The Film School that ruined my chances to be normal

The old dreams were good dreams. They didn't work out, but I’m glad I had them.”The Bridges of Madison County (1995) –

Jamia was the kind of Film school that middle class journalist/documentary types like me fell for thinking it would our direct entry to the highways of super consciousness of Television Journalism. The way you could to make a difference (ouch!) The one profession that helped you in transcending the middle class rules that fettered meaningful living. The only licence in cutting through those traditions was intellectual licence( Money and Glamour used to be dirty words then!)

So I chose a film school that by my standards looked pretty much unattainable. But I really ached when I dreamed of going to the same college that Barkha Dutt and Sharukh Khan had gone to. It was a complete act of fantasy for an average student whose only claim to enter there was burning greedy passion to be there. Someone who was zilch in extra curriculars, was painfully shy, found public speaking painful and didn’t like looking in the mirror more than twice a day! Whatever made me choose Television!

All of this was the blue sky. Where did I step into it I never quite know! Perhaps the day of my interview when the director of Jamia asked me ‘You could have gone to FTII why you choosing Jamia’? I looked at him disbelieving! FTII! That place for stupid people who want to make mainstream trash!? Whoever aspires for something like that! Dont you see I am so thoughtful that I want to be a Jholewali for the rest of my life. I want to be poor and gritty. I want to be great! I want to make a difference. I will be Barkha Dutt not Subhash Ghai! Huh! The panel smirked between itself. Another one blinded with stardust. Take her in!

And In I went booming, swooning, derilious but with a poker straight face. We were to be trained in serious world-changing life altering practises.We would be the Medha Patekars and Arundhati Roys. We were to set the world straight! From the beginning it was made very clear that you would be a middle class filmmaker for the rest of your life! You don’t like it? You shouldn’t have come in and wasted someone else’s seat! Now for two years please keep your daintiness and love for glamour in your AC car. This was a place that would teach you to rough it out big time.

I knew no one in Jamia who openly admitted to be aspiring for a happy balanced love life? There used to be walls painted with Faiz Ahmed Faiz’z ‘Aur Bhi hai Gham Zamane main Mohabbat ke Siva’ So you could have a lot of unrequited love to fire you into being intense but happy love life’s was always to be looked down upon! Then there were those love nests in the neighbourhood which were rented by generations and generations of MCRCites. Other than the people who lived there they also served as shacks for other friends who would need it for a few hours. These love nests were such nice personal History Monuments I wish someone had maintained a register of who all went there. They used to be so inseparable for those 2 months of peak of passion and all (ok most of them) of those affairs would fall out like a pack of cards. All of us needed our creative space at the end! All possibility of love ever being a straight road was abandoned there!

Then there was that hedonism that came with being is a company of Pan India Intellectuals. There were North easterners, Punjabis and Crazy surds. There were Toppers from Bengal and there were the cut your throat women of Indraprastha College and LSR offcourse. There were dour Jamia Category students and there were the SC’s and the ST’s. Being a General category (1 of the 14) meant that you had mastered a Handicap in the India of 2005’s.

You could even be forgiven for thinking that you had arrived! For in a certain way you had. You would be a stamped Jholewala with the Kolhapuris( even though they don’t save you from electric shocks) You would wear with élan vegetable dyes and Fab India Kurtas even while the rest of the world had passed into Ganjis and Mango and Bananas and other such labels(forgive my dismal awareness about Fashion Trends for I am still a Jholewali as per my cool friends) You could even become a celebrity in a small town surrounded by teenage girls who would blink at you with doe eyes and ask you all details about how to crack the entrance. You become cool in an old doordarshan Kind of way.

Then there were those crazy assed friends. The ones who lived with you 24 hours . For a film school means no boundaries about where work begins and where it ends. I loved that Blurring of boundaries. 9 to 5 is the end of passion and beginning of Sanity. I would any day choose to be passionate 22 year old gone crazy with work than a 35 well settled decent woman with Gelled hair (yikes!) The thing about those 24 hours friends that it was difficult to draw their attention to urgent practical things of one’s life( Shifting houses, Buying LPG cylinders, Fixing Computers, repairing the Coolers etc.) for those mundane things of existence you depended on the other supporting world! A world which understood you sometimes after they had run out of being freaked by your crazy hairstyles and piercings and ideas!

It made me the real world that supported the mundane existence becomes the other side of the divide. (Well meaning people like parents, cousins and landlords (please note the power structures here) became the other’s who would never understand one. The ones whose advices and pressures had to be managed. You weren’t a normal human being looking for happiness! You were now a thinking filmmaker!

Then there were friends who were in different fads and phases. E.g. a Rishu Beri who would suddenly feel the compassion of Lord Buddha and take up the task of feeding you breakfast and dinner on herself. There were also seasons when she would be so much in love with Papayas (yes the same orange stupid fruit that’s found across the year) that she would give it to you as a medicine for everything you could possibly suffer from. Heartbreak, Constipation, Viral, Hangover, Cold and Headache. (I apologise Rishu But it didn’t work for no 1 and 6) I am only glad that she didn’t serve it as lunch and dinner in her shoots!

Then there was this other one Safura who suffered at the hand of her own superactive imagination. (We suffered more than she did!) In the course of two years we heard such great stories that I blush when I think I believed them. From having a tumour in her head to going to France without a Visa she has seen and done it all! She used to be a Kashmiri with a bungalow near the Chenab with an export business in walnuts and saffron till I met her real family from in Allahbad. I must have been a surd back then to believe all of it. But incidentally she is my best friend now. We haven’t let reality of who we are, where we come from , come in the way of where we are going!

Then there was that Illogical concept that was passed on by our teachers that stories and how you tell them mattered more than the technology you used or the money that you spend on them (or on yourself) this illusion broke on the first job-interview that I gave.

The world (of employers) dint want stories. They had plenty of their own festering for want of the chance to bring them out. They wanted cheap, hi grade, good-looking, polished labour. That ennobling difference that John Ruskin talked about ‘The ennobling difference between one man and another is that one feels more than the other’ was to be thrown out of the window. It was obnoxious to have any bearings other than cut throat sharpness in discharge of your duties. All creativity and passion worked against you. Passionate people are difficult employees. Period.

So we are a bunch of difficult employees for the most of the well doing media world. There are some sad looking places and corners left. Where that ‘make a difference’ shit is still practised. I worry that I am doomed in that soggy corner. Thanks to the film school I went to.

PS-“Whoever tells the best story wins.”-Amistad (1977) - John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins)