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Fair, fairer, fairest Renu (Kundan shah on Renu Saluja and JBDY)

I caught hold of this book while doing a google on renu saluja. It is easily available and at 50 rupees, quite a steal.
This book is highly recommended. Thanks to Graftii.com and comet media foundation.

Here’s a wikipedia on Renu Saluja and a very informative upperstall article.

Anyways, this post isn’t entirely about the book or Renu Saluja. This is an article written by Kundan Shah on Renu Saluja. They had worked together in the classic Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron.

Here’s a brief overview of the book (courtesy indianwriting.blogsome.com)

Over to Kundan shah who has written an article in the book, which I’m reproducing here for all the JBDY and Kundan shah fans -

”In my three years at FTII, I hardly exchanged a word with Renu Saluja. All I knew is that she was a sister of Radha Saluja, and had joined the editing course probably, my stupid surmise, having been rejected from the Acting course. That was in 1976. The next time I met her was in May 1979. I had disappeared from the scene for a year and a quarter, to eke out a living outside films to pay my debts. I was already married and my second child was on the way.

On my return, the first person I rang up was Saaed Mirza.

He had lots of journalist friends and I had written a few articles on world cinema which I desperately wanted to get published – that was the side income in those days! Saeed was surprised to hear from me and invited me to the screening of his first film Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastan at the Eros Mini Theater.

At the end of the film, while I thought of when I would be making my first film, Saeed offered me a job- would I assist him for his second feature Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hai ? I thought he was joking. A second film so soon! Well the script was approved by FFC (Film Finance Corporation, now NFDC or National Film Development Corporation) and he was to shoot commencing in August. After three years of not having earned a paisa, I was in luck at last, I immediately said yes.

That very night he took me across from Eros to Alliance Franciase where Vinod Chopra and Renu Saluja were seeing a film and they were to meet Saeed afterwards. That was my first proper meeting with Renu. I had no inkling that there had been something going on between Renu and Vinod and was surprised to learn that they were married. Vinod, Renu and Saeed were thick as thieves in those days and very soon, I became the fourth one. Renu was to edit Albert Pinto, so she and Vinod would often drop in at Saeed’s during pre production. Renu and Vinod had rented a place above Majora at Palinaka in Bandra. That became an idle strugglers’ workshop where many visited, including myself.

Every director thinks he is God. So did I. And if you are from FTII, even God is inferior to you. So there were the three Gods – Saeed, Vinod and me. As for Renu… well, she was just an editor. When Saeed took the decision that Renu would be the editor for Albert Pinto, my reaction was “Why Not”. I never took Renu seriously as an editor but then what are friends for? She’ll learn editing during this film. I thought, I’m sure that in my bias against her, the fact of her being a female played as important a role, as the our belief in ourselves as Gods.

As an assistant director, I was entitled to attend the editing. It had two advantages: Rs 10 which was given as conveyance and of course, free lunches and dozens of cups of tea. I don’t know when, but sometime during the editing, I started noticing that the onus of being a God had shifted from the director to the editor. Renu was totally in command. What I observed most, was the method in everything she did. I don’t mean method as in methodical. There were no budgets for assistant editors those days in FFC films. So Renu did everything. She ordered me to follow all her rule, of keeping rushes, cuts etc, in properly labeled cans. We were making cement joints then, and the nightmare was taking care of the frames. But this is more than, just being methodical. What Renu did was to discover a method to become one with the film to get its soul through the mechanical art of editing.

Her loyalty to each film she edited was beyond question. Later in life, she invited me to screenings of various ‘lesser’ films that she had edited. Yet I saw the same amount of pride in her for these films. They were her children! Even Mangesh Desai who was the re-recordist at Rajkamal studio and a nightmare for any editor increasingly became an admirer of Renu with every film she brought to him for mixing. Secretly, Renu also prided herself in the fact that not once had the fanatical re recordist thrown a tantrum at her. No wonder then, by the end of the editing of the Albert pinto, she had become a super human figure to all of us. And also, my natural choice to edit my first film.

If we knew what Jaaney bhi do Yaaron was to become today, we wouldn’t have had the courage to make it. Why ? Well, I could have told you to ask Renu about it as she was involved in the whole chaotic process from beginning to end but I have to keep reminding myself, that she is no more with us. Philosophers say that death is the only reality. Is Renu’s death real? I don’t know.

By the time I was to shoot JBDY, we four i.e Renu, Vinod, Saeed and myself were so close that we could be called the Gang of Four. The fifth to join was Sudhir Mishra. Renu and Vinod visited us almost every evening for one whole month, when the dialogues of the film were being written and enacted by Ranjit Kapoor and Satish Kaushik. Literally they were the film’s first audience.

Renu was by my side right through the shooting of JBDY, through thick and thin, along with the whole unit. There can never be enough words or opinions to describe the chaos during the shooting of JBDY. The best way to understand it is to see Naseeruddin shah’s expressions during an interview in “Remembering Renu” a documentary made by Anil mehta and Sanjiv shah. It is the best piece of spontaneous acting ever done! It shows pure horror, the like of which could get him the role in a Ramgopal Verma’s film.

When the nightmare of shooting was over, Renu and I never realized that the worst one awaited us in the editing of JBDY. The process began innocuously enough… the first scene was not working. The timing was wrong, the shots were too lengthy … the problem we faced again and again, right through the film – the beginning and the end of every shot worked, while the middle of it sagged. And of course, there were no cutaways.

The second day of editing was worse… and so it went for the next two months. After the assembly of every scene we sank, then re-floated after a marathon editing effort.

For the record, two points:
1.Renu never assembled two scenes of the rushes having declared them NG in toto.
2.The first final cut of JBDY was over 3 and a quarter hours long.

How we survived this nightmare was once again thanks to Renu’s methods. The film no longer belonged to me, it was her baby and she was totally in command.

The years 1979 to 1983 were the years when Albert Pinto, Saza – e- Maut, and JBDY were made and they were all edited by Renu. We breathed films, with tea and more tea faffing and more faffing, plans and more plans. Even though the years following didn’t give us regular filmmaking careers; but those years had a flavor, a lifelong remembrance of the things past. The hours, the days, the years spent with Renu and Vinod at Majora are for all of us, treasured memories of all our days of struggle. Vinod was in the greatest awe of Renu and rightly so. If she asked for the moon, Vinod would’ve broken the record of Neil Armstrong.

They success brings with it a crown of thorns, so it did, for we are all separated from each other. But Renu remained a part of each one’s life. In fact her circle of friends and directors expanded. What I noticed most was that each one of her friends had the same level of familiarity as I had. Sometimes it made me jealous. But I soon realized that there was no need for me to feel that way.

She belonged equally to all of us. To her rakhi brothers from FTII, like Manjul Sinha, IssacThomas, and probably to many more. As for me, I was like an elder brother to her.

Whether we met after a day or a month or a year, the level of her warmth never diminished. What was so special about Renu? What made her so fair to all of us? Or shall I say fairer? Well the simple answer is that she gave herself equally and wholly to all of us, so fairest would be the most apt description.

For me and many like me, death when it comes, would not be such a bad thing to embrace since Renu awaits all of us on the other side. “