A huge star from our industry today was doing a film with me and we were shooting in a foreign land, much to the delight of the Indians abroad who gathered around to watch the shoot. They were delighted with the star’s presence. Now the star wanted to smoke and so he decided to get his attendant to hide him with an umbrella and smoke undercover. Why was he bothering to hide and smoke I inquired and he said that there were a lot of young fans and he did not want to set a bad example. Quite impressed was I. Very thoughtful indeed.

A huge star from our industry today was doing a film with me and we were shooting in a foreign land, much to the delight of the Indians abroad who gathered around to watch the shoot.

I am in Los Angeles as I write this piece and have been away for almost a fortnight now. I am told by my office in Mumbai that a lot of films have not done well lately. There is a mystery that surrounds the dismal opening of films like Jhootha Hi Sahi and I know the place will go in a tizzy trying to figure if John Abraham is saleable on his own.

Persona non gra-ta. Fully unacceptable or unwelcome, especially to a foreign government, that of course is a term used in diplomacy and used in the realm that is not supposed to concern me but it is a term that applies to all of us in the entertainment industry. Unwelcome. That is us.

Raise the bar and someone will jump higher than that bar, but the point is to raise the bar and hope that someone jumps that. It would be sad if no one could do that. What would be then the point of raising the bar if no one took the challenge? I am sure that no one could be happier than Sunil Gavaskar at the genius that Sachin

When I was studying screenwriting I read a very interesting chapter on characters and their characterization and I must admit that at that point of time it seemed all too confusing but let me not get ahead of myself here and slow down a bit. The chapter told me that a character is not what a character says it is, but what a character does. Huh? What does that mean, “Not says but does?” Could not get it so I left it at that.

Everybody is somebody’s fool, said Shakespeare, I think, and even if he did not it sounds like something he would have said. Of
course what he meant was more in terms of love. There is always someone you love more than he or she loves you and there is always somebody you love less than he or she loves you.

There is a lateral thinking riddle that blows my mind. Let me ask you! Here goes… A surgeon was driving down the road and saw that the road was blocked by a huge throng of people. The surgeon stopped the car and got off to see what the crowd had gathered for. On reaching the spot the surgeon saw a young man lying wounded on the road. “Oh my God!” exclaimed the surgeon, “That is my son!” But the surgeon was not the boy’s father. Who then was the surgeon?

Elia Kazan said that audiences all over the world were like blood hounds. They could smell a good film and queue up for miles, and at the same time there would be no one for miles willing to watch another film. What is it that makes a film work? No one knows this yet, but there is a strange emerging trend here. Something that is waiting to be talked about.

In the early days of my career I remember this really embarrassing situation on a recee in Switzerland. My producers and I went to book this chalet for the crew in the pretty hamlet of Gstaad. The estate agent looked at us and frowned. When we confirmed her worst fears that we were from the Indian Film Industry. she went