SHRAYANA BHATTACHARYA: DESPERATELY SEEKING SHAH RUKH

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Vi propongo una rassegna stampa relativa al saggio del 2021 Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh. India's lonely young women and the search for intimacy and independence, a firma dell'economista Shrayana Bhattacharya. Il volume indaga la condizione socio-economica femminile in India partendo da uno spunto piuttosto bizzarro: se e in quale modo la superstar hindi Shah Rukh Khan ha influito nella vita personale delle sue sostenitrici, in particolare nel periodo della liberalizzazione economica (anni novanta). Viene da chiedersi: esiste davvero qualcosa che il Re non possa fare?

- Taps into the Myth and the Mannat of SRK, Prathyush Parasuraman, Film Companion, 2 novembre 2021:

'Mannat

Shrayana Bhattacharya in her fascinating book, (...) her love letter to both Shah Rukh - not Shah Rukh Khan, not SRK, but Shah Rukh, an invitation to intimacy - and women, calls him "the receptacle of so many of our expectations". Often, she capitalizes the H in He when referring to him, both aware of and buying into his god-like stardom. (...) Is it possible to extract the human from the myth? No? The alternative, which is what Bhattacharya does here, is then to contextualize that myth. (...) In 2017 (...) 60% of the audience members at an Indian cinema hall were men. Even in Mumbai, the single screen theaters are often bastions of male assertion. Most of the women Bhattacharya speaks to - from small towns, villages, big cities, the metropolis - were often dictated to never visit the theater. When they did so secretely, they were punished, slapped. It was an unsafe place, unbecoming of a woman. And yet Shah Rukh emerged in their lives, "divided by class, united by fandom", with pirated copies and music cassettes of his films, the television revolution that brought his cinema into the house, and later the internet, which would bring the entire archive of his films and interviews under the access of a thumb swipe. (...) But Bhattacharya is clear that while he elicits female fandom, he isn't a feminist icon. The characters he plays often champion noxious ideas of entitlement or dated pursuits of love. But his unthreatening gait, his inviting charm, and his interviews where he champions his wife paint an aura of the masculine ideal. (...) Even by measuring the screen time given to the men as compared to the women in his films, Bhattacharya notes how there is more space and time for women in his cinematic universe compared to his contemporaries. (...)

The labour market

Reading Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh, I often felt like I was reading two different, often unconnected books - one on the condition of women in the labour market, and the other, about how these women relate to, aspire towards, or seek solace from Shah Rukh. (...) The book on the labour market is cutting, precise, laden with statistics, and then counter-statistics to doubts you might and will have; the kind of careful defensiveness that comes from being surrounded by skeptics. Bhattacharya notes that the labour force participation of women has dropped despite the economic boom. The numbers are shocking. Between 2004 and 2011, while the economy was growing at around 7%, the share of women in the labour force fell to 33%, and thereon even further. In 2017, it hit a historic low of 23,3%. The pandemic further pushed this decline. India is the only middle-income country where economic growth and poverty reduction has not led to more women working outside of their home. India is placed among the bottom 5 countries on gender gap in economic participation. (...) But this isn't just an economic problem. It is a problem of social conditioning, for even among the wealthiest top twenty percent of urban Indians between the ages of 20 and 55, only 6% of married women were employed. But how does this connect to Shah Rukh? The women Bhattacharya speaks to - 80 in-depth interviews - (...) are also fans of Shah Rukh Khan. The tether, as one can imagine, between the labour market and the Shah Rukh fandom, is very thin. It is this part of the book, on Shah Rukh's fandom, that feels awkward and repetitive in its insistence on profundity. The insights are shaky, like throwing ideas at a wall, hoping something will stick. She uses the famous "Shah Rukh or Salman?" question as an icebreaker, and has met many a fan through this. Some of them are confused by her prodding. (...) Often Shah Rukh emerges only on the edges of their story, unimportant, but dressed up to feel central. (...) One of the fans Bhattacharya interviews, facetiously, but also, perhaps, correctly, developed a test to detect misogyny in Indian men using the fandom they belong to, "If a man likes Shah Rukh, he is usually progressive. If a man likes Salman, he is bad news. If a man likes Aamir, he's often a bearded liberal who likes his own voice too much. My test rarely fails".'

- In the sunshine of Shah Rukh's love, Uday Bhatia, Mint, 22 gennaio 2022:

'“I thought I was collecting stories about how women see Shah Rukh Khan and his films. In fact, I was collecting narratives of how they saw themselves and those around them.” This is the crux of Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh, an ambitious and impassioned non-fiction book that looks at the lives of women in India through the lens of their fandom. Shrayana Bhattacharya, a senior economist at the World Bank, spoke to women across economic strata for 15 years about love, work, agency, and the actor whose films offer everything from diversion to comfort and encouragement. (...)

Did the realisation that this is a book about Shah Rukh’s female fans, and not about the man himself, arrive at the start?

I think it came towards the middle, to be honest. In 2006, I was sent to collect data, the way any research assistant would. All these women I was sent to survey, when I would ask them about their wages, their working conditions, these were realities they were very aware of. I was uncomfortable that these people were so bored, so I started talking about Shah Rukh. I thought I was asking them about him, about his films, but instead they were talking about their husbands, their lovers, how difficult it is to earn money to watch Shah Rukh. I diligently had these conversations. Some of them knew I was thinking of converting these into an academic book at that time. Till 2013 it was, to me, these women and how they see Shah Rukh. Then, I decided - for personal reasons - that I wanted to broaden the scope of the book to include my own class. It’s when I started to talk to them and went back to look at the old notes that it occurred to me this was no longer a book about Shah Rukh Khan. I realised he was actually a research device. Then I completely restructured the book. (...)

One thing you reiterate is that these women are active creators of the Shah Rukh persona.

Received wisdom was he was the creator of that persona, and everyone else was just a consumer. But I realised that narrative is totally wrong. If you look at what’s usually said about Shah Rukh, it’s that he’s an NRI (non-resident Indian) star, who caters to thirsty housewives. I did not see that at all. I knew that he was the person who narrated the story around social mobility, but the amount he symbolised that to people from an elite background surprised me. And then what really surprised me was the way women in working class and low-income communities thought of him as being an escape when their lives were so difficult, giving them almost a demonstration of what a good man could be. I was shocked about the way women would cry about his films when talking about the lack of romantic agency in their lives. I was really surprised how, for a younger generation of women, he represents opportunity and liberalisation.

Why do you term his best performance that of the “unapologetic middle-class superstar”?

This is where the economy reacts with film. Inequality among our top 10%, the difference between the mega rich and the merely rich, has grown unimaginably. And I think he captures this. When people look at him, they see a merely rich person who has become mega rich. He has been, from his early 20s, the hyper elite of our country. And yet people feel so taxed because of the way network wealth is so important in our economy, that they will all look at him as someone who “made it”, who triumphed over patronage and networks. Another reason I think is important is he came to prominence in that liberalisation period. Suddenly, there were creative spirits of the economy that had been unleashed - he’s one example of that. He capitalised on everything the reform process maintained. (...) We think of him as capturing that original moment. I will say one more thing. If you look at his (early) interviews, I don’t think anyone is talking about money and the need to earn it and hold on to it (as much as he is). Bollywood stars don’t talk about money. But he’s saying openly in interviews that I needed to take loans, I needed to buy a house. He was very open about it.

You write that women who grew up watching Shah Rukh films graduated to watching his interviews in their 30s. Why do you think this is?

I think there are three reasons. One is that he was one of the first actors who, in the 1990s, talked about feeling bad, feeling depressed. I think a lot of women connected with him because he addressed these everyday negative feelings of anxiety, competition, job market issues. The second reason people were very enchanted was that he was a good public speaker. I know so many women, and men also, who said they would take tips on how to talk in public from his interviews. And the third is just that they are really charming and fun. He will entertain you, he will illuminate - it’s a performance. And there’s a fourth thing, which is particularly for women. If you look at the interviews, he was always talking about his mother, his wife. He was talking about marital fidelity, about his female co-stars. We can say some of it might be posturing - but he was saying it. I don’t think any of our male superstars at that time were valorising womanhood.

At one point, you paint, and address, a composite picture of the Shah Rukh fan. It reminded me of how, in market research, one is asked to visualise the target group as a single person.

The way I did that was, there were about a hundred women from my class group whom I spoke to. I wrote up an average. And then I thought, what’s a way to communicate an average? So what’s on the page is the median elite Shah Rukh fan.

