On an Instagram account, Kalpak Bhinde analyses movie characters, both the popular and the insignificant, and what makes them tick
Pic/Satej Shinde
While dissecting film characters, Kalpak Bhinde has to limit himself to 2,200 characters. "If a character has a lot of depth, I could write a chapter," he says. "But I have to edit and omit stuff to make it fewer than 2,200 characters." That's Instagram's caption limit, on which Bhinde runs an account called @characterbiopsies. On it, he makes complex roles appear simple. And sometimes, makes simple roles appear complex.
Bhinde can give you a lot to chew on with just cameos. Just like great actors can. "I like characters that have a lot of layers, but don't have a major part in the story." In Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, Naseeruddin Shah, while playing Salman Habib, appears for fewer than 10 minutes, but Bhinde is able to break down why his character is "unapologetically self-centred."
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When Habib meets his son, he doesn't fall back on a hug, he rolls a spliff. In Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, Shah Rukh Khan, as Tahir Taliyar Khan, Saba's ex-husband, is onscreen for four minutes. "Tahir says that one-sided love is the most beautiful feeling in the world; he's lying," writes Bhinde. "He answers to Ayan [Ranbir Kapoor] but looks at Saba [Aishwarya Rai Bachchan], into her eyes. His ruined heart tells her, 'I love you,' but his ego says, 'I don't need you.'" In Andaz Apna Apna, he empathises with Shakti Kapoor's Crime Master Gogo, "a good guy desperately trying to be bad." Gogo wears a cape because "he doesn't want to be just a villain, he wants to be a super-villain." The dialogues attest to this as well: Gogo isn't a purush, he's a mahapurush.
With the physique of a couch potato, Bhinde, 30, has no background in film studies; he's simply a lifelong student of cinema. "I grew up on a heavy dose of movies. I can watch anything and everything. Sometimes my wife also wonders, 'How can you like Anurag Kashyap's No Smoking so much and then enjoy a Salman Khan film also?' But I don't discriminate. I just enjoy movies in general."
After a "vanilla education" (BCom and MBA), he worked in sales for eight-odd years, and is currently employed with a SAS company called BrowserStack. He's also been working on a fiction novel for the past five years. "Every New Year resolution is to finish writing my book, and it keeps getting pushed. I still don't feel like saying I'm working on my book, because I'll write something once in a blue moon. I wanted to start an Instagram page that was writing-based, just to get regular with my writing. That was my first goal." Interestingly, his first post in August 2018 was on Ranbir Kapoor's Ved Sahni in Tamasha: "A storyteller trapped inside an everyday guy."
On the page, he's able to flesh out characters because he likes reading people. "I think it was my people-observing skills that helped me. One of my favourite hobbies is to go alone and sit in a coffee shop and just randomly observe people. See how animated the conversations are, and what they're talking about. Maybe, that created a base for this." As an example, he talks about a fit, 50-something guy with salt-and-pepper hair, he noticed recently. "He was dressed in a turtleneck and an overcoat, like he was in a J Hampstead ad. My wife was also drooling over him.
I found him interesting because he had so much sternness on his face. [The kind of person] who would not cry or show any vulnerabilities, but with something soft inside him."
He pays equal attention to film characters: their dialogues, body language, attire and the physical spaces they inhabit. "Earlier, I used to observe subconsciously; now, it's consciously done." His analysis is obviously subjective. "There have been several comments on my posts, where people have given contradictory interpretations.
My analysis is not sacrosanct. In Piku's analysis, I wrote a paragraph on feminism in the end. I was dicey about posting it, because it's a sensitive word in general. And there were comments, saying, 'This was such a good post, but what was that sh*t in the end?'" He also didn't think twice before calling the character of Rahul Khanna, from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, an a**hole. "There were a lot of loopholes and toxic stuff in his character that people had overlooked. So, that's what I described in detail. Even hardcore Shah Rukh fans were like, 'Don't say this, don't break the bubble.'"
With 8K followers, film-maker Zoya Akhtar among them, Bhinde's words do carry some weight. What's lovely is that he's using them to give side characters their due, and making them the hero in their own stories.
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