Interview: Imtiaz Ali – ‘TV is the only film school I ever went to!’

I think the first kind of writing I ever did was poetry in English. It was back at school in Jamshedpur when I was in the 9th standard. It was a sort of anti-establishment poetry. There was also a relationship-sweetness type of thing in it. I used to show it to my English teacher, Deepa Sengupta, who was kind enough to go through it and sometimes give me a review. I still remember some of her comments. That’s how my journey as a writer started. When I was writing, I felt happy. I also enjoyed the attention that I sometimes got.

With writing, I started knowing myself more. I became aware of somebody else who was also me. After these small poems, I started writing small skits, which I think have a role to play in bringing me here today. These were skits for school, for Teacher’s Day, for somebody’s welcome. The Rotaract Club asked me to write some plays whenever they had some delegates over for a meeting. I used to write them and then make them with my friends. Those tended be musicals and involved a lot of poetry. I also remember this one time when the school principal walked into our rehearsals and after watching what was happening, asked, “Whose play is it? Who has written it?” And I said, “I have written it.” She looked at me for a bit and said, “Maybe you should write more then.” That encouraged me. This was my life in Jamshedpur and in my school as a writer.

The place poetry holds in my mind is something I can describe with that sher by Momin: “Tum mere paas hote ho goya, jab koi doosra nahin hota.” (You are with me, when no one else is.)

How did your idea of art change from Jamshedpur to Delhi and then from Delhi to Bombay?

I think it changed a lot. And that has to do with the kind of theatre I was involved in – not just as a writer but as an actor or a director as well. When I was in Jamshedpur, we were doing archaic English theatre. We were trying to enunciate old English and get that dialect in. That’s the kind of theatre that has a lot of rules like an actor’s shoulder blade shouldn’t cut the line of audience or an actor should never show his or her back to the audience. While I was in Jamshedpur, even my writing was like that because I was writing for, let’s say, that mentality – flowery, maybe a bit highbrow and only in English.

One of the biggest things Delhi did for me is introduce me to Experimental Theatre. This is also when I started writing in Hindi. Although Hindi is what we always spoke at home, until I went to Delhi, I always wrote in English. I still think in English.

At Mandi House, I started doing experimental Hindi plays. Now the shoulder blade could cut the line of audience, I could have an actor showing their back to the audience. Experimental theatre is more liberal and open. Though it has rules of its own, it allowed me more freedom. I also started writing and directing nukkad natak (street plays).

Delhi became an important city for me also because Delhi is a rough city. It attacks you. And you tend to hit back. And at the age that I was, early college, there was a roughness. So I found an expression in the city. In fact, when I came to Mumbai, almost all my stories were from my time in Delhi. Like, Highway is one of my early stories and originally, the script was much harsher than the way I made it. I had that story since the 1990s. Maybe since 1996-97. Then, in Bombay, I wrote a play when I was at the Xavier’s Institute of Communication, which, at that point, as a theatre person, I was very proud of.

I think my take-off point is lived experience. But nothing is autobiographical either. You can say, for me, it starts with lived experience and then takes a flight of the imagination. For example, Jab We Met: a girl on a train – this is a fantasy for any guy who travels by train from Jamshedpur or any small town. Now, mix this with the piece of imagination: what if she and I were to miss a train together? Then we might be walking down the lanes of Ratlam. This is how the story started unfolding. That never happened in reality. Unfortunately, I never missed a train with a girl. But it started off because I must have seen a girl on a train in my early days. The reality is the trigger; the rest is imagination.

Many people talk about the struggle that the Hindi film industry can be for an outsider, especially one who wants to tell original stories. What was it like for you?