Did you debate whether to interview Shah Rukh for the book?

Actually, I never thought of it. (...) This is not a text about Shah Rukh but a text about gender and economy, and he played this research device role to enter into the lives of these women. (...) He doesn’t need to be involved, because, in a way, it’s not him as a person but him as a construct. I realised that if he entered the agency would no longer be with the ordinary fan. He’s so powerful - it would just become him and his voice.

The book was to release around the time the storm over his son Aryan Khan exploded. Were you worried that a narrative you had constructed over so many years might spin out of control?

No, and this is something that’s heartening. I was confident that the love for him superseded whatever internet trollery political agents could buy. Having said that, I faced abuse from right-wing nuts when I put up an innocuous tweet about how I used to stand outside Mannat. I know that because of who he is and where we are as a country, the moment you say this generation of women is in love with a Muslim actor, there are people who will react with extremely hateful views'.

Shrayana Bhattacharya

- In a sea of Indian men, why everyone is seeking Shah Rukh, Sarim Naved, The Wire, 8 febbraio 2022:

'Khan is a unifying factor for women, Adivasi and Brahmin. The author is an accomplished economist and writer, choosing Khan as the constant for her study of Indian women, and to an extent men, born in the ’80s and ’90s. It goes beyond the anecdotal and evaluates its subjects utilising hard data as well. While Khan may be the constant, the variables are many - caste, class, geographical and occupational. The struggles of these women, divided by these variables, are of course very different from each other. Some seek personal fulfilment while others are just looking to make a living. (...) I can fully endorse this work - it is deeply engaging, and as a reader, or at least a male one, will take your minds down many paths which you did not know existed. As an analysis of the world of 30-something metropolitan professionals, regardless of gender, it’s a therapeutic read. It’s just accurate. The Shah Rukh Khan mythos started in the mid-1990s and is still going strong, even if every new release is not a monster hit. Khan is now in the news mostly for the attacks on him and his family. The myth is a dangerous one for the current ruling dispensation. It unifies what they want to divide. This man who flaunts his faith while maintaining an old-world air of accommodative secularism does not conform to the stereotype that they wish to assign to him. A work as detailed as this would obviously have taken years to plan, research and to write. By luck or design, the book has released at a time when Khan has become more relevant than ever. The “idea of India” that is the site of all political contestation these days now incorporates the fate of Shah Rukh Khan as an unavoidable part of its own destiny. Will Khan stay in India? Will he continue acting in films? Will he withdraw from public life? These are questions not only about Khan the person but about the trajectory that the country is on. Leaving one’s own imagined grievances with Khan aside, the man is rather uniquely placed to influence this country and society. We need people who can communicate charm, empathy and kindness. So, I say, Khan for PM. Why the hell not?'.

- recensione di Suman Joshi, The Hindu, 12 marzo 2022:

'Using Shah Rukh Khan’s films and the reforms of 1991 as starting points, Shrayana Bhattacharya makes women talk about their lives, from compromises to outright rebellion. (...) This genre-bending book looking at women in post-1991 India draws you in from the word go. (...) It presents a powerful commentary on the lives of Indian women and the ways they deal with inequities. Most importantly, it provides women a toolkit to navigate the changing landscape of economy and society in their search for freedom and happiness. 

