Amidst a hall full of enthusiastic students at IIT Bombay’s annual cultural fest, filmmakers Madhur Bhandarkar and Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra threw the crowd into a frenzy with interesting anecdotes from their lives
Pallabi Purkayastha (BOMBAY TIMES; December 27, 2017)

Madhur Bhandarkar, the critically-acclaimed director, who is known for making hard-hitting cinema about the darker side of life, had to overcome some mammoth obstacles to get to where he is today. Talking about his struggling years, Bhandarkar said, “I come from a middle-class family. So I had to struggle a lot... I sold video cassettes on cycles. As a delivery boy, I have given cassettes to every person— from dance bar girls to people from the underworld. I used to meet film actors during those days. One person who knows that I am the same video cassette delivery boy who used to go around on his bicycle is Mithun Chakraborty. He remembers me well because I used to go to his place for four years. He cannot believe it that I am that same guy. At the success party of Corporate, he went on stage and said ‘half chhaddi main aata tha mere paas.’ It was so sweet of Dada.”

Bhandarkar also spoke about the pay disparity in showbiz and had a powerful message to convey when a student quizzed him about his take on the glaring issue. “Like I always say, all superhit films are not good films and films that do not work are not bad films. Bollywood is definitely star-driven. As a consumer, if you go to a shop, you prefer to buy a trusted brand. Similarly, you will go for a small budget film only when you start hearing good things about it. A lot of people ask me why heroines face pay disparity, as opposed to heroes in films. To which, I reply ‘Aap hamesha puchte ho hero kaun hai, aapne kabhi pucha heroine kaun hai?’ Nobody asks that. The priority is always given to the male lead. Everyone wants to know only about the actor and not the actress. The day we change this mindset and go to watch a female-centric movie with the same zeal as we have for a male-lead film, that day the actress will be paid equally,” he said. Needless to say, the answer was received with a thunderous applause.

While the students were bowled over by Bhandarkar’s brutal honesty, Rakyesh Omprakash Mehra left everyone in splits with his tongue-in-cheek humour. When he was asked to impart life lessons to the young generation, he said, “There is a price you have to pay, whether you like it or you don’t. There are many who manage to do that (excel in academics) and lose out on life. I would rather not lose out on life chasing a certain percentage. I cannot speak for others but for myself. Some people have the ability to multitask, I cannot.”

Mehra, who is known for his films like Rang De Basanti and Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, shared how failures and rejections instilled a sense of fearlessness in him and urged him to go on. “Rang De Basanti was supposed to be a Box Office disaster. We all knew it. It is a miracle that it worked. Nobody was financing us, nothing was happening and for us, it was even more fun. Every time we hit a wall, we said aur maza aayega. We went to every actor from A to Z and all of them rejected it. I went to Amitji (Amitabh Bachchan) and told him that there is this character of a 22-year-old, which has been rejected by everyone. He said when he looked at me for the first time, he thought I was crazy. Now he is sure that I am totally mad. That was his way of encouraging me.” The director is clear in his thoughts that he would rather learn from his mistakes than repeat his success.

While talking about the process behind making the biopic Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, he made a startling revelation. He shared, “Every time I would interview Milkha Singh, I would ask him to repeat his stories. He welled up on two occasions — when he lost the 400 metres Rome Olympics and second, when he spoke about the massacre. Milkha Singh had demons in his heart about the partition. I don’t blame him; he has witnessed the massacre of his mother, sister, brother and cousin. When he saw the film, he broke down. He held my hand and said ‘jitni nafrat thi aaj sab nikal gayi’.”

Both Madhur and Rakeysh urged the youth to chase their dreams without an iota of hesitation and told them that they should never let anyone plant the seed of self-doubt in their beaming minds.