Chitti chitti bar bar

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Chitti, a cousin of mine, had this brainwave of opening a bar-cum-restaurant on Mehdi Patnam Road in Hyderabad. Despite a huge housing colony on that road, there wasn’t a single bar in the vicinity. With an investment of `20 lakh, he claimed that he would make a profit of at least `1 crore in the very first year. It sounded fantastic, I wished him all the best.

By the end of the year he had lost every rupee of his investment and had closed down the bar because there was little or no business. Sadly he reasoned that people from the housing colony did not want to drink in a bar which was very close to their homes. Instead, they guzzled at bars close to their workplace, had an elaichi or paan, thus camouflaging their breath on returning home. Chitti’s Bar flopped but only his immediate family and I knew about this.
On the other hand, since I am from the spoilt film industry, everyone knows about my failures and crows about it. Over the years, I meet people who ask me how I could have made an X, Y or Z flop. What these ‘well-wishers’ don’t realise is that a film is made after a series of decisions taken over a long period of time and are influenced by a set of specific factors.
Otherwise why would any filmmaker, however good or bad, slog over a film which the audience dismisses as garbage within a matter of minutes?
No one cares if a hell of a number of factors went wrong between the intentions and the execution of a film. Fair enough. That’s why I have always maintained that all my flops are unintentional and my hits are accidental. There’s no point analysing the reasons for success or failure.
On a personal note, I remember a friend who was dating a girl for seven years. They seemed to be made for each other but their marriage flopped. They had discovered some extremely unpleasant facts about each other, which they had never brought up during their seven years of dating. The point I am trying to make, then, is that apart from films, many aspects of our lives flop because of wrong decisions.
Sunil Gavaskar once told someone that if he was bowled out early in a match, even the attendant removing his knee pads would comment that he should not have hit a ball which led to him returning to the pavilion. It’s another matter entirely that the attendant may not even know how to hold a bat.
Coming back to Chitti, his family had backed him financially. If the bar had clicked, he would have been called a visionary. Since it was a dismal failure, they called him stupid. So who said life’s fair? We all think that we live by intent and die by accident. But those who have an iota of courage will admit that we all live by accident and die by intent.