Watershed moment 

The watershed moment of the 1991 reforms serves as an anchor, as the author traces the rise of the Indian economy and the simultaneous arrival of Shah Rukh Khan as a superstar. The author wears her economist hat lightly, but combines hard economic data, such as falling female labour force participation rate, hidden taxes women pay and a whole host of metrics, with surveys and interviews to paint a picture of the state of women. What makes this work special is her ability to use heart-warming, everyday stories to provide a relatable view of complex economic phenomena. The book draws on her work of following the trajectories of a group of women across caste, religion and class groups over several years. It has a generous smattering of songs and dialogues from SRK’s movies, deploying his work as a literary tool to string together stories of women whose paths would otherwise never cross. The magical SRK touch adds to the readability and fun quotient of the book. (...) ‘Fantasies’ give a glimpse into what Shah Rukh inspired in young elite girls growing up in the 1990s. The stories, one of which is the author’s own, and interviews of women bring out the contradictions women confront and the compromises they have to make despite being educated and upwardly mobile. Questions are raised regarding gender relations among the well-heeled. “Why do women resign their love lives to the trappings of male power and prestige? Why do so many successful women acquire a taste and tolerance for inequality in their private lives?” An interesting side story is the ringside view of Delhi drawing rooms with their own codes; and the trappings of power and male chauvinism. Her astute observation about the gaps in confidence arising out of social conditioning - “The upper class mating market seemed neatly divided between males with unwarranted self confidence and women with unwarranted self-doubt” - makes one question and ponder over what can be done to bridge these gaps. The 1991 reforms are estimated to have pulled millions of people out of poverty. A transformation of this magnitude that included structural changes in the economy was bound to have an impact on women. The expansion in large scale manufacturing, urbanisation and the boom in IT services changed the nature of the economic opportunities available, thereby impacting familial relationships too. 

Gambles for a dream 

‘Baazigar’ tackles the changes in the nature of relations within families and the societal contract during this economic boom. It also throws light on the nature of resistance for women in tier two cities, away from the cosmopolitan milieu of the big cities. The stories of women in this section all involve the baazis, gambles that women in tier-II cities take in an attempt to live a life they dream of. The stories ‘The Accountant’ and ‘A Girl called Gold’ are characterised by the struggle and strife at home to gain an education, choose a career and resist the pressures to “settle down”. While Gold makes the ultimate gamble and runs away from her Rajasthan home, The Accountant wages her battle of resistance within the confines of her home, revealing the many shades of pushback against restrictive traditional family structures. Women claim their space in their own unique ways, choosing from a spectrum of options from compromise to outright rebellion. There is no magic bullet to empowerment. No book studying gender in India can be complete without studying the lives of women from the informal economy, who are in the bottom two-thirds of wages, in households at or below the poverty line. In ‘Working from Home’, the author leaves the capital and travels to Gujarat, Jharkhand and the Northeast. She provides insights into the invisible lives of women in home-based industries such as textiles and tobacco as also domestic and field survey workers. The first stop is Ahmedabad. Given the vast socio-economic gap between the author and the women, how does she get these women to open up about their lives, love and aspirations? Through Shah Rukh and his movies and music, of course! The women open up about their struggles after the author uses the ice breaker question: “who is your favourite actor?” Using the metaphor of dialogue from the movie Kuch Kuch Hota Hai - “a home that is built on the foundations of compromise and not love is not a home (ghar), it’s a house (makaan)” the author demonstrates the give and take that women of the slum struggle with for mobility and economic independence. The second story is from Rampur, U.P., where Manju represents the boredom of women in small town India that have been denied agency for work and leisure. While young men get to ride bikes and watch movies, girls are denied mobility for work or leisure thus experiencing inequality through boredom. 

In her conclusion, the author draws attention to the “crisis of love” and discusses solutions to issues women face. She makes a compelling argument to avoid big bang revolutions or twitter hashtag movements, instead imploring women to attempt “intimate revolutions”, where each one of us looks into our personal equations to address our own disequilibriums'. 

- Read an exclusive excerpt from Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh, Hindustan Times, 5 gennaio 2023.

Vedi anche How Hindi films saw liberalization

IL RAGAZZO GIUSTO - LA SERIE

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Nell'autunno del 2020 Netflix propose - anche in italiano - la serie BBC in sei episodi Il ragazzo giusto, tratta dall'omonimo romanzo di Vikram Seth, diretta da Mira Nair e con un cast ricchissimo: Tabu, Vijay Raaz, Vijay Varma, Shahana Goswami, Ram Kapoor, Ishaan Khatter, Vivaan Shah, Ranvir Shorey, Randeep Hooda, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Vinay Pathak, Vivek Gomber e Manoj Pahwa. Trailer. Vi segnalo di seguito un paio di interviste concesse dalla regista in quel periodo. 

- Mira Nair on 'A Suitable Boy': I would joke, it’s 'The Crown' in brown, on a slim budget, Namrata Joshi, The Wire, 20 settembre 2020:

'How much is A Suitable Boy itself a homecoming for you? How lived in does it feel to you?

