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On reading the premise and then getting a glimpse of the trailer “Via Darjeeling” I went around looking for the director. Here was one of those rare stories that had piqued my interest no end. And then after a few days, Phoenixnu managed to get in touch with the director Arindam Nandy who’s sent in this post to PFC. Over to Arindam…

Ramblings before the release of ‘via darjeeling’

Arindam Nandy

In Bengal, stories are what I grew up with. ‘Grandmother’s Bagful of Tales’ or ‘Thakumar Jhuli’, a compilation of stories about princes, princesses and demons was the popular bedside book when grandmothers were away. At eight or nine years, the recurrent dreams every night were made of these. Ghost stories took centrestage after a while. Thanks to the Bengal famine of 1770 and 1943, stories of villages filled with ghosts were abundant. And there were stories that never ended…the Arabian Nights, The Ramayana and The Mahabharata.

The Ramayana and The Mahabharata stories lured me since long. The chapters never ended. The tributary of endless tales never seemed to dry up. Often my father used to tell me stories from these epics and every time they seemed fresh. There would be a new one almost always. One that I could never recollect having read.

As I grew up, interest in the arts since childhood taught me to draw, paint and write. At the University, I studied Comparative Literature and rediscovered something in a completely new way…the epics. It is here that my eyes were opened to the ‘oral tradition’ of telling tales. And that The Ramayana and The Mahabharata along with The Iliad and The Odyssey were formed by endless tales that were sung by wandering minstrels. They traveled from place to place. Country to country. And that is how the stories changed form and colour.

They were all ‘mentally’ recorded and played back at gatherings. Like Homer, the blind singer or Vyasa, the storyteller who needed divine aid in the form of Ganesha to pen down his tales. Most importantly, I learnt a new word that, I believe, is the essence of storytelling….myths.

A young professor once jokingly described ‘myths’ as a variant of the Hindi and Bengali word ‘mithya’. Myths are things that never happened. They are created by ‘word-of-mouth’. The myths of Krishna, the dark-complexioned butter-thief who grows up into a flirtatious local hero who kills snakes and enemies with equal gusto.

A charioteer to Arjuna and reincarnated as Rama in The Ramayana. The tales of Zeus, Aphrodite, Athena helping the Greeks or the Trojans…vindictive and partial always as the battle ensued. Confusing at times, tales blended into one another leaving little scope for boredom or disbelief. Fact or fiction, they were interesting and captivating at all times.

The ‘aul’, ‘baul’ and ‘sufi’ singers; the proponents of the ‘Bhakti’ movement in India…Mirabai, Chaitanya, Kabir or Surdas; the vachanas of Akka Mahadevi or Allama Prabhu, the ‘pata’ painters of Bengal who tell tales through earthy paintings that unfold like a film as they sing the tale; the folk-tales and songs of Gujarat, UP, Bihar and Orissa…everything kept returning to me when I read the first few pages of a rough script in Bengali by my friend and classmate Ranjan Das in 1999 or 2000. I visited the US and stayed there for quite a while in 2003 and the story of Ranjan’s script kept me thinking all the while I was there. Upon my return, I was determined to revisit the script.

Ranjan, by then, had lost interest in it and I began living with it. I began re-writing parts of it to give it a shape and colour of a film screenplay. I was and am, of course, still learning to hone screenwriting skills. But I relentlessly continued to work on it. Eventually, there was something ready to be read out to people…a tale full of tales in the garb of a psychological thriller.

I chose diverse groups of friends and film people…journalists, police people, singers, filmmakers, and producers…and collected their advice. Not all were to be used and applied though. Eventually, Soumo and Joy Ganguly, two young men and brothers, were kind of convinced that this one could possibly make an interesting thriller. And the process began…of writing and re-writing…all on holidays and after my Calcutta advertising agency office hours late in the night. It seemed like a malaise that was haunting me every moment.

When I was a kid, I recall my father taking me out of our one room house in Calcutta to a cinema in the evening show to watch a film called ‘Baghini’ (Tigress). All because my elder sister could study for her exam undisturbed. Prachi Cinema Hall it was if I remember correctly. And I cried because I couldn’t find a single tigress in the film.

Apart from the infrequent Hollywood films I watched when young at special shows in school and in cinemas, I loved watching the Bengali films. Uttam Kumar ruled the Cinema going experience. The Suchitra Sen–Uttam Kumar duo and later Uttam Kumar–Supriya Debi combo were hits. In the city and beyond. The ‘guru’ in Bengal was at par and beyond with Rajesh Khanna and Amitaabh Bachchan, the ‘gurus’ in Bombay for Hindi films.

Stellar performances and stories fired me with desire to catch them all ‘first-day-first-show’. Bengali films made in Tollygunge studios were no less popular and called for full houses regularly. The stories, drama, emotions, songs…all put together a compleat treat!

Parallely, there were family entertainers by Satyajit Ray, political films of Mrinal Sen and the magic of Ritwik Ghatak. Remember watching some great comedies by Tapan Sinha as well. Apart from Bengali and Hindi films, European cinema, especially the French and the Italian films of the post-war era and the New Wave were hot favourites in high-school and college. As a member of the film society, one indulged in the cinema of the world quite easily.

Gradually, the heroes changed…from the actors to the ones behind the camera…Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Copolla, Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Wong Kar-Wai… The literature of the world was slowly joining hands with cinema. The hunger never ended…from collecting books, video-cassettes and DVDs, an addiction that has been instrumental in shaping up my dreams, to convincing myself that I really wish to make this film my way, or else…

I always believed that making a film is like playing cricket or football. It is done with the help of a team of people who are equally important. I am lucky to have some friends with whose ‘little help’ I got by…Ranjan Das, the original writer; Abhik Mukhopadhyay, my director of cinematography, a neighbour and friend since long; Arghyakamal Mitra, the editor; Prabuddha Banerjee, my music-director and college mate who chucked up his cushy job of an engineer with Balmer-Lawrie to take on music as a fulltime career; Indranil Ghosh, my art-director; Atul Sabharwal and Siladitya Sanyal, the writers with me; Sanjeeb De, my chief assistant-dirtector; Bishwadeep Chaterjee, my sound designer par excellence; Joy and Soumo Ganguly, people who believed in me to put in their precious time and money.

And finally, thank you all the people who have wasted their time to read this article. I promise to try and compensate this when you watch the film.

The trailer of Via Darjeeling

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