "You don't need to go through every life experience yourself when you have people to share them with. I have my own point of view and my own understanding through my relationships with women, and my exposure to world cinema. The characters I portray engage me, and I assume they would engage an audience," he says.

Today Ranbir's star meter is at a point few actors have reached before. Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani is a rare, epochal moment that comes along perhaps once in a decade, when the audience starts believing that the person they're seeing on the screen is not the character, but the actor himself. It happened with Shah Rukh Khan in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) when viewers thought Raj was a physical embodiment of Shah Rukh. They thought he was a passionate lover who would go to any lengths to win the girl of his dreams, charming his way past any opposition. Shah Rukh emerged from that film as a funny, confident, upright, master-of-all-trades who women wanted to fall in love with and men wanted to be friends with.

Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani has struck a similar chord. The movie-watching public somehow believes that the man they see on screen is not Kabir, but Ranbir. That he is naughty and fun-loving. That he takes life lightly. That he is loyal to his friends but wouldn't give up on his dreams for the woman he wants to share his world with. That he is the life of every party and the soul of every song. "It's too soon for me to analyse the film," says director Mukerji. "We had thought it would do well but fall short of being a blockbuster-like, say, a Cocktail (2012). But something multiplied its business. Perhaps it was Ranbir and how the public saw him as Kabir." Unlike any other Bollywood superstar before him, Ranbir's USP is how he reins in his emotion, rather than how he lets it out. He's not a master of tragedies like Dilip Kumar, or an angry young man like Amitabh Bachchan, or a fervent lover like Shah Rukh. Ranbir is a new hero for a new age. 

Sociologist Shiv Visvanathan, professor at the O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonepat, and senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, says: "Ranbir is, first, part of a legacy, a nostalgia-Raj Kapoor incarnate, a clown but an adolescent clown. Second, he is a subject of gossip, which sees him as playful and light, and with a roving eye. If Aamir Khan is a social project and Salman Khan is a muscular project, Ranbir is an individual project. He is narcissistic without being self-obsessed, which makes him connect with the India we are becoming, and the India we want to be."

This change in perception now follows him everywhere he goes. There is a smile on the faces of the Besharam unit when Ranbir walks on the set. (...) The assistant directors and grips watch him through tints of rose as he bends down to touch the feet of veteran action director (...) or refers to the cinematographer (...) as "Madhu sir". They gather around as he raps with co-star (...) between shots. They want to know what Ranbir's room is like, who his friends are, which restaurants he goes to, what turns him on, and what has made him this friendly, humble superstar who throws no tantrums and remembers everybody's names.

Ranbir's bedroom on the first floor of the Krishna Raj bungalow, where he chooses to live with his parents despite a bank balance now estimated to be in the range of Rs 200 crore, is a strange mix of young and old. His king-size bed, covered by high threadcount sheets, sits on a wooden floor. The lamp on the side table is perched next to The King Of Oil: The Secret Lives Of Mark Rich by Daniel Amman. "I read autobiographies because there is too much fiction in my life," says Ranbir. There is a beige three-seater sofa for friends, and small tables all around which hold his numerous awards. The decor is inspired by film and family: A poster of Barfi!, a photograph of the first shot of Mughal-e-Azam featuring his great grandfather Prithviraj Kapoor, a mosaic of his grandfather Raj Kapoor's face created from movie stills, and a 3,300-image mosaic of his own face presented to him by the Ranbir Kapoor fan club.

The centrepiece of the room is a 103-inch TV on which he's watching the Netflix series House of Cards. He has an Xbox 360, on which he plays FIFA 2010 and Halo 4, and a Playstation 3, on which his latest favourite is Uncharted 3. His mini-refrigerator is stacked with beer, caviar, sardines, and his favourite chocolate wafers, Quadratini. "When I'm in this room, I vegetate," says Ranbir.

