(Statutory warning: Suicide artists, please stay away from this poem. If you’re hellbent on having it as your epitaph, please remember that you’ll have to pay licensing fees till eternity.)

How much have you laughed recently? What’s the sum total of laughter in the bank of your life? What have been the seminal, laugh-your-lungs-out moments in your existence? There are times when life itself will ask you for a laughter audit.

It happened to me recently as I finished watching Dev Anand’s latest film. I won’t go into the details of my audit here, but would like to talk about the piece of art that occasioned it: Chargesheet.

Chargesheet overwhelms you.

Dev Anand may be 88 but he has the heart of a lightening-bolt teenager. In some scenes he can barely walk, but that doesn’t stop him from taking his story forward by any means possible, plausible or implausible.

For example, this scene in the climax has him climbing up a hill chasing a guy who is on some other hill. Dev’s specs fall off and go way way down. There is no way a guy of such vintage is going to climb down an entire hill to retrieve them. But for Dev Anand, owner of a film studio in real life, this is not an issue. He simply edits himself out of the situation. In one shot the specs are seen falling deep into the abyss, the next shot has Dev Anand reaching out for them. How he got down so quickly, how the specs managed to stay unharmed after such a  mighty fall, these are petty matters for petty minds.

In the same climax, taking the specs motif to yet another zetalevel, we have the 88-year-old Dev dodging grenade explosions and machine gunfire when, out of the blue, a young Caucasian beauty accosts him. She hands him his specs, saying it fell off him some way back. Dev takes the specs and smiles at her, and she is smiling too. She seems to be the kind of girl who can see a he-man inside the most unlikeliest of men. The kind who magically knows that you may be all wrinkles on the outside but deep inside you are god’s greatest gift to womankind. In short, a woman created by the sheer willpower of the male imagination.

It’s a brief, strange scene. We have never seen this girl before in the film, this is her first and last appearance amidst exploding mines and grenades. It’s almost a case of parallel universes meeting. In one universe, Dev Anand is dodging explosions. In another universe, but occupying the same space continuum, a girl is taking a walk in the park. In the exploding universe, Dev loses his glasses. In the peaceful universe, the girl picks up those glasses. Then, the fabric separating their universes melting for a moment, she hands him back his glasses. After which they go back, she to wherever she came from, he to his explosions. You suddenly realise Dev Anand is the Dali of cinema.

But before we go any further let me give the basics first. Chargesheet is a murder mystery. It has been written, produced, directed and acted in by Dev Anand. It is being distributed – I bluff you not -  by Hollywood giant Warner Brothers.  It stars one of Hindi cinema’s greatest thespians, Naseeruddin Shah, in a role his grandchildren would remember him by. It also stars Jackie Shroff, a  superstar from the ’8os now battling the cruel twins of age and destiny.

I love these two fine actors, and the rest of the superb cast, for doing this film. It amounts to the near impossible act of surrendering your actorly ego. It involves standing in front of the camera looking completely silly and not being bothered about it.  It involves mouthing tons and tons of exposition disguised as dialogue and not giving a damn. It involves mastering that most rare of human conditions: not taking yourself too seriously. I can almost hear them say between the lines: To hell with our reputations we are doing this for the love of Devsaab!

Another person who may (or may not) be doing it for the love of Devsaab is Amar Singh. Yes, the Amar Singh, of Amitabh Bachchan fame. In one of the craziest cameos in the history of Hindi cinema, we have the politician talking on two phones simultaneously, his head gear vanishing from one shot to the next, reciting dialogues as if he had just mugged them a moment before. One of the most amazing scenes ever filmed. Do not miss this.

And the beginning too. Dev Anand dispels any doubts being perpetrated by the heavy-handed title right at the start. The credits roll with a cheerful female voice warbling “Charge..sheet! Charge..sheet! Charge..sheet” in the manner of old Doordarshan ads selling soaps and detergents. You know right there you are in safe hands. For Dev Anand takes care of his audience like no one else in world cinema. His basic motto being: thou shalt be crystal clear. So much so that when he introduces a new girl in the movie she enters the scene holding a placard with her name (‘Chham Chham’) scrawled on it making sure that not a single member of the audience forgets the fact for the whole length of the movie, indeed for the whole length of their lives.

This concern for the audience is visible in the dialogues too. The characters don’t just mumble a few words and vanish, they spout elaborate sentences that provide backstory, motivation, aspiration and all kinds of essential information needed to keep the audience up to date. Hats off to this detailing.

How does he do it? What will you and I be doing when we are 88?

When you look at it from that angle, the Dev Anand movies made in the last few years acquire a unique, fragile beauty of their own. They become less and less about filmmaking as a craft and more and more about filmmaking as a life. They are saying to us that there has to be a reason to wake up in the morning, even if that reason doesn’t make sense to some.  And if that reason doesn’t exist for you then, like Dev Anand does after every failed movie, you simply have to invent the next one. It’s as simple, and as complex, as that.

There are millions of ways of being alive on this planet and just one of them is Dev’s way. But I like it the best.

May we all stay forever young.

(pic source)

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(pic by Francois Guillot/AFP/Getty Images)

(pic by jpro747)

As a lamp, a waterfall, a star in space
an illusion, a dewdrop, a bubble
a dream, a cloud, a flash of lightning
view all created things like this.

-Buddha

And will always be.

Writers are the bottlemakers. That is what they are born to do: make new bottles. The newer the better. All the excitement is in the bottle. The shape of it. The colour of it. The ambition of it. How ambitious is your bottle? Will it blow my brains out? Is it worth my eyesight? Think about these as you make your bottle. The wine will be wearing the bottle you make.