Their partnership clicked

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Salman Rushdie has been making news with his typical tongue-in-cheek wit. In Mumbai to release his film, Midnight‘s Children, I was keen to hear his views on myriad issues blazing in the media. What took me by surprise was his interesting insight into partnerships and handling the sometimes conflicting ideas that partners run into when working together.

Salman spoke at length about his collaboration with Deepa Mehta while making the film, and it struck me as an important insight in an environment where business partnerships are growing and new opportunities enter a globalising India.
Salman and Deepa‘s camaraderie came across when they discussed their latest project, Midnight‘s Children, enthusiastically. Quite obviously, they‘d had a blast doing the screenplay for the film. In fact, I don‘t believe I‘m being facetious when I say that he was also somewhat surprised at how wonderfully they‘d worked together.
A partnership, especially when a creative collaboration happens, can be very tumultuous. People with different views, backgrounds, perceptions, decisions,hormones, can spell high drama. And yet, here was a highly controversial author working with a director who is known to be an opinionated, self-assured woman, and they came out of it friends, working well together.
“Even to my surprise it was an easy collaboration. The thing is when you partner at work you can‘t mollycoddle each other, you have to speak directly. And then novelists don‘t like collaborating. You have to be able to speak plainly through the long difficult journey. You have to be able to say unpleasant things. So I always believed that to work together is difficult. It was then incredible that we did it without yelling and bad tempers. I had been worried that two people like us sitting together can confuse the actors,” says Salman with a twinkle in his eye, to which Deepa adds, “We got an incredible screenplay done together, off we went, did recces, found places, created the vision after extensive workshops.”
So how do two people put their heads together in a working partnership?
Salman cites the collaboration. “Deepa does not thwart the instinct of a partner; after a workshop, if I felt a particular way then we discussed it and did it with inputs of both partners.” Deepa adds, “I don‘t like to control people in a working relationship, I leave them to unfurl their creativity.”
Working in a partnership is actually very advantageous, each shares the stress with the other. It is also exciting to have another person to discuss ideas with, someone to do part of the work if you are tired and a person whom you can brainstorm with if you are unsure or need a sounding board.
The best way to nurture resentment is to be dismissive.
It fractures a partnership when you break communication. In stressful situations it is best to keep voices down and breathe. People with different points of view, different backgrounds and different work styles need to respect each other, be able to give a patient hearing to the other point of view without just obdurately believing that they and only they know best.
(The author is a lifestyle columnist and a fashion consultant. You can mail her at nishjamwal @gmail.com