Mahesh and Pooja Bhatt speak about why their film Daddy is relevant in modern India, and why it needs a female interpretation
Jaspreet Nijher (BOMBAY TIMES; May 9, 2018)

Filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt and his daughter Pooja Bhatt are known to speak their mind. Recently, before the staging of the theatrical adaptation of their film, Daddy, in Chandigarh, they spoke to us about the relevance of this 1989 film today, and their own battle with alcoholism. Pooja, who made her Bollywood debut with Daddy, is keen on re-narrating the story, albeit from a female perspective. In a conversation, the duo spoke to us in characteristic Bhatt style — unrestrained and effusive.

Why the need to reinterpret the film Daddy into a play?
Mahesh: At a time like this when there is all-pervasive darkness, when your leaders boast of connecting every village and city with electricity, there is an inner darkness, which you can’t look away from. At this time, it is pertinent to reopen Daddy, which was based on human evolution. The idea of these adaptations, for both films Daddy and Arth, came from this bright theatre actor Imran Zahid whom I met in Delhi more than a decade ago. To get out of Mumbai and come to Delhi, to meet these uncontaminated, clean youth with a fresh naivety, touched me so much that I agreed to their idea. To see the film from their perspective, but not from a patronising view, is also difficult without the need to interfere.

How much of yourself from the film do you see in the play?
Mahesh: I am not obsessed with my imaginary greatness. I am a fumbling, stumbling human, and the film deals with the most vulnerable, fragile phases of my life, when I had almost come to the brink of the abyss. But I looked the darkness in the eye, and pulled myself back, and I am still here. The human heart is as old as life itself, and hence the struggles shown in the film are still very relevant for the human race, and this narrative of man oscillating between dread and hope.

Pooja, how much of the play reflects your subjective emotions from the film?
It is ironic. I keep telling my siblings I have an edge, for you have only seen the flight of Mahesh Bhatt, I have seen him in the gutters. I have seen him pick himself up from that gutter and return to life. And the irony of that reality was, the girl who picks up her father from the dumps, and weans him off alcohol had to herself struggle with it many years later. So, life comes back a full circle. Alcoholism mard ki jaagir nahi hai. Men can turn to alcohol and tom-tom about it, but no one expects women to have a problem, especially if they are in the public eye. If I didn’t have the same blood and genes in me as my father’s, I wouldn’t have been able to pull myself out. We call ourselves role models, but roles models aren’t people who look pretty at all times. They are someone who show people they are as human as others, they have the same frailties where they fall and pick themselves up then, and share it with the world.

So, we are referring to the same genes that make you as unrestrained in speech as Bhatt saab?
Oh, that is a genetic flaw! All four of us siblings have the same core, even if we have different perspectives. My father gave me the inheritance of a quote from Swami Vivekananda, ‘Be truthful and be fearless’. How many of us actually live the things we retweet on Twitter, and walk our talk by sharing our weaknesses with the world? It’s been many months since I’ve been sober now. But people don’t want me to talk about it. I didn’t drink hiding inside, so I will not recover in the closet. We have to take away this word shame from our supposed frailties- from rape, domestic abuse, alcoholism. I drank like I lived — copiously and fully, and I will recover like that.

You ever felt the need to take your subjective battle to your films?
Yes, in fact I am in talks over it. We have seen a Sharaabi with Amitabh Bachchan, a Daddy with Anupam Kher, but where is the female perspective? So, I have been promised that I will be given a script with a woman protagonist dealing with alcohol. With women, this problem runs even deeper. We conceal our drinking because we don’t drink with our husbands and parents. And the pressure is even more because we compete with men, we are body shamed and morally lectured.