Despite living with a strict father and an indulgent mother, Ranbir has a clearly defined personal space, borne partly out of rebellion and partly out of success. When he was in college, he would derive great pleasure in violating his 1.30 a.m. curfew. "I came home by midnight, waited for everyone to go to bed, then snuck out." His girlfriends often stay over despite his folks living on the floor below. "I don't take them for breakfast with my parents. But I'm sure they know who stayed over," he says.

Ranbir's relationship with women is a little more complicated than he likes to admit. He's been in five "meaningful" romances. His last girlfriend, Deepika Padukone, was his co-star from Bachna Ae Haseeno (2008) and Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani. "We're okay now. We sorted things out a while ago," he says about her. The closure has come at a price, hinting that an inveterate romantic is hiding beneath textbook intimacy issues: Ranbir avoids riding the Segway he would use to go to her Bandra home when they were dating. "I associate it with her. That was my Deepika vehicle."

But his inability to invest too much is obvious from how Ranbir has never been dumped. "I haven't really gone in deep enough to allow myself to get hurt. I'm weak; I pull away when things start to stagnate. I'm aware that I've broken five hearts, and it's not a good feeling." Ranbir says he doesn't really have a 'type'. "I like conflict - someone who challenges me, someone who I can look up to, someone who can keep me in check. Love has to be extraordinary, otherwise there's no point in it. I just haven't met anyone who's made me feel that way." At least not for long enough.

All this talk could also be a ploy to kill the rumour that has been raging in Bollywood - of his relationship with Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani (2009) co-star Katrina Kaif. "Everybody seems to think we're together, but it's not true," Ranbir insists. "She gets along with Ayan as well so we hang out together. It gets tiresome sometimes to talk about what Katrina and I have, and what we don't." His fans, and somehow even his film unit, don't seem to buy that.

But the defining relationship of his life is the one with his father Rishi Kapoor. It's an awkward, uneasy connection though the distance between them is slowly reducing. When Ranbir was a child, his father would either be out shooting, or would get into loud drunken brawls with Neetu that stretched deep into the night. "There were times when my sister (...) and I would be sitting on the steps till 6 a.m., waiting for them to stop," says Ranbir. It made for a difficult adolescence, stemming from an early realisation of how complicated a relationship between a man and a woman can be. "I always knew Dad loved my mother. He is still deeply possessive about her. They would have long arguments and passionate reconciliations. But he always held the upper hand in the house. He was the dominant force, and the rest of us had to cower." It was only when Ranbir returned from college did he noticed the dynamic had changed. His mother had become assertive. "She now had a point of view and got her way," he says.

His misgivings about alcohol spring from seeing what its overindulgence had done to his father. Ranbir is a reluctant social drinker but has smoked his share of weed, especially while at film school. "I used it again during Rockstar," he says, "this time as an acting tool. It was hard to get in the moment on stage with 300 bored junior artistes posing as a real audience. Pot made those moments feel real." But he says he's quit now, partly because he's too busy to get high, partly because he can't afford the lack of concentration and short-term memory loss that comes with smoking up. Rishi Kapoor acknowledges that his relationship with Ranbir remains somewhat strained. "I don't believe a father and son should be friends. I don't want him smoking in front of me, and I'm not comfortable talking to him about his girlfriends. But maybe," he adds, "I've missed something. Maybe I could've been a little different."

Ranbir still wants his father to handle his acting contracts for two reasons. One, Rishi Kapoor is a hard nut to crack in the boardroom and always gets him a great deal. Two, he doesn't want to let commercial negotiations come in the way of a partnership with producers and directors, many of whom are his friends. His only condition is that any creative decision must be his own.

"Today Ranbir is a young actor making fresh films with new directors telling different stories," says Mukerji. "To see how he changes as a superstar will be interesting. When he's 40, will he still be open to meeting a young, unknown director with a new script, or will the Rs 100-crore blood that he's tasted force him to play safe? That, for me, is the question which will decide whether he becomes the next Shah Rukh or someone even bigger." It's past midnight now. Ranbir is back in his room. (...) But he won't be going to bed anytime soon. "I am too insecure to crash early," says Ranbir. "I feel life will pass me by while I'm sleeping".'