A HEAD for tales

From Lucknow to LA, players have identified with the film. “At the LA premiere, I saw an old lady trying to catch my attention. I went up to her. She was crying and asked me, ‘How did you know about my life and about the things we said in the hostel? Thank you for giving back my life’.” That woman was Otilia Mascarenhas, a surgeon now and Goa’s first woman Arjuna award winner, who captained the Indian women’s hockey team in Auckland in the 1971 World Cup. 

This young writer is a chronicler of the real. Much of Sahni’s writings, from Company to Bunty Aur Babli, Khosla Ka Ghosla to Chak De, captures a changing India and its different modes of being. A single-column article in the sports pages of a newspaper on the win of the women’s hockey team in the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester may have set him off on the Chak De trail but it’s not just the neglect of hockey that he takes up. Chak De is as much about hockey as it is about being a Muslim in India, about young spirits smashing the gender divide. Last year’s hit Khosla Ka Ghosla took up the urban middle-class dream of owning a plot of land and the nightmare of losing it. Bunty Aur Babli was about small-town India, impatient to get ahead.

On this slim body of work rests his reputation as Bollywood’s next big writer. In his mid-30s, Sahni is seen to be part of the new breed of scriptwriters, which includes Vishal Bhardwaj and Rajkumar Hirani, that has got good writing back in films. “In a short span, he has done films that are poles apart. That shows his range as a writer,” says noted writer-lyricist Javed Akhtar. That also shows, adds Akhtar, that Sahni’s canvas is not being influenced by the success of his films. “It’s easy to repeat yourself if your last film was a success. But he didn’t do another Bunty Aur Babli.” Some would say the variety that Sahni has brought in is a part of a growing willingness in the industry to explore new themes. Akhtar agrees. “The kind of films we are making now is something we weren’t doing earlier. I consider the period between 1983 and 1993 as the darkest for Indian films. Now there is a greater desire to do original films though it’ll take some time to reach the maturity of the golden era, the sort that Bimal Roy and Mehboob achieved,” says Akhtar. 

Sahni appears to have begun on that journey at least. ‘‘I see writing as the R&D arm of filmmaking,’’ he says. And he hasn’t scrimped on research. For Bunty Aur Babli, for example, Sahni drew on his experience as an IT consultant—in his first job at NIIT in Delhi that lasted one year, his territory was western UP—to create the sleepy Fursatganj. ‘‘Everywhere you go now, everyone watches 300-odd channels. So their aspirations are bound to be the same. The film was a bridge between Shining India and an India waiting to shine,’’ says Sahni.

How did this former adman with the IT-consultant look find his way into Bollywood? After six ‘‘very good years’’ in ad firm Contract in Delhi, he felt ‘‘meetings and the regular stuff’’ were restricting his self-expression. He decided to quit in filmi style — in his resignation letter, he complained …‘‘do takiya di naukri mein mera lakhon ka sawan jaye,” a snatch from a song of the 1970s film Roti, Kapda Aur Makaan—and work independently. In the late 90s, he chanced upon John Briley’s screenplay of Gandhi in a Delhi bookshop. ‘‘I was hooked. I read it and thought: it’s almost like a computer programme. Now I know it’s much more difficult.’’ He began teaching himself the art of scriptwriting. “I would access sites of universities abroad that ran scriptwriting courses and tried reading up whatever I could on the Internet,’’ says Sahni. Around this time Ram Gopal Varma was looking for a writer for Jungle and someone recommended Sahni’s name. Varma let him give it a shot.

Since then, Sahni has been working on diverse subjects, drawing on his experience and interpreting the world around him. For Chak De, he was at hockey camps across the country, talking to players and picking up nuggets of their lives. In the end, he had a fat file on the game. ‘‘I thought if the players and coach knew that I was researching for a film, it might alter their behaviour. But I revealed the truth to a few of them on the last day.’’

Delhi was where Sahni was born and grew up. With a civil servant father and a teacher mother, books, and not films, made up the world of his childhood. Holidays for Sahni, who studied in Delhi at the Kendriya Vidyalaya on IIT campus till his Class X and then at DPS RK Puram, meant reading. ‘‘I was never into films. I used to find ads more entertaining. My brother and I would tape Chitrahaars and ads. When I came to Mumbai to write, I must have seen only 30-odd films,’’ says Sahni.

From his Delhi experience and a family incident grew the story of last year’s surprise hit: Khosla Ka Ghosla. The story of a middle-class family who invests everything in a plot in south Delhi only to lose it to the land mafia and how it wins it back had a life-next-door feel to it that recalled the best of Sai Paranjape’s work in the 80s. (Sahni counts Paranjape’s Chashme Buddoor and Katha among the films that had a major influence on him.) ‘‘The plot was taken from what happened to my aunt. The bits about the mafia building a wall around their plot and the Khosla family hiring pehalwans to evict them were true. But the latter part about how they win their plot back was all fantasy. In real life, it didn’t end well,’’ says Sahni, who wrote the lyrics and also turned creative producer for the film. The authenticity was once again the result of research—Sahni sent out his team to meet and secretly record conversations with property dealers in Gurgaon.

Moments of his life keep cropping up in his work. As a student of computer engineering at Bidar in Karnataka, for example, Sahni witnessed the horrific anti-Sikh riots of 1988. Six students were killed in the attack and the house where Sahni lived with fellow students was the first to be burnt down. “Nobody helped us. Another student and I had to go to Hyderabad to appeal to the CRPF for help.’’ The lesson he learnt—what it is to belong to a minority community and how everyone is a minority somewhere—gave life to the character of coach Kabir Khan in Chak De.

Writing lyrics is Sahni’s stress-buster. Scripts are a more complex business. ‘‘It’s usually the subject that catches my attention. Then come the characters, then a kind of a story idea starts forming, the character’s journey. And from then on it’s the craft stuff—screenplay, dialogues, lyrics, all of it,’’ he says.

Does writing come easy to him? For years now, he says, he has been trying unsuccessfully to get up early to write. ‘‘I keep wasting time, surfing the Net, reading newspapers and usually start getting terribly guilty by around lunchtime. So I have a guilty lunch and guiltily watch TV and then by 3 or so in the afternoon I get going and write for as many hours as it comes naturally and organically.’’

The road ahead holds a lot of promise. Sahni has written the script and lyrics for the Madhuri Dixit comeback film Aaja Nachle, which is ready for a November release. He has penned the lyrics for the Yash Raj-Disney animation film Roadside Romeo that’ll be released next year.

What he would love to script, however, is a science fiction. ‘‘I would like to write on the guys in ISRO. Or people in the public sector—Bharat Heavy Elecrticals Limited (BHEL), Rail India Technical and Economic Services (RITES). Everyone thinks of them as people who don’t do anything but there are many among them who do,’’ says Sahni.

It may be the turn of the public sector underdogs next but the present clearly belongs to their sporting counterparts. “I have 270 new congratulatory messages in my mail inbox and I am going to forward all of them to the players of the 2002 Commonwealth team—Suman Bala, Helen Mary, Mamta Kharab. They are for them actually.”