The Shyam Benegal Effect

What do you say about a man who has won all the honours one could win in cinema and says he does not feel successful? A man who says he has not made a single perfect film, and immediately prevents a whimsical metaphysical conversation by readily giving examples of perfect films - An Autumn Afternoon by Ozu and some of Akira Kurasawa's work, which he calls "flawless"? A man who, when invited to the studio, and offered a car, prefers to walk it? A man whose deep baritone has everyone who hears it feeling its chords and who laughs and dismisses his voice as "an okay voice"? A man who answers his mobile phone himself and sits down to dissect the rights and wrongs of Black, and examines how Pedro Almodovar's style has changed since La Mala Educacion? A man who says "I was fairly successful at advertising, and because of that, I was going up and up and up; and that made me unhappier by the minute". A man who speaks of how success can only come when you listen to your calling.

Talking to Mr. Benegal a few days ago made me yearn for the one thing that immediately has my pulse beating. The scratchy sound of pen against paper, the romance of the blue ink drying slowly, the incredible magic of watching one's mind craft itself on paper, of words pouring out of the tip of a fountain pen, of watching characters who will tell their stories through you...the feeling of being a medium. The world of characters, I believe, is a parallel world - a sort of dream world where each writer can only see what s/he is meant to see. Where these characters are roaming around in search of a destiny - an author who will tell their stories. Where the best books come out of authors and characters finding each other and fitting into each other, becoming each other's closest friends and moulding each other's existence. Think, for a minute, of Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment, where Dostoevsky's mind unleashes its darker instincts; where he speaks of the momentary sense of pleasure, however short, but definitely present, in a man's head when he hears of another's death...where Dostoevsky's Christian beliefs force him to make Raskolnikov repent for his crime...and then, all of a sudden, in the last fifty pages, it is as if the pen were grabbed from Dostoevsky by Raskolnikov to tell his story the way he wants to.

The calling to find those characters, that latent journey that needs to be taken, the drive that will make one take the final plunge...should all those be sacrificed for lack of time? That manic feeling that grips you when you write, the sight of words soaking themselves into a page, the sound of the keys on the laptop, the sight of the words forming themselves, appearing out of blank space...it's a fever. And it's a fever one longs for.

I call it the Shyam Benegal effect. Not only did I happen to have my mind burst open by that conversation, to have my instincts take over my pragmatism, but I also happened to speak to two much younger men whose passion for their creativity has only increased the entropy of the cells in my brain. One was Chetan Bhagat, whom I interviewed about his Five Point Someone; he said he wrote the book out of boredom and now makes the time to write down something that will give him the stimulation a job in investment banking cannot. The other is a person whom I interviewed about blogging today. He has one of the best advertising blogs I've ever come across - it's at http://sandeepmakam.blogspot.com, and he told me he posts in it 4-5 times a day, because it's his passion, and he cannot allow anything to get in the way of that.

I suppose it's a combination of those factors that made me write today, and has made me resolve to write something everyday...on paper and on the screen.