Well, I feel that anybody who came to Bombay at around my time to become a director, was at first, a writer. Myself, Anurag (Kashyap), Sriram Raghavan, Tishu (Tigmanshu Dhulia), (Anurag) Basu, (Rajkumar) Hirani – we would all write. I think writing created a chance for most of us to become directors. I think we were a desperate lot. Not that we wanted to tell our own or original stories. We had no fanciful notions. We wanted work and money to survive. I wanted money to pay the rent and get married and start a household and stuff like that. We were all middle-class small-town boys. We had our own experiences and gradually, we found a way in.

Tell me about your television days in the 1990s, especially Star Bestsellers. I don’t think shows like that are made any longer.

I agree. Unfortunately, shows like Star Bestsellers aren’t made any longer. All of us wanted to make films. At that time, the difference between a TV story and a film story wasn’t as clear as it is today. I made one film for Start Bestsellers called Witness. It was a great opportunity for someone like me to tell a finite story, with a definite beginning, middle and end. Otherwise, the other TV shows that I was working on like Imtehan were endless sagas. For instance, in Witness, I went crazy recording sounds from the atmosphere. That’s when I realised the importance of ambient sound. Television was very important to my journey because it taught me to write quickly and shoot quickly. I think television is the only film school I ever went to.

How easy or difficult was it to pitch your first film Socha Na Tha? Talk about that journey.

I had been writing and directing television for many years. When I was working on Star Bestsellers, the team there approached me one time and said that they were working on a new segment, which would have a feature film but in three parts on television. And they were looking for a story. So I told them a story. They said they liked it and they would want to commission it to be the first one. They wanted it done quickly. So I went underground and wrote it in three nights. The only time I went out of my house in those days was to go to the bank because I had no money to buy food either. When I finished it, the team said, for some reason, they were not going ahead with their plans and that the show was cancelled. Now I had just written the full script of a film! So then I approached my friend Sanjay Rautre, who now heads Matchbox Films. We tried to pitch it and ultimately landed a meeting with Sunny Deol. I went to Shimla to meet him. Imagine, I was telling an action hero about a romantic film where the hero himself gets slapped. I was wondering if he would find it a sissy plot for his action hero self. But he listened with rapt attention and then two hours later he said, “Khana kha lein? Bhook lagi hai.” So I said, “Sir, thodasa bacha hai.” He said, “Picture main kar lunga, bhai. Khana toh kha lein!” That’s how it happened. He just heard the story, loved it intuitively and asked me to direct the film.

In 2008 came Jab We Met, which found its way into the hearts of many. How long did it take to write and make?

Well, the writing was very, very quick. I write to get rid of the job. You might be surprised but I don’t really enjoy the process of writing, especially film writing. So I want to get done with it quickly. I think I enjoy direction more than writing. Writing allows me to have more fun as a director. I wrote Jab We Met in two nights. That was the first draft. And then only one major change happened in the screenplay before the film got made.

In fact, there’s another interesting thing about Jab We Met. I had a friend, Joy Banerjee, who was rather depressed at the time and said he needed work. So I told him to write something. I told him that I would come up with one idea, he could come up with another one and then we would put the two together and write the story. He came up with an idea of “A man who wants to kill himself”. What I came up with is “A girl on the train”. But then my friend wasn’t really interested in taking it further. So I combined the two ideas and wrote the film in two nights when the time came.

One of the things I love about writing Jab We Met is that the idea of Krishna becoming Radha and Radha becoming Krishna comes through in the script. If you notice, throughout the film, Shahid’s character slowly becomes Kareena’s and Kareena’s character becomes Shahid’s.

Is it true that the bigger the budget of a film, the lesser the writer’s creative freedom?

Haha! I won’t say that’s entirely true because in the film industry, only when the script is complete do you get into budgeting. When the script is being written, there is usually no money involved. That is unfortunate because it puts the writer in a place where he is not guaranteed to get paid for his work. Only when the project is greenlit, does he get paid. We’re trying to change that. I think what this industry lacks most is good writers. We don’t need more actors or more directors or more musicians in the industry, we need more writers. People will have to realise that everything in the history of cinema that has ever worked has been well written!

