Interview with Jai Arjun Singh

Anybody even passingly familiar with the Indian blogging scene knows Jai Arjun Singh. A freelance columnist, reviewer and prolific blogger, he has recently written a monograph on the classic Indian cult film Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, and has also edited an anthology of film writing called The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies Do to Writers.

 

In this Q&A, I talked to him about blogging, freelancing, and cross-country interviewing.

 

 

 

When I look at some of the young people I know today, and how certain they are at an early age about what they want to do, I realise that my own career trajectory has been very haphazard. Did B.Com in college because at that time it seemed the practical option, but my heart wasn’t in it. Then, after completing a short and soul-deadening internship with a chartered accountancy firm, I decided to change track and do a post-graduation course in Communications instead. From there, one thing led to another, and after working with Encyclopaedia Britannica for a while I did my first proper journalistic stint with the India Today Group’s 24-hour website. But it wasn’t until I was already in my late 20s that I really began to do the sort of feature/review writing I enjoyed.

 

Shifting to freelancing (which I did around five years ago) was a bit scary at first – I wasn’t sure if I’d have the self-discipline required, how I’d juggle various assignments and so on – but it’s worked out very well. It’s been empowering, and it gives me a lot of flexibility and keeps me from having to negotiate Delhi traffic daily. I’ve discovered I’m allergic to offices and conference rooms and meetings, so I highly doubt I’ll ever get back to that life.

 

 

Difficult to compare, really. The blogging is very often an extension of my journalistic writing – I routinely write longer, more informal versions of my film and book reviews for the blog, since there are no space constraints. At other times, I use it to put down a few unstructured notes that might eventually develop into a structured review or column for official publication.

 

Even after six-and-a-half years and more than 1200 posts, I’m still passionate about maintaining the blog. The blogging has been directly responsible for some of the best things that have happened to me – it enabled me to make a decent living through freelancing, for one thing, because the blog developed a following and people started offering me assignments.

 

 

Though I’ve been working on the books beat for years, cinema is my first love. More importantly, I feel like I’m on more solid ground writing about film because my knowledge of movie history is deeper than my knowledge of literature. Consequently, when I write about a movie, there are greater chances of being able to discuss that film in the context of its director’s career, or make connections with other films that it might have been influenced by. With books, it often happens that I’m asked to review a book by an author whose other books I’m not familiar with – and because deadlines are short and time is always at a premium, it isn’t possible for me to source and read his earlier works for reference purposes. That can be frustrating.

 

But in most ways, my approach to writing about books and writing about films is similar. I try to be as open-minded as possible, not to be genre-intolerant, and to approach each work on its own terms. I try to be honest about my own feelings about the book/film and to articulate them as well as I can. And I try, though I don’t always succeed, to concentrate on the “how” rather than on the “what” – in other words, the plot (what the book/film is “about”) should be the least important thing while assessing it. What’s far more important is the execution. In a novel, this can take the form of sentence construction, style or the distinct sensibility an author brings to the story. In a film, one can search for cinematic language, and the consolidated use of the various techniques available to a director.

 

 

Interesting you ask that, I’ve been thinking about this and it’s occurred to me that perhaps I’m a little more lenient (sorry for the schoolteacher-like word!) when I’m reviewing a book as opposed to when I’m reviewing a film. Because I’m constantly aware that a book is entirely (or almost entirely) one person’s effort and that therefore stressing a book’s faults in a gratuitous way almost amounts to a personal attack on a single individual. Whereas with a film, you know that blame can be distributed more evenly and that even a really bad film might be the result of different elements not coming together well rather than with all-round incompetence in every area of the production.

 

I hope I’m not misunderstood – I don’t mean to suggest that I give books favourable reviews even when I don’t like them; the priority is always to be honest about my response. But yes, chances are that when I don’t like a book or am indifferent to it, I’ll opt not to review it at all. The majority of book reviews you’ll see on my blog are reviews of books that I enjoyed, or that at least stimulated me in some way. Whereas I’ve often written negative or snarky reviews of films.

 

But all that said, the movies that I personally find most interesting are the ones where there is a definite unifying sensibility behind the film – where a single individual (call him the auteur or whatever) has imposed a particular vision on it, and where you can see a strong link of some sort between the various films he has made.

 

 

For the long version, see this post on my blog. But in short: Harper Collins was planning a series of books on iconic Indian films and asked if I’d be interested in contributing. During a subsequent brainstorming discussion, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro came up and I knew immediately that it would be a very interesting film to write about – being a one-of-its-kind Hindi movie, with lots of talking points and lots of important people who were involved in its making. Plus, of course, it’s one of the pop-culture touchstones of my childhood through all those viewings on Doordarshan in the mid-80s.

