Oz in Bollywood!!!
18th Feb dawned pretty nice and normal. Sun rising in the east, sweepers carefully re-arranging the mess on the roads, my kaamwaali bai late for work again so n so forth. So basically it wasn’t a day that began with a sense of foreboding like in Shakespeare’s works. But then there was no reason to as it ended perfectly well too. Just maybe not that normal.
Now you are wondering what’s the deal with this Feb 18th and its normal-abnormalities and how does it concern us. See, I will give you hints. Feb 18th is 4 days after Valentine’s Day. 23 days after Republic Day. 49 days after New Year’s. 78 days after my birthday. All landmark events, got it yet?
No? Ok I’ll tell you. Feb 18th this year was 3 days after THE Oz arrived in India and scheduled to meet with us. Follow up this info with a series of exclamation marks and savor the difference of Feb 18th.
The party (yeah, it was one, for all Oz’s hoity-toity-‘meeting’-ness) started at around 9/9.30 pm and I, in all celebrity glory landed fashionably late around 10-ish. We had decided to raise hell at Anurag’s office. Now the back story to that was that pleased by our million good wishes for hit films and all that here Anurag decided to be generous again offering us his place this time. (Which reminds me I have to add in some trillion good wishes at the end of this post. These film-maker types are greedy I tell you!)
So I entered the sooni sunsaan very poetic looking galli with hardly a lamp-post light that leads upto his office envisioning a sit-down, anecdote sharing, beer n everything else guzzling meet up with the boss of all times. (I just learned yesterday he hates being called boss, *silly giggles*). I had heard he has a shining taklu and shining taklu-ed men are quite interesting (Phoenixnu, don’t get ideas) if they are not wearing thick gold chains. Now in all my interaction with our boss-man, he didn’t seem to have a fascination for gold chains so I was pretty keen on seeing what the formidable man was all about.
Wait…!
The party was in HIS honour. WE had gone ALL the way to meet HIM. So HE should be writing this and not ME!!!! NOT FAIR!!!
But then as usual hum logon ki Oz ke saamne zyaada chalti nahi so I hereby meekly put my tail in between my legs and continue writing.
So where was I? Oh, in that sooni sunsaan galli. So I looked for the correct door and didn’t have to look too hard as I heard booming sounds of laughter, joy and happiness. No it wasn’t a Christmas party going on and actually it was more raucous than happy although everyone got very happy in an hour’s time as fiery fluids were doing their work pretty well. The noise pulled me in and I meekly put my head in and saw a whole courtyard full of people chatting, drinking, laughing, smiling, clicking pictures and very soon welcoming me. My dear duniya-ko-jala-doonga friend Karthik Krishnan gave me a bear hug and so did our stud trumpeter Vasan (Arre that’s not his profession, he played one in Dev D. That’s the reason the film was such a hit, then what!) and then Thani all smiles (people say he has got a new hair-cut and well, I say, so he must’ve! Sorry Thani for not noticing. For his female fan-following-rest assured the alluring locks still remain.) and then so on. I met Indraneel, Sudhir Nair, Srinivas, George (Medium, come all the way from Ahmedabad just for this!), Shayon (Playback), Manjeet, Shivajee, (who STILL insists on calling me Fatema-‘ji’, taking revenge for his Shiva-‘jee’!) Kenny, (Phoenixnu was acting pricier than me and wasn’t there yet) and all of us basically behaved like we were mele mein bichhde hue bhai-bandhu meeting after some twenty years or so. Damn good fun it already was, I tell you!
And then it happened.
Slowly the sea of human faces parted. There was a shining spotlight lighting up a space just made. Violins, trumpets and heady music played in the background as KK announced –
BA-ADAB BA-MULAHIZA HOSHIYAR SHAHENSHAHON-KE-SHAHENSHAH PFC KE SAR KE TAJ DESITRAIN KE NOORE CHASHM TAAJDAAR-E-BLOGGING KE DUNIYA KE SEHZADE OZ padhaaaaaaar rahe haaaaaainnnnn…
Oz walked towards me and like an adna kaneez I did tasleem to him and he gave me a half-smile, said ‘taqhliya’ and walked off to the next person in line waiting to pay him his respects.
But actually none of the above happened. KK (rudely) pulled me away from someone I was talking to, to introduce me to Boss-man and warm smiles and warm hugs and warm greetings and other such nice things happened. I was mighty suspicious, I tell you! Was this that same authoritative, demanding, dictatorial, severe, over-bearing fellow forever threatening us to do this or that else he might do this or that to us??? The fellow in front of me was quite charming, nice smile, gentlemanly and all and looking ready to drop dead he was so severely jet-lagged! Mighty nice of him to have held out the way he did till the end of the party which people tell me was not until 4.30 or so!
Soon enough, almost as soon as we had exchanged pleasantaries this time someone rudely pulled Oz away to be introduced to someone else. I looked around to catch hold of someone to talk to and that’s when the scale of this party hit me. In one corner I saw Sriram Raghavan talking to Surya (p.s. this time again his hairstyle changed and again there were jokes about it, only between him and me though.) and Sanjay Routaray, Kundan Shah talking to a group hanging onto every word of his, (obviously, who wouldn’t! Indraneel, please describe the moment he entered.), Anurag in deep conversation with Deepti Naval (looking as beautiful as ever), Navdeep keeping another group entranced, Suparn Verma, Hansal Mehta, Jaideep Varma in other such similar groups and I was like WHOA! What a collection of people!!! Sridhar Raghavan dropped in later at some point and so did Sudhir Mishra!!! Kudos Pfc Bbay for organizing this! (I’d so love to take the credit, being a default member of Pfc Bbay but then I just added the glamour quotient to the pictures without doing anything else constructive.)