A recurrent theme in your films is finding oneself while finding love. Does that come from an early personal experience or subconscious emotion?

Nothing conscious in my writing, ever! Everything comes from my subconscious or unconscious mind. Nothing follows a set design either. If I realise that there’s a design, I try to change it. I don’t try to belong to it. But yes, I see that the theme you talk about exists. Shahid in Jab We Met, Alia in Highway, Ranbir in Rockstar, yes, I notice the theme. But it’s not a conscious play. It must be coming from a deep corner of my mind.

In almost all your films, the music has been brilliant. Do you look at film music as an integral part of the script itself?

Yes, I totally do. In fact, I write the songs in my screenplay. I mean, I don’t write the lyrics. But I describe the song in the scene where I see it playing out. I also believe that songs give you the liberty to express things that cannot be written in dialogue. Sometimes, the articulation of an emotion is not all that you want. Cinema allows you the liberty to have music that articulates the mood or emotion in a unique way. Music can also allow poetry to come in. So the songs in my films always have a purpose.

I am not a practising spiritualist. But incidentally, the first book of philosophy that I ever read in my life was the Bhagawad Gita. It was a book that was available at book stalls in Jamshedpur at a discounted rate because of which I could afford and access it easily. I would read it on train journeys to Patna or Bhubaneshwar that I used to frequently take alone when I was in the 6th or the 7th standard. Some things in the book started making so much sense to me! It is very straightforward and I still think some of it is great philosophy. I didn’t know Sufi spiritualism at the time but I did know the Gita. Then, when I got acquainted with Western philosophy and also Sufism, I found many similarities with the Bhagawad Gita. In some cases, even the words are the same. The “spirit” in spiritualism is the same.

Much later in life, I found Rumi present at many junctures of my life. Like for instance, in Rockstar, I was doing a scene and somebody sent me a message which was a Rumi quote. I found it so relevant that eventually I used it in the film. It was like whatever mental zone I was in, this guy, Rumi, has already been there or thought about it. Even “Nadan Parinde Ghar Aa Ja” somewhere, coincidentally, is a reflection of Rumi’s writing. It was this strange connection I made with the man.

Why did you choose to be a filmmaker and a film writer and not, say, a novelist or a poet or a playwright considering you are interested in all those forms as well?

Because most of these instincts and desires get satisfied in film. I think cinema allows me to do all the kinds of writing that I ever want to do. Having said that, I often think about a novel. Early in college, I thought I’d be a novelist. But now I don’t know whether I’ll ever be able to write something without being conscious of the visual of it. I still have the fancy of writing a novel. But I’ll only write a novel that I think cannot be made into a film. And my novel, if ever there is one, will definitely not be anything like the films I make.

Everybody’s talking about OTTs changing the game, especially for writers. What do you think about that?

I’d say OTT is not changing the game but upgrading it; just like television did when it first came in. Back then, we did not fully understand the difference between writing for television and writing for film. Now we do. Television was supposed to kill cinema. But did it?

OTTs are certainly a great new avenue but it will have to coexist with cinema. OTT requires a different type of writing. Because of the length of a show, it allows for more details than a film. We are still discovering the potential of OTT and we will soon learn more and along the way; it will also further define the way films will be written.

Who are your favourite poets?

Shakespeare, Ghalib, Faiz, Neruda. Five or seven years back, discovering Fernando Pessoa was a revelation. I think Pessoa speaks more directly to me than anyone else.

Who are your favourite filmmakers and writers across the world?

Emir Kusturica in the Bosnian language, Wonk Kar Wai in Cantonese, Sergei Bodrov, a Russian filmmaker, who made Prisoner of the Mountain and The Rise of the Mongol, the great Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, and almost everyone from Iran including Asgar Farhadi, Majid Majidi, Abbas Kiarostami. In the commercial old space, I like David Lean a lot. In India, I like Bimal Roy a lot. I also like Vijay Anand a lot. Then Raj Kapoor and more recently, I like Mani Ratnam. And of course, Satyajit Ray. Shyam Benegal is a huge influence in my life. His cinema is intellectual but it is still cinema. It’s not ever boring. Even Satyajit Ray was never boring. I like cinema being cinema.