Very lived in. I read the novel in 1993 soon after it came out. I read it twice. I didn’t want to leave my best friend at the end of it - it was that kind of a feeling. Vikram [Seth] had so extraordinarily captured that Nehruvian India [at] the moment we were trying to create [a] new country after freedom from the British. And yet we were so anglicised and spoke and dreamt in English. He coupled all that with a very astute eye on the politics of that time. So prescient in some ways. But, besides that, the wit and the sensuality, the great depths and layers of friendship between the families - the Khans, the Mehras, the Chatterjees, the Kapoors. It’s a world I do know, but I [have] also longed for. My parents married in 1951, the year of A Suitable Boy’s story. They travelled from Punjab to Orissa where he [Nair’s father] was an administrative officer [IAS officer], setting up the new capital of Bhubaneswar. That’s where I grew up, in those bungalows, with hardly any roads and a new airport, when I was eight years old. The idealism of that time has always attracted me.

The society that you are talking of - what hits home is a longing and a sense of nostalgia: what we were and where we have come.  Do you also see parallels with the situation now? 

I only came back to A Suitable Boy. I haven’t been holding a torch for it for the last 25 years, hoping to make it. Not at all. I moved on to my own work. Only when I heard that it was being made perhaps [that] I said, anyone but a gora [White] to make it, man! I need to make it [laughs]. Even the story of Babri Masjid is in it. The stories in it, the prescience of Vikram’s vision - the seeds were planted then. But there was the great beauty of the syncretic culture where we come from. The same cloth [from which they are cut], Hindu and Muslim, whether it be language or poetry or music. (...) That was actually the biggest magnet for me. (...) This is (...) the reason why I just had to make it. And make it with such great artistes who [are] deeply imbued [with] what I am talking about in terms of that syncretic culture. Tabu was the first one cast in my head and fortunately she loved it. It’s all about finding that spirit in who you choose and who you bring to the party, and I swear the greatest satisfaction of making A Suitable Boy was this great cornucopia of actors. And pretty much everyone said yes. (...) We cast for over 18 months, [from] all over India - 110 characters and they are all great. And, of course, I have old friends. Many of them started with me so they can’t say no to me. Even Vijay Raaz, who is now a big star, did two scenes for me, memorable scenes. Or Manoj Pahwa. These are  extraordinary actors who just came and lit up the screen. That was the real joy; to see Shahana Goswami completely sparkle without any inhibition and with great skill.

You have adapted many other literary works for the screen. What is it that made this fun or [conversely] a nightmare?  

I came to it when it had already been adapted by Andrew Davies, who is a master distiller of great big tomes like War and Peace, Les Misérables. He has craftsmanship on his side in such a fantastic way and also a great sense of humour and also the television structure of the cliffhanger, and there are so many in our book. It was there but it had to be culled out. At that time, it was eight hours [duration] and, frankly, the financing for an eight-hour, all-Asian drama in the Western world is always going to be challenging. I used to joke and say, it’s The Crown in brown, as magnificent, with as much sweep as [that] series, but the budget was some 10% of it. I don’t have the statistics, but it is always the case. You don’t have what you need when you are not a gora [White]. I am used to it and I always show it. I always give it to them: “Don’t see my struggle baby. But this is as good as anything out there”. (...) Having said that, we had to distil it further into six episodes of six hours. At that point I was deeply involved and basically added two things. One was to make the political interweave with the personal, [to say]  that it would not just be a marriage story - who will she marry,  who is the boy? It’s not only that. But it is much more interwoven with the politics of then, which is [also] the politics of now. That balance is what I tried to bring back in. Also, in the process, bringing back certain characters that had not been given the time of day. Like Mrs. Mahesh Kapoor, (...) who is the unspoken cornerstone, the foundation of this political family and is really the glue that holds this family together. Restoring some weight to some characters. And sadly, as is often the case, killing some characters, [by] just not having them. Secondly, I insisted on the language. It’s a beautiful novel in English that people spoke at that time. [But] if Saeeda bai would sing in Urdu, then why wouldn’t she talk in Urdu? Or the villagers. That was the discussion at every level. Vikram, thankfully, supported me, thanked me for “translating it back”, as he put it. For BBC it was quite radical to have their first big drama show in Urdu, Awadhi and Hindustani, mixed with English. But I could do this much and not more. I tried to juice it and do it as skilfully as I could and as naturally to the character as possible. There were other things. Music is my oxygen and it’s a huge part of everything that weaves these worlds together.