While I was recuperating from the reality of what my eyes had just told me I met Smriti, whom I had been looking forward to meeting and also a young couple with a background in finance Jaideep and Oinderalla and basically hit it off very well with them! I was little bedazzled with all that talent in the room and hadn’t even found my bearings to go say hi to some I had met earlier and introduce myself to others who’d care when I wanted water. I was about to go inside when I saw that my discoveries weren’t over yet! The corridor leading to wherever the water would be was lined with about 6-8 men in animated conversation, bright lights and all that! Most of the stars of the evening were there and I noticed some more, Imtiaz Ali, Nishikant Kamat… (Oh, Oh Oz but you were the brightest star of them all! Promise! ) with whom I got introduced and behaved the perfect star-struck dundle-head. Not that they let it on, courteous and unassuming as they were.
By then the party was in pretty much full swing and so was I and all of us basically were having quite a ball. Kalki walked in sometime then and was promptly drowned in Hi’s and well-deserved congratulations.
Just then I noticed apna Karthik passionately discussing something with Sriram Raghavan and he had his full attention. If I didn’t have somewhat the minimal manners I do I would’ve so loved to barge in on the conversation. Shamelessly I asked Sudhir to eavesdrop and he said they were talking about the structure/motivation of Stoneman Murders and Karthik, dear, please write in your full account of all that Sriram Sir told you.
Meanwhile another lucky bastard had the company of Kundan Shah. That was Vasan. I couldn’t take it anymore and bidding adieu to manners joined them. Vasan, please please please write everything he spoke to you about. I know you did get quite emotional by the end of it 
Anyone would!
In between somewhere there were lots of chats with Oz about pfc, cinema and life in general. Not as many as I would’ve loved to but then the party was pretty crazy! Our master Thani and Anurag had this desperate urge to go and invite RGV (who lives down the lane) over to the party but then sadly the plan didn’t fructify. (Hope that’s the subject of my next meet-up post!) But if not RGV then we had Richa Chaddha, ‘Dolly’ of ‘Oye Lucky Oye’ courtesy Thani, joining us.
There was a close door meeting between the ‘important people of Pfc’ and well since it was close doors all we can do is sigh and sulk and wish we were there to know what was discussed but since we weren’t we can just wonder. I’m doing all of that right now.
For me it all ended in a daze! And pretty soon. It was way way past midnight and even though Anurag hadn’t called ‘pack up’ yet, some of us had to. We quickly gobbled up the food that was also courtesy Anurag (looking for some additional good wishes I bet!) and left the luckier ones to continue partying for some more time! What really transpired after that I’ve had no means of knowing and it’s a great idea to pester everyone who came to write down their thoughts here the way Oz has been pestering me for this one. (I even threatened to complain to you t! but he continued to bully me!)
Thanks to all the special Pfc people for organizing this, turning up and making it such fun! All the exclusive authors as well! Thanks so much for joining us and making it all the more interesting! Please keep doing so if you want the gazillion wishes that we are just going to give Anurag that make his movies such a rage. Thanks Anurag for your generosity and please keep it coming.
Pfc so rocks!
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
A much awaited write-up! Please complement it with some pics!
Wahtte fun! damn, i shud have been there… profesonal atyachar i tell u! pics kahan hai? kahan hai pics?
Who is OZ?
@P
“Who is OZ?”
Hum sabka baap!!
Hehehe OM, was going to say just that.
@P – post padhke bhi samajh nahi aaya?
Ozsome!
“Hum sabka baap!!”
magar mai to sala lawaris hoon! Lagata Shanti constructions firse banegi …. ya fir naya blog site say “loveforcinema” … hai koi mai ka lal…
Hey! finally good to see a write- up on “The 18th of Feb”
God wish I was there too sigh!!!
has pfc become a closed cult or are there more ppl wondering who this ‘Oz’ is? I am an unknown Eklavya type shishya of AK sir(as in, not part of his immediate circle) and I am sure there are many like me who love reading about him and the ppl associated with him….kindly explain this ‘Oz’ business. Just a wild guess…is it a new nickname for our revered acharyaji?
People asking who Oz is makes me giggle!
.
Thanks for the fun write-up. I’m sure you added a large part of the glamor quotient to the party and it would have been much less without you.
@OM
Om ka baap Oz. WOW!!! That was informative.
guys..if someone out there did not yet get it..he is a greek god this “Oz” who sometimes deigns to come down to ‘dharti’ and chant “Krishna Krishna” a la the Prabhuji of yore!
In keeping with times, he is the IT enabled, network cannibal, avid blogger of the cosmos, wordsmith in the galaxy of cinema and most else that this blogsite and this passionate underworld stands for!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DafkaZLfKc
This is the ad that comes to my mind on P’s comment. :-)
Can you brief on the names you have mentioned?
I know Vasan Bala( one of the ADs of DevD)
Oz is a PFC admin but would love to know more.
Like me, many others must be curious to know about these fellows.
thanks
Well, Kuldip, all you got to do is hang out some more at pfc and you’ll get to know all of them!