Fortunately, for my generation, most of us are friends. We talk for long hours, call each other, and many times, not for work. Thankfully, it’s not a finite piece of the pie. If my film does well, so can yours. We don’t have to compete with each other that way. Among us there is no creative jealousy. We are on great terms and also help each other in many ways. Like, for instance, (Anurag) Basu can pick up the phone on me and say, “You’ve done such a wonderful scene. I hate you for that!”

Which of your films is your best work according to you and why?

I can’t say. I feel there are things that I like about some of my films. For instance, I feel that Jab We Met is my most consistent film. It has a beginning, middle and end. It is smooth and has a very good shape. But the depth at which Rockstar hits you, in its purity, is something I like a lot as well. There are portions of Rockstar which I feel are more precious to me. One can argue that Jab We Met does not have that level of depth. The Jab We Met fans are very different from the Rockstar fans. I also think that there are certain parts of Highway that are utterly fulfilling; I can really give my life for some of those scenes and moments in Highway.

Define success for the writer in you.

I think there are certain things that Shakespeare writes or Ghalib writes and you feel that well, I should have written something like that. I aspire to that level of relatability. I’d also say that to be truthful as a writer is success for me. It’s not easy to be truthful.

I wanted to say this last thing that while I said I sometimes write to get rid of the work, I’d also say that writing is my doorway or my comforter. Writing is something I can hide behind. Writing takes care of me. It keeps me sane, keeps me alive and it takes care of all my problems. I can’t survive without writing.

Mihir Chitre is the author of two books of poetry, ‘School of Age’ and ‘Hyphenated’. He is the brain behind the advertising campaigns ‘#LaughAtDeath’ and ‘#HarBhashaEqual’ and has made the short film ‘Hello Brick Road’.

I think the first kind of writing I ever did was poetry in English. It was back at school in Jamshedpur when I was in the 9th standard. It was a sort of anti-establishment poetry. There was also a relationship-sweetness type of thing in it. I used to show it to my English teacher, Deepa Sengupta, who was kind enough to go through it and sometimes give me a review. I still remember some of her comments. That’s how my journey as a writer started. When I was writing, I felt happy. I also enjoyed the attention that I sometimes got.

With writing, I started knowing myself more. I became aware of somebody else who was also me. After these small poems, I started writing small skits, which I think have a role to play in bringing me here today. These were skits for school, for Teacher’s Day, for somebody’s welcome. The Rotaract Club asked me to write some plays whenever they had some delegates over for a meeting. I used to write them and then make them with my friends. Those tended be musicals and involved a lot of poetry. I also remember this one time when the school principal walked into our rehearsals and after watching what was happening, asked, “Whose play is it? Who has written it?” And I said, “I have written it.” She looked at me for a bit and said, “Maybe you should write more then.” That encouraged me. This was my life in Jamshedpur and in my school as a writer.

The place poetry holds in my mind is something I can describe with that sher by Momin: “Tum mere paas hote ho goya, jab koi doosra nahin hota.” (You are with me, when no one else is.)

How did your idea of art change from Jamshedpur to Delhi and then from Delhi to Bombay?

I think it changed a lot. And that has to do with the kind of theatre I was involved in – not just as a writer but as an actor or a director as well. When I was in Jamshedpur, we were doing archaic English theatre. We were trying to enunciate old English and get that dialect in. That’s the kind of theatre that has a lot of rules like an actor’s shoulder blade shouldn’t cut the line of audience or an actor should never show his or her back to the audience. While I was in Jamshedpur, even my writing was like that because I was writing for, let’s say, that mentality – flowery, maybe a bit highbrow and only in English.

