Kersi Khambatta: People will be offended. That's not unusual

With 16 years spent away from his chosen profession of writing Kersi Khambattarsquos hands and speech are racing ahead of what he wants his written words to say The script writer best known for his partnership with director Homi Adajania for Being Cyrus and Finding Fanny mdash sailed with the merchant navy till 2000 before actively seeking a more fulfilling life as writer You can see that career in the pronounced articulation of his knuckles and finger joints as his hands gesticulate his speechKhambatta 50 always wanted to write I was sht at academics too much of a dreamer I used to write long letters back home when I was sailing and nobody complained about them says the Bandra resident However the urgency of having to earn a living led him to catching a transsteamer in Hong Kong The romantic oldfashioned way at 19 right after doing miserably in his HSC examsKersi Khambattarsquos first novel the Village of Pointless Conversations published by Harper Collins will be out next month It is an expansion of the script that became Finding Fanny PicSameer MarkandeHis first novel the Village of Pointless Conversations will be out next month mdash an expansion of the script that became Finding Fanny Homi always wanted to tell a story about the irony of a postman receiving a letter At that point I was working on a slightly autobiographical novel which I scrapped because this was more of a challenge How mad can we make the characters How eccentric can we make them while making them seem perfectly normal So I asked Homi if this could be my first novel and he said go for it It took nine months to write and three years to reduce that verbal vomit to something that was passably readableAdajania and Khambatta met on a diving trip at Lakshadweep in 1997 Discovering a similar sensibility they collaborated on Being Cyrus based on a short story written by Khambatta Together they bring a unique sensibility to Hindi movies which the industry now realises is elastic enough to make place for differing but valid viewpoints Both now consider the industry their primary profession Khambatta has moved to Bandra to be closer to work assignments His next script is being produced by Balaji making it as commercial as it comes He doesnrsquot care as long as he gets to writeAfter the Merchant Navy he spent seven years looking after private yachts He started learning karate under Pervez Mistry and now goes for a pilgrimage every four years to Okinawa to train under the masters All this magic he says happened when he quit sailing and was able to do everything he wanted to since 18 Karate is my yoga The challenge and the discipline of living the karatelife makes me a better person a more focused individual It is my anchor in stormy seas When everything is going wrong that one thing is always going rightOn the side he would write whatever he could mdash celebrity interviews travel and adventure stories and foreign assignments The short story of Being Cyrus was lying in my computer until Homi read it in 2003 There was no master plan of getting into writing for movies It happened serendipitously Homi also had this bug up his ars of making a movie his first so we developed the script togetherThe partnership worked well and the two went on to work on Finding Fanny and the contentious oneandhalf minute film on women empowerment made for Vogue magazine When Adajania needs words he calls Khambatta And he calls the shots He is the captain of the ship I am just the galley cook he saysBesides the love of diving and telling stories the two are also bound by the desire to shock people We like to experiment with pushing the envelope a little bit seeing how much we can get away with The whole premise of Being Cyrus mdash killing old people is not an explored subject or theme in most movies Especially making Parsis the bad guys who have always been portrayed as good and almost painfully boringly saintly he says Which is not accurate at all We are just like anybody else Irsquom sure we can be pretty damn homicidal if situations and circumstances push us to be I wanted to talk about all the taboos prejudices and biases that plague our community We can whitewash it as much as we want but the truth is that we are just like anybody else Not purer or anythingHe actively disassociates from Brand Bawa He clarifies that he is not a representative of the Parsis And if anybody expects me to be then tough luck It was sx drugs and rock and roll growing up in Dadar Parsi colony but a time comes when you have to get outThe biggest trap of staying in a gated colony he thinks is that you ghettoise yourself You will find comfort within that little patch of land Marry a nice Parsi girl who will live three buildings down from you Your kids will do the same thing Itrsquos a dangerous I find it parochial and boring Too much intellectual interbreeding is harmful for the community With Being Cyrus I buried my hatchets about the community and got it outThe longing with which his older relatives spoke of the days of the Raj he saw echoed in the landed gentry of Goa as he researched his book Its ending is completely different from the slapstick resolution the movie chose And the characters are richer because I have elbow room to play with all the idiosyncrasies and madness in their heads he says Khambattarsquos agenda when he writes a book is to tell a story that resonates with the heart Growing up he was an Amitabh Bachchan fan and now watches a curated selection of Hindi movies like Titli Piku and Queen Yes they had stars such as Deepika Kangana but first and foremost they were great stories If you can empathise with the human condition any human condition you can do a good job of telling a story even if itrsquos out of your comfort zone he says about writingWith The Village of Pointless Conversations he is back to pushing the envelope The book is set in the Goa of villages not the beach Literally every village in Goa and I donrsquot mean that disparagingly is a village of pointless conversation You walk down to a taverna and listen to the gossip The toddy tappers actually do come at five in the morning drink arrack and climb those 40 feet high trees Itrsquos a fascinating little microcosm of lifeHere comes the juicy bit The landed families that live in these villages they donrsquot consider themselves a part of India even today They yearn for the day the Portuguese will come back and take over They consider themselves a cut above the Indians more progressive more stylish landed gentry but in reality they are just normal folk caught up in their boring quotidian lives These affectations are merely their aspirations to grandeur something I find quite quaint and lovely as a theme to explore