It’s a busy time for Varun Grover. The multi-hyphenate—through stand-up, cinema and books—aims to look at the world through a wry lens, all the while spotting a glimmer of goodness in difficult times
Grover’s story Karejwa has made a long journey over eight years, from a children’s monthly to a graphic novel. Pic/Atul Kamble
For most people, the impending end of the world would cause a state of panic, helplessness, chaos. Their whole lives would flash before their eyes, as city governments and national institutions tried—in vain—to control the situation, perhaps even minimise people’s legitimate fears. In Varun Grover’s story Karejwa, set in a doomsday scenario with exactly 30 minutes left on the clock, the young protagonist Pintoo dreams of only one thing: the titular sweet, more tender than a gulab jamun.
Karejwa has travelled a long road since it was first published in Chakmak, a children’s monthly, in 2015. Five years later, Grover joined hands with Bakarmax, a comics and animation studio, to turn it into a web comic, edited by Sumit Kumar and illustrated by Ankit Kapoor. Last week, the studio and lyricist launched it as a graphic novel.
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In the last eight years, Grover has not felt the need to revise the plot or the characters who inhabit the story. Not because of a creative urge, but especially not because of the social and political environment today. “Unfortunately, our world is getting closer to the scenario depicted in Karejwa. In fact, it’s becoming more plausible with every passing year, given people’s prejudices and dogmas, and the bits about how different institutions may react to this fate… The plot looks more real than it did eight years ago,” Grover tells mid-day.
In many ways, Karejwa is emblematic of the lyricist-comic-writer’s creative process. Karejwa’s visuals, the choice of the dish at its core, and its infatuation with certain foods are all seeped in Varanasi, where it is set. All India Rank, Grover’s feature-length film about a young boy enrolled in one of Kota’s many IIT coaching centres, is set in the 1990s. So rooted are the plots of the graphic novel and film that they cannot simply be set anywhere else in India.
“This is the main criteria in my mind because it makes the story original. I think authenticity is its own aesthetic—it’s an aesthetic I try to chase. The other aspects, like the emotional elements, can be subjective based on the viewer’s own experiences, but the time and place are easy to determine. This is why Kumar and Kapoor visited Varanasi before they began their work, to get a real taste and texture of the city,” he explains.
From his stand-up bit titled Padmaavat & the Parrot to his debut short film KISS, about the censorious forces in India’s film certification bodies, Grover does not hold back from being wry and observational—it may be the qualities he is best known for, apart from his lyricism.
Did he sharpen this way of looking at the world during his years as a comic? He says it’s the other way around. “I became a stand-up comedian because of this attitude in life, of being detached while also finding a wry or satirical perspective on things. I think that is the only way to survive… Perhaps the world has always been this way, even a century ago. But I can say with certainty that the world today is difficult to cope with,” he comments. “Without some degree of attachment and humour, I think I’d fall apart under the weight of anxiety that comes with living in this world.” The school boy Pintoo, with his innocent search for a sweet while the world ends, is Grover’s way of looking for a sense of light-heartedness amid darkness.
As he works across formats and mediums, the lyricist-writer says that sometimes he knows what will work for a particular idea, and sometimes he doesn’t. Over the years, he has developed the practice of journaling and documenting the ideas and leads he gathers—across email chains he maintains with himself, and on WhatsApp groups featuring only him. “Sometimes, I’ll mention that the idea is for stand-up, or a phrase that can be used in a film song, or an idea I like or am deeply fascinated by,” he explains.
“There was a time when I read about a bird called the bar-tailed godwit, which takes a long, non-stop migratory flight across continents. When I came across this bird, I didn’t know what to do with it, but when Rajkumari—my partner—and I were writing Biksu [a Hindi graphic novel], there was an instance where we wanted to talk about resilience and focus. We revisited the bird in my list of ideas.” The page featuring the bar-tailed godwit would go on to become Grover and Rajkumari’s most cherished in the book.
As he looks forward to another tour of his comedy show Nothing Makes Sense in January, Grover ends 2023 on a moving note. At the recently concluded Jashn-e-Rekhta festival in Delhi, singer-writer Swanand Kirkire broke into the song Shauq from the film Qala, only to be drowned out by an eager audience who knew its lyrics in entirety. Grover, who wrote the song two years ago, was left feeling joyful and overwhelmed; he knew the song was a popular one, but watching the attendees sing in tune shifted something inside him.
“This happened at Rekhta, where attendees come out of a love for Urdu poetry and prose, not Swanand and myself. And they knew the words of the antara, at a time when most songs are 30-second Reels and we don’t know if the audience listens to songs beyond this mark. That was what struck me,” he concludes.
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