One of the biggest things Delhi did for me is introduce me to Experimental Theatre. This is also when I started writing in Hindi. Although Hindi is what we always spoke at home, until I went to Delhi, I always wrote in English. I still think in English.

At Mandi House, I started doing experimental Hindi plays. Now the shoulder blade could cut the line of audience, I could have an actor showing their back to the audience. Experimental theatre is more liberal and open. Though it has rules of its own, it allowed me more freedom. I also started writing and directing nukkad natak (street plays).

Delhi became an important city for me also because Delhi is a rough city. It attacks you. And you tend to hit back. And at the age that I was, early college, there was a roughness. So I found an expression in the city. In fact, when I came to Mumbai, almost all my stories were from my time in Delhi. Like, Highway is one of my early stories and originally, the script was much harsher than the way I made it. I had that story since the 1990s. Maybe since 1996-97. Then, in Bombay, I wrote a play when I was at the Xavier’s Institute of Communication, which, at that point, as a theatre person, I was very proud of.

I think my take-off point is lived experience. But nothing is autobiographical either. You can say, for me, it starts with lived experience and then takes a flight of the imagination. For example, Jab We Met: a girl on a train – this is a fantasy for any guy who travels by train from Jamshedpur or any small town. Now, mix this with the piece of imagination: what if she and I were to miss a train together? Then we might be walking down the lanes of Ratlam. This is how the story started unfolding. That never happened in reality. Unfortunately, I never missed a train with a girl. But it started off because I must have seen a girl on a train in my early days. The reality is the trigger; the rest is imagination.

Many people talk about the struggle that the Hindi film industry can be for an outsider, especially one who wants to tell original stories. What was it like for you?

Well, I feel that anybody who came to Bombay at around my time to become a director, was at first, a writer. Myself, Anurag (Kashyap), Sriram Raghavan, Tishu (Tigmanshu Dhulia), (Anurag) Basu, (Rajkumar) Hirani – we would all write. I think writing created a chance for most of us to become directors. I think we were a desperate lot. Not that we wanted to tell our own or original stories. We had no fanciful notions. We wanted work and money to survive. I wanted money to pay the rent and get married and start a household and stuff like that. We were all middle-class small-town boys. We had our own experiences and gradually, we found a way in.

Tell me about your television days in the 1990s, especially Star Bestsellers. I don’t think shows like that are made any longer.

I agree. Unfortunately, shows like Star Bestsellers aren’t made any longer. All of us wanted to make films. At that time, the difference between a TV story and a film story wasn’t as clear as it is today. I made one film for Start Bestsellers called Witness. It was a great opportunity for someone like me to tell a finite story, with a definite beginning, middle and end. Otherwise, the other TV shows that I was working on like Imtehan were endless sagas. For instance, in Witness, I went crazy recording sounds from the atmosphere. That’s when I realised the importance of ambient sound. Television was very important to my journey because it taught me to write quickly and shoot quickly. I think television is the only film school I ever went to.

How easy or difficult was it to pitch your first film Socha Na Tha? Talk about that journey.

I had been writing and directing television for many years. When I was working on Star Bestsellers, the team there approached me one time and said that they were working on a new segment, which would have a feature film but in three parts on television. And they were looking for a story. So I told them a story. They said they liked it and they would want to commission it to be the first one. They wanted it done quickly. So I went underground and wrote it in three nights. The only time I went out of my house in those days was to go to the bank because I had no money to buy food either. When I finished it, the team said, for some reason, they were not going ahead with their plans and that the show was cancelled. Now I had just written the full script of a film! So then I approached my friend Sanjay Rautre, who now heads Matchbox Films. We tried to pitch it and ultimately landed a meeting with Sunny Deol. I went to Shimla to meet him. Imagine, I was telling an action hero about a romantic film where the hero himself gets slapped. I was wondering if he would find it a sissy plot for his action hero self. But he listened with rapt attention and then two hours later he said, “Khana kha lein? Bhook lagi hai.” So I said, “Sir, thodasa bacha hai.” He said, “Picture main kar lunga, bhai. Khana toh kha lein!” That’s how it happened. He just heard the story, loved it intuitively and asked me to direct the film.

