<img style="float: left;" src="http://images.mid-day.com/images/images/2022/feb/Mayank-Shekhar-op_e.jpg" alt="Mayank Shekhar" width="150" height="83" />Who plays Yakub Memon, brother of Tiger (Pawan Malhotra), mastermind of 1993 serial Bombay blasts, in Anurag Kashyap&rsquo;s film Black Friday, on the same subject? Director Imtiaz Ali.
Kashyap never acted in Ali&rsquo;s films. Which is ironic, once you consider, as Ali told me once, the first time he ever saw an actor&rsquo;s portfolio&mdash;basically a bunch of photographs of an actor in multiple poses/dresses&mdash;it was Kashyap&rsquo;s!
Back in Delhi, in the early &rsquo;90s, when Ali was scouting for talents for a TV show around Delhi University, Kashyap was an aspiring actor. Kashyap himself makes a split-second cameo in Black Friday, you&rsquo;ll notice, as a Pak agent passing on terror consignment, mid-sea.
After getting picked up by the CBI from Kathmandu, Yakub was let free, and then rearrested from New Delhi railway station. Subsequently he claimed, on the video-magazine Newstrack, that no one from his family, besides Tiger, had any role in what was clearly the world&rsquo;s first terror attack of this scale (7/7, 9/11, 26/11, etc. happened years later).&nbsp;
Black Friday was based on S Hussain Zaidi&rsquo;s non-fiction book of the same name. Which, in turn, was culled from a 10,000-page Bombay Police chargesheet, besides personal interviews and case papers lodged at a ministerial bungalow in Nariman Point, that CBI gave him access to.
During the book&rsquo;s writing, trials of around 200 blasts accused were on, between 10.30 am and 5 pm, at a special court inside Arthur Road Jail. (These prime suspects later stalled the release of Black Friday in 2004, until they were convicted anyway). &nbsp;
This is where, during recess hours in the jail canteen, Hussain met several accused, including Yakub and Asgar Mukadam, played by who in Black Friday?&nbsp;
An unknown actor, at the time, Nawazuddin Siddiqui. In fact, Nawaz&rsquo;s lone, stellar interrogation scene&mdash;with DCP Rakesh Maria (Kay Kay Menon) and his cop crew&mdash;has developed a life of its own on YouTube since.&nbsp;
The interrogation room is lit in red. As with all such sequences in Black Friday. There is a distinctive blue tint during most scenes involving the blasts&rsquo; conspiracy itself. It&rsquo;s the usual white light, otherwise. Never asked Kashyap if this was some sorta film-buffery homage to Kieslowski&rsquo;s Colours (Red, Blue, White) trilogy!&nbsp;
The other sequence on repeat, online, is the six-minute chase between cops and a character called Imtiaz Ghavate&mdash;who&rsquo;s decidedly wearing red (shirt) here, for audiences to easily spot him, as the camera captures the hunt through multiple angles/shots, over gullies, gutters and general gunk across North Bombay.&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s the first time we see characters heavily losing breath while on the run. Which should be the case, unless it&rsquo;s Bachchan in a &rsquo;70s potboiler. Amar Akbar Anthony is referenced in this scene.&nbsp;
Unsuspecting crowds fill up the frame, just as they were in the edges of the Satya-Bhiku-Guru Narayan, railway overbridge chase, in Ram Gopal Varma&rsquo;s Satya (1998).&nbsp;
The intro sequence in Danny Boyle&rsquo;s solid entertainer Slumdog Millionaire (2008) similarly captures Mumbai&rsquo;s lower deck through a kinetic chase. Here, you can draw a straight line between Satya, Black Friday and Slumdog.&nbsp;
Divided into chapters&mdash;what we now associate with OTT shows&mdash;Black Friday, produced by Arindam Mitra from mid-day (newspaper), was commissioned as a mini-series for Aaj Tak news channel, written by Kashyap, directed by Aditya Bhattacharya.&nbsp;
Folks at Aaj Tak backed out reading the first episode, I&rsquo;m told&mdash;too brave/edgy for them, I guess; naming names, seldom shying away from the politics.&nbsp;
Kashyap saw in the deeply researched case files, a heavily factual, documentary-like feature film. Shorn of the usual three-act screenplay structure. Inherently lazy, mass/theatrical audiences perhaps find it hard to instantly immerse into docu-dramas. As it appears from the more recent, Kabir Khan&rsquo;s 83 (2021).&nbsp;
Ram Gopal Varma told me he was approached to direct Black Friday. He saw in the film a rather bombastic opening scene of mafia-don, chief conspirator Dawood Ibrahim in Dubai, receiving broken bangles from women in his Bombay neighbourhood, Dongri&mdash;for having failed to protect his lot during the 1992 riots. Introduction sets the tone. Varma was out.&nbsp;
That Dawood scene is there in Black Friday. But Kashyap opens with a guy called Gullu (Gul Noor Shaikh), a riot accused, who actually informed Bombay cops of the blasts a few days before it. This scene as a starting point is similar to the snitch, who sets the ball rolling in the seminal, docu-like civil-war drama, Gillo Pontecorvo&rsquo;s The Battle of Algiers (1966), that lenses on-location Algiers, but from a decade ago. &nbsp;
As with Black Friday, shot guerilla-style in the early 2000s, with top angle shots and tele lens on the streets of Bombay&mdash;concealing cell phones, satellite TV hoardings and snazzier vehicles, not there in 1993.&nbsp;
It was Kashyap&rsquo;s first theatrical release (after a couple of aborted attempts). I remember watching it, overhearing him from the row behind me at the premiere, joking with his friends, &ldquo;Now everybody will know I&rsquo;m a fraud!&rdquo;&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s been exactly 15 years since. Odd how fans on social media, during landmark anniversaries of films, wish that the picture celebrates 50/100 years! Of course it will. It&rsquo;s not a person. And a staggeringly faithful document like Black Friday, I suspect, will live on forever. &nbsp;
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com The views expressed in this column are the individual&rsquo;s and don&rsquo;t represent those of the paper.
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Going back to Anurag Kashyap’s ’93 Bombay blasts case-file, Black Friday, that released on February 9, 15 years ago—so should you!

Decade & half to this Black Beauty

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Decade & half to this Black Beauty

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