Even the incidental music ties in with the larger narrative very well. 

This is a very different style for the BBC: “Is it a Bollywood thing? What are these musical interludes? Can’t we just have some kind of a singing over there?” I would say, this is not Bollywood style; this is what I do, and this is why I am doing this. Basically, it was a vocabulary that was not familiar to them. But I must say they came around and they love it for what it is. And then I worked directly and closely with Vikram to get the balance and the nuance and the love and the complications, but most of all the friendship - the depth of it - correct between the Hindu and the Muslim characters. I did not want to fall into any traps of today. I wanted to make sure that we really got (...) what I wanted to say, which is syncretism. The structure of it was given to me and I carefully worked within.

The society as seen in A Suitable Boy is syncretic, but also at a point in time when the threads are beginning to unravel. Is there a sense of regret on how far we have come as a culture, country, society?  

Regret is like giving in to defeat. I am confronted by it - we all are - in such a direct, transparent fashion, whether it be renaming things, or pretending things just didn’t exist and, of course, the more targeted attacks we see every day. We cannot be defeated [by] this. We have to persevere, and we have to remember who we actually are. It’s within ourselves'.

- Going down Mira Road, Mayank Shekhar, Mid-Day, 21 novembre 2020 (il testo include il video dell'intervista integrale):

'Mira Nair's journey as an Odisha-born/bred filmmaker in America will seem greater to you, if you consider the first thing she did, landing up as an under-grad student at Harvard in the mid '70s. She went over to her course-mate from Bombay, Sooni Taraporevala, desperately to check on who the other Indians around were. There were only two - studying film. One of them, a gentleman named Anand Mahindra; the industrialist, whose surname carries the massive fleet of automobiles on Indian roads. "Anand was a really talented filmmaker. He's still an artist in his soul. I'll never forget the wonderful thesis-film he made, following a holy man up a mountain," Mira remembers. Screenwriter Sooni and Mira of course became great friends and colleagues thereafter - collaborating on notable productions like Salaam Bombay! (1988), Mississippi Masala (1991), and The Namesake (2006). Anand was the "big brother, who'd encourage everyone to move back to India [once done with studies]." As he did, taking over his family empire.

Speaking of famous associations from unrelated fields, a picture that once got widely circulated online was of Mira as Cleopatra and Shashi Tharoor as Mark Antony, in an inter-college Shakespearean production from the '70s. Mira was a student at Delhi University's Miranda House then; Shashi Tharoor, the undisputed star of St. Stephen's College. She's been asked about this picture on occasion during interviews. And I gauge from her responses before - it doesn't seem like she liked the college-kid Shashi Tharoor much! Did he throw big words at her? "Oh no, I just didn't like kissing him [in the play]. Back then, you know how it was - even if you got slightly physically close to someone, people would start cat-calling. It was ridiculous." As for the Tharoorosaurus bit, "Well, we used to tease Shashi [who hadn't lived or been abroad yet] about where he had got that accent from. (...) But he's always been a sport. He used to take it well!" (...)

Mira remains still one of the most critically acclaimed filmmakers - for a majority of her filmography. (...) Mira is formally trained in cinema verite - art/technique, mostly associated with documentary filmmaking, intended to convey realism. (...) The main muse for Mira's realistic lens was in fact the city of Bombay itself. (...) "Now they can call me a New York-based filmmaker in Bombay, but the fact is that not many saw Salaam Bombay, right under their noses. It was a life around us. When you live in it all the time, you can't see it well - having numbed yourself to it." This seamless transition from documentary filmmaking to fiction - something that writers of non-fiction find harder to be equally adept at - Mira admits, has helped define her work. And you can still sense strong stamps of it, even in later movies. (...) "Cinema of truth [cinema verite] sounds a little pretentious. It is very real, in the sense that you don't script everything. You just have to be humble enough to enter the world. Just be there. Of course your presence is shaping [the moment] to some extent. But it is also about being an observer to the situation, and eliciting things from [actors] - as they feel them, rather than you telling them what to say."