In 2008 came Jab We Met, which found its way into the hearts of many. How long did it take to write and make?

Well, the writing was very, very quick. I write to get rid of the job. You might be surprised but I don’t really enjoy the process of writing, especially film writing. So I want to get done with it quickly. I think I enjoy direction more than writing. Writing allows me to have more fun as a director. I wrote Jab We Met in two nights. That was the first draft. And then only one major change happened in the screenplay before the film got made.

In fact, there’s another interesting thing about Jab We Met. I had a friend, Joy Banerjee, who was rather depressed at the time and said he needed work. So I told him to write something. I told him that I would come up with one idea, he could come up with another one and then we would put the two together and write the story. He came up with an idea of “A man who wants to kill himself”. What I came up with is “A girl on the train”. But then my friend wasn’t really interested in taking it further. So I combined the two ideas and wrote the film in two nights when the time came.

One of the things I love about writing Jab We Met is that the idea of Krishna becoming Radha and Radha becoming Krishna comes through in the script. If you notice, throughout the film, Shahid’s character slowly becomes Kareena’s and Kareena’s character becomes Shahid’s.

Is it true that the bigger the budget of a film, the lesser the writer’s creative freedom?

Haha! I won’t say that’s entirely true because in the film industry, only when the script is complete do you get into budgeting. When the script is being written, there is usually no money involved. That is unfortunate because it puts the writer in a place where he is not guaranteed to get paid for his work. Only when the project is greenlit, does he get paid. We’re trying to change that. I think what this industry lacks most is good writers. We don’t need more actors or more directors or more musicians in the industry, we need more writers. People will have to realise that everything in the history of cinema that has ever worked has been well written!

A recurrent theme in your films is finding oneself while finding love. Does that come from an early personal experience or subconscious emotion?

Nothing conscious in my writing, ever! Everything comes from my subconscious or unconscious mind. Nothing follows a set design either. If I realise that there’s a design, I try to change it. I don’t try to belong to it. But yes, I see that the theme you talk about exists. Shahid in Jab We Met, Alia in Highway, Ranbir in Rockstar, yes, I notice the theme. But it’s not a conscious play. It must be coming from a deep corner of my mind.

In almost all your films, the music has been brilliant. Do you look at film music as an integral part of the script itself?

Yes, I totally do. In fact, I write the songs in my screenplay. I mean, I don’t write the lyrics. But I describe the song in the scene where I see it playing out. I also believe that songs give you the liberty to express things that cannot be written in dialogue. Sometimes, the articulation of an emotion is not all that you want. Cinema allows you the liberty to have music that articulates the mood or emotion in a unique way. Music can also allow poetry to come in. So the songs in my films always have a purpose.

I am not a practising spiritualist. But incidentally, the first book of philosophy that I ever read in my life was the Bhagawad Gita. It was a book that was available at book stalls in Jamshedpur at a discounted rate because of which I could afford and access it easily. I would read it on train journeys to Patna or Bhubaneshwar that I used to frequently take alone when I was in the 6th or the 7th standard. Some things in the book started making so much sense to me! It is very straightforward and I still think some of it is great philosophy. I didn’t know Sufi spiritualism at the time but I did know the Gita. Then, when I got acquainted with Western philosophy and also Sufism, I found many similarities with the Bhagawad Gita. In some cases, even the words are the same. The “spirit” in spiritualism is the same.

Much later in life, I found Rumi present at many junctures of my life. Like for instance, in Rockstar, I was doing a scene and somebody sent me a message which was a Rumi quote. I found it so relevant that eventually I used it in the film. It was like whatever mental zone I was in, this guy, Rumi, has already been there or thought about it. Even “Nadan Parinde Ghar Aa Ja” somewhere, coincidentally, is a reflection of Rumi’s writing. It was this strange connection I made with the man.