 

 

Mostly interviews, yes – I spent a lot of time (over two visits to Mumbai) with Kundan Shah, and I also spoke to Ranjit Kapoor, Naseeruddin Shah, Ravi Baswani, Satish Shah, Om Puri, Pawan Malhotra, Binod Pradhan, Sudhir Mishra and others. It wasn’t very difficult once I managed to get Kundan to open up a bit. But being Delhi-based, funding my own travel and not having the luxury of heading to Mumbai on very short notice (because of my other work commitments), I was always a bit nervous about interviews falling through at the last minute. On one occasion, Naseeruddin Shah told me he’d be around during the week I’d planned to be in Mumbai, but shortly after I reached he messaged to say that something urgent had come up and he wasn’t around. Thankfully, I managed to get other interviews done during that trip, so it wasn’t too frustrating.

 

Of course, I also looked at what literature I could find about the film – mostly pertaining to its press reception when it first came out.

 

 

A bit of both. Before fixing any appointments (with Kundan Shah and others), I made sure to sit down and watch the film again a couple of times from beginning to end: pausing and rewinding scenes, making little notes and observations, preparing a detailed list of questions about various things that occurred to me. And of course, I had other questions that weren’t directly related to what was in the film. But I didn’t want to be rigid in my approach either. When I met members of the unit, I didn’t bombard them with questions in the style of a one-hour journalistic interview. If I got the sense that they wanted to talk about something else, or just reminisce in general, I let them talk, and then asked specific questions afterwards, once they were in the comfort zone.

 

 

Oh, I was very jaded by the end! When you watch a movie multiple times with paper and pen in hand, analysing it, thinking about it constantly, a lot of the fun goes out of the viewing process. I don’t think I’ll be watching Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro again for another few years at least!

 

But yes, on another level, my admiration for it has increased. Over the course of working on this project, I developed an appreciation of how difficult it was for this film to get made – on very limited resources, by an inexperienced crew who didn’t even know if the film would ever get completed or released. It says a lot about the personal integrity and talent of all the people involved – and their willingness to collaborate with each other without letting egos get in the way – that the final product turned out to be something that struck a chord with so many viewers.

 

 

Not in the near future. Writing a book takes a lot of time and I don’t see myself ever becoming a prolific book-writer anyway, so whenever I do work on the next one I’d like to look at broader subjects – perhaps something like the career of a particular filmmaker, or a particular filmmaking period/movement and the types of movies it produced.

 

There are also many non-Indian films that I would have loved to write a (short) book about – perhaps a few years down the line – but I doubt an established Indian publisher would allow me such an indulgence!

 

 

Believe it or not, I went through a 13-14 year period (roughly from 1991 to 2004) when I watched hardly any Hindi films at all. What happened was that my mind became saturated with all the Hindi masala movies I’d been indiscriminately watching for years. Simultaneously I discovered and fell in love with Old Hollywood, and moved from there towards international cinema. So I basically missed out on the 90s Hindi movies as they happened. The only two films I saw in a hall during that entire decade (which included the onset of the multiplex era) were Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge and Pyaar Kiya Toh Darna Kya (Salman Khan, Kajol). I enjoyed both films a lot, but at the same time I didn’t feel particularly tempted to go and watch more Hindi movies. I returned to watching Hindi films only a few years ago.

 

The commercial Hindi films of the 70s and 80s, on the other hand, are what I grew up with, so there’s a lot of nostalgia associated with them. I’ve also been in the process of rediscovering a lot of the good non-mainstream/semi-mainstream films of that period, such as the work of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Sai Paranjpye, Basu Chatterji, Saeed Mirza, Gulzar and others.

 

 

I get a little defensive about the word “recommend” – with its implication that another reader will enjoy a particular book the same way that I did – but here are some of my personal favourites: Manu Joseph’s Serious Men, Pallavi Aiyar’s Chinese Whiskers, Samanth Subramanian’s Following Fish, Ramachandra Guha’s Makers of Modern India, Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing, Tabish Khair’s The Thing About Thugs, Jerry Pinto’s Leela: A Patchwork Life, Samit Basu’s Terror on the Titanic, M. K. Raghavendra’s 50 Indian Film Classics, Rajorshi Chakraborti’s Balloonists, Annie Zaidi’s Known Turf, Rahul Mehta’s Quarantine, and the lovely picture book Kumari Loves a Monster. I should also mention one of my favourite discoveries of the year, though it’s a book originally published in 1947 – The Prevalence of Witches, a sharp satire by the Irish-Indian writer Aubrey Menen, which is included in a new anthology of his work.

 

I have written about many of these on my blog (http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com), so you can do a search if you want to read more about them.