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Back by popular demand, yaaro!

Updated on: 21 December,2010 11:08 AM IST  | 
The Guide Team |

That Kundan Shah's Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro has achieved cult-like status is no secret. Reliving the magic of this is Jai Arjun Singh's take on the making of this film against incredible odds and hilarious on-set adventures

Back by   popular demand,   yaaro!

That Kundan Shah's Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro has achieved cult-like status is no secret. Reliving the magic of this is Jai Arjun Singh's take on the making of this film against incredible odds and hilarious on-set adventures






The film showcased the talents of some of the country's finest theatre and film talents, who were all at key stages of their careers, including Naseeruddin Shah, Ravi Baswani, Satish Shah, and Om Puri. Jai Arjun Singh attempts to unleash the madness behind this movie that continues to tickle the funny bone of the cine fan.

DON'T MAKE ICE, MAKE SNOW, Pages 89-91
It was a nervous time for Kundan. As the prospect of directing his first feature film ufffdfrom a script he had written himself--drew nearer, self-doubt began to creep in. Writing a madcap comedy is one thing, but it's another thing to be present while other creative artists are scrutinizing it, even speculating about how it will be received by a large audience.

'The script was written on a certain wavelength,' Kundan says, 'but if you started examining it by the cold light of day, many things started falling apart.' Even before the shoot began, his confidence had begun to waver.

Succumbing to the general mood, he started incorporating changes that would give his film a more logical, realistic flow. But there was a problem. The NFDC's sanction had been given on the basis of the original script that had been submitted to them.

If Kundan was going to make significant changes, he would have to let them know. So he decided to play a confidence trick by going to Akhtar Mirza, Saeed Mirza's father, who was on the NFDC committee at the time. 'I knew Akhtar saab quite well through Saeed, so I thought the easy thing to do would be to go to him and casually tell him: "We've changed the script slightly to make it better".

That way, I would at least have it on record that I've conveyed this to someone in the NFDC.'u00a0 The senior Mirza listened to Kundan for half an hour without saying a word. At the end of it, he spoke two lines, lines that resonate with Kundan to this day: 'Your script is like snow, so it's floating. If you put all this logic into it, it will become ice and sink.' It's a beautiful analogy, built around the idea of snow as something delicate and enigmatic, and ice as something that is both transparent and heavy (in this case: obvious and didactic).

The moment Kundan heard these words he felt a strong sense of relief, as if his own inner voice had been validated. Mirza had intuitively understood that the young man sitting in front of him was in danger of trying too hard to make his film 'respectable' by smoothing over the absurdities, and that this wasn't the right thing to do for this particular film. 'I went back to my original script and threw out the artificially implanted logic,' says Kundan. There was to be no going back ufffdnot even when Naseeruddin Shah, the biggest star in his film, repeatedly conveyed his dissatisfaction with certain scenes.

Exploitation Film, Pages 151-153
The puppy cantered down the road, sniffed around a bit and then squatted with a purposeful look on its little face. 'Cut! Cut!' yelled Kundan. This wasn't the sort of humour he wanted in his film. 'What nonsense, don't cut!' screamed everyone else in the unit, and Binod Pradhan kept the camera rolling. The pup peed, the shot was taken, and everyone pounced on Kundan and told him that he had to use it.

It would be an instant mood-setter for the film's opening scene. 'Dekho mere pillay ne kaisa perform kiya!' ('Look how well my pup performed!') a proud Pawan Malhotra said to the unit. He had picked up the 'pilla' from a nearby slum. To Pawan, it must have felt like his official designation of production assistant came with the fine print: 'In Charge of Procuring Small Furry Animals (And One Werewolf/Gorilla Costume)'.

Apart from the puppy, he organized the monkey for the park scene from a chawl in Kurla. But his bravest moment came while doing the legwork for one of the film's classic sight gags: the scene where Tarneja's guards, in a literalizing of the cliche 'Even a mouse can't get past this level of security', hold up the carcass of a rat they had gunned down because it had the cheek to trespass into Tarneja's apartment. (It's another matter that Vinod and Sudhir not only succeed in gaining entry but also go on to photograph and voicerecord Tarneja and Ahuja while hiding behind sofas in a tiny room.) The day before the scene was to be shot, just as the crew was winding up, Kundan glanced at young Pawan and said, almost as an afterthought: 'Hey--kal ke liye chooha laana hai' ('Hey, we need a rat for tomorrow').

Life might have been easier for Pawan if it had been possible to get a live rat to play dead, the way Satish Shah would do at the homo sapien level later in the film. But this wasn't an option, and so, off he went to a Byculla building that served as a sort of purgatory for freshly deceased rodents: the BMC (Bombay Municipal Corporation) would collect carcasses from all over the city and bring them here, presumably for eventual disposal.

'I had never done anything like this before,' Pawan says, somewhat unnecessarily. Since he was armed with the NFDC Letter that Opened All Doors, the man in charge called someone and said, 'Arre, inhe chooha chahiye, le jao' ('This guy wants rats; take him to see them'). The next thing he knew, he was in a hall laden with trunks full of dead rats--possibly the eeriest experience of his young life. 'Do choohe de deejiye,' he bleated, 'ek chhota aur ek bada' ('Give me two--one small and one big'). It was prudent for a production assistant to get a 'backup' of each item wherever possible Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro by Jai Arjun Singh, HarperCollins India, Rs 250. Available at leading bookstores.

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