Why did you choose to be a filmmaker and a film writer and not, say, a novelist or a poet or a playwright considering you are interested in all those forms as well?

Because most of these instincts and desires get satisfied in film. I think cinema allows me to do all the kinds of writing that I ever want to do. Having said that, I often think about a novel. Early in college, I thought I’d be a novelist. But now I don’t know whether I’ll ever be able to write something without being conscious of the visual of it. I still have the fancy of writing a novel. But I’ll only write a novel that I think cannot be made into a film. And my novel, if ever there is one, will definitely not be anything like the films I make.

Everybody’s talking about OTTs changing the game, especially for writers. What do you think about that?

I’d say OTT is not changing the game but upgrading it; just like television did when it first came in. Back then, we did not fully understand the difference between writing for television and writing for film. Now we do. Television was supposed to kill cinema. But did it?

OTTs are certainly a great new avenue but it will have to coexist with cinema. OTT requires a different type of writing. Because of the length of a show, it allows for more details than a film. We are still discovering the potential of OTT and we will soon learn more and along the way; it will also further define the way films will be written.

Who are your favourite poets?

Shakespeare, Ghalib, Faiz, Neruda. Five or seven years back, discovering Fernando Pessoa was a revelation. I think Pessoa speaks more directly to me than anyone else.

Who are your favourite filmmakers and writers across the world?

Emir Kusturica in the Bosnian language, Wonk Kar Wai in Cantonese, Sergei Bodrov, a Russian filmmaker, who made Prisoner of the Mountain and The Rise of the Mongol, the great Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, and almost everyone from Iran including Asgar Farhadi, Majid Majidi, Abbas Kiarostami. In the commercial old space, I like David Lean a lot. In India, I like Bimal Roy a lot. I also like Vijay Anand a lot. Then Raj Kapoor and more recently, I like Mani Ratnam. And of course, Satyajit Ray. Shyam Benegal is a huge influence in my life. His cinema is intellectual but it is still cinema. It’s not ever boring. Even Satyajit Ray was never boring. I like cinema being cinema.

Fortunately, for my generation, most of us are friends. We talk for long hours, call each other, and many times, not for work. Thankfully, it’s not a finite piece of the pie. If my film does well, so can yours. We don’t have to compete with each other that way. Among us there is no creative jealousy. We are on great terms and also help each other in many ways. Like, for instance, (Anurag) Basu can pick up the phone on me and say, “You’ve done such a wonderful scene. I hate you for that!”

Which of your films is your best work according to you and why?

I can’t say. I feel there are things that I like about some of my films. For instance, I feel that Jab We Met is my most consistent film. It has a beginning, middle and end. It is smooth and has a very good shape. But the depth at which Rockstar hits you, in its purity, is something I like a lot as well. There are portions of Rockstar which I feel are more precious to me. One can argue that Jab We Met does not have that level of depth. The Jab We Met fans are very different from the Rockstar fans. I also think that there are certain parts of Highway that are utterly fulfilling; I can really give my life for some of those scenes and moments in Highway.

Define success for the writer in you.

I think there are certain things that Shakespeare writes or Ghalib writes and you feel that well, I should have written something like that. I aspire to that level of relatability. I’d also say that to be truthful as a writer is success for me. It’s not easy to be truthful.

I wanted to say this last thing that while I said I sometimes write to get rid of the work, I’d also say that writing is my doorway or my comforter. Writing is something I can hide behind. Writing takes care of me. It keeps me sane, keeps me alive and it takes care of all my problems. I can’t survive without writing.

Mihir Chitre is the author of two books of poetry, ‘School of Age’ and ‘Hyphenated’. He is the brain behind the advertising campaigns ‘#LaughAtDeath’ and ‘#HarBhashaEqual’ and has made the short film ‘Hello Brick Road’.