What this has also led to since her celebrated debut feature is - film after film, an established practice of casting 'real' people, as it were, or non-professional actors, alongside trained actors/stars, in the same frame. And watching this unique alchemy come to life on screen. For instance, Mira discovered Sarita Choudhury, who played Denzel Washington's love interest in Mississippi Masala, biking on a street in Cambridge once. She found Tillotama Shome (Alice in Monsoon Wedding) in the corridors of Delhi's Lady Shri Ram College. Even better, she picked up Kamini Khanna for a typically Delhi-Punjabi Shashi Aunty in the same film - spotting her on the walking track of a South Delhi park. Does she think everyone is essentially an actor then? "Not at all! It's about several things, but mostly instinct. I can tell immediately if the camera will love you or not. Or sometimes it doesn't matter if the camera won't love you, but can I use that in a way? Like [Pedro] Almodovar and his ladies are fantastic. And they so destroy the notion of what's beautiful before a camera. But the roles need that. So it depends on the role, of course."

While casting for Monsoon Wedding, she recalls, a newbie Vijay Raaz's face had caught her eye: "He'd walked in from the train station to (...) Churchgate. I don't know how I even remembered his name. Paresh Rawal, whom I admired a lot, had approached me for (...) Dube's part. We had a workshop in Delhi, which Paresh couldn't join. So then I had to take Tillotama [Alice] back to Bombay to rehearse with Paresh [Dube]. Naseer bhai [Naseeruddin Shah] had given us space above his flat for rehearsal. The door opened, and my eyes fell out. Paresh had gained 30 to 40 pounds. He looked like Alice's father, and this was supposed to be a love-story with him! (...) He said, 'I'll just lose [weight].' But we were shooting in literally four days! I just thought of the bald man with long ears and the widest mouth in the world, Vijay Raaz, and called him. I had not auditioned him, but I loved his look." The role expanded as Raaz came on board, killing it along the way. (This conversation between Mid-Day and Nair took place a day before Raaz was summarily arrested and subsequently bailed over a molestation charge on a movie set.) He's had a solid career since. 

Several Indian actors in the Bombay film industry similarly owe their first frame on the big screen to Mira. Right from Nana Patekar and Irrfan in Salaam Bombay!. Late Irrfan, she always felt, was cut from a different cloth from Bombay's leading men in the '80s and '90s. He delivered, arguably, his finest work with Mira in The Namesake (2006). Or Randeep Hooda and Ram Kapoor, for that matter. They were debutants in Monsoon Wedding; bona fide stars now. Why, even Kamini Khanna! She's played multiple versions of Shashi Aunty in every other Bollywood movie. This contribution to the Bombay film industry in particular, I suspect, isn't acknowledged enough about the New York and Kampala-based filmmaker.

Even more than a keen head-hunter, Mira is an all-encompassing aesthete, wholly invested in cinematography, literature, production design, colours, costumes, the craft of moulding actors/characters... (...) Given the résumé and musical references seeped into her work, besides an army of previous recruits from among top Bombay actors, I'm almost amazed that in all these years, Bollywood folk haven't ever attempted to co-opt Mira with a grand scheme/project? "I am not looking for that either. But I have really lovely friendships. Yash Johar and I were very close. (...) I really respect Aditya Chopra's mind. I had taken him on an idea - not for me to do, but for us to work together on. But, no, I don't think so. I think they think correctly - that I just make my own movies!" (...)

A film that would've brought (...) [Mira] back to Bombay - her early muse, and that too with Johnny Depp - was the adaptation of Gregory David Roberts' Shantaram. Regrets - that the film fell through? "I only regretted that I gave one-and-a-half years of my life to it. And we really had a good thing going. Not, otherwise. They were starting it again, and I was not interested!" Mira also famously let go of directing the fourth Harry Potter film, for the sake of The Namesake. She declined The Devil Wears Prada, going by the same measure of what interests her - and what she can do, better than similar directors on hire. (...) Exuding power, all right, in an industry that when she entered it - doing theatre in New York during day, waiting tables at night - there were barely any coloured people around, let alone desis, or women. (...) Mira first got on the road, splitting rent for an editing suite at a basement collective for offbeat artistes in New York. This is after she had shot Salaam Bombay!. Which she knew the West had no similar reference point for. Spike Lee, same age, also editing his film, would pay the other half of the rent!'.