Prateeksha, Mumbai November 29, 2009 Sun 9: 27 PM
5 Days to PAA releasing December 4th 2009
It takes a while to digest an evening of such immense emotion and joy. It takes a while too to remove yourself from one clime to another. Another that reflects your sense of creativity and aesthetics, your labor and love, your passion.
For all this to transpire in an evening requires capabilities that sometimes remain humanly impossible. But we as artists or ones that have the temerity to call ourselves one, have been relentlessly trained through deliberate compulsions, to abide by events that come our way in such form.
The ‘Bachchan Sandhya’ took me back with each reference to my Father, to the days spent with him and his travels in sometimes harsh circumstances, to the countless poetic soirees in and around the city we lived in – an act that would bring in that extra 500 to a 1000 rupees, so valuable for our kitchen and home. Having worked in office the entire day for my Father to then be driven out for hours into the night to neighboring destinations and then to perform all night his poetry and return in the early hours of the morning to start the next day in office, was an incredible physical exertion. But no matter where we were or in what circumstances, the joy of seeing the multitudes enjoying his recitation gave him the required adrenalin to last the rigors of the night.
Those moments have remained deeply imbedded within me. The travel, the crowds, the elation and appreciation, the renditions and the tired exhausted bodies returning home to the warm and affectionate arms of my Mother, are all a part of me now. I am blessed by their presence in my life. Blessed that I was exposed to them, influenced by them to an extent that they shall never ever leave me. They are my greatest and most loved acquisition. I may lose all that I possess – my name, my stunted fame and my material gains, but my ‘acquisition’ shall never be lost.
The flow of emotion last night at the commemoration for my Father was indescribable. There were among the audience those that had been and heard my Father live. Those that had drenched themselves with the nectar of his words, his feelings and his philosophy. Those that had struggled and lived through their own demons and then discovered their destruction through his poems. The atmosphere was strange in many respects. They cried not because of sadness, nor did they laugh because they were amused. They just willingly succumbed to or rather gave themselves in to the moment because of its beauty, because of its connection to, not necessarily a spell they may have individually experienced in his presence sometime, but simply because of its association with an emotion an incident or thought, that had at some point been of eminence in their lives.
My Father in one of the prologues he wrote as an introduction to his works had been so specific. He had said that what would give him the greatest joy from his readers would be the fact of finding ‘themselves’ in his poetry, rather than the other way round. Last night many in the audience found themselves in his work and words – a sign of a great poet !
That over, a quick switch took over our countenance. The first trial for cast and crew, as is the norm, of the film PAA. Two diametrically opposite emotions, two diametrically opposite audience – though there was a slight spill over – but the same render.
A stunned silence can become very ominous at times, as can a delayed applause. A silence that eventually discovers its voice a little later is healthy, and the early morning, did find it later. For me to elaborate on this would be most unnecessary and not prudent at all. A few more days and the facts would be out. We must submit to them for ‘whom the bells shall toll’. So we rest.
There is a strange sense of not wanting. Not wanting anything to move, to speak, to opinionate, to obey, to judge to … just be …
Its a case of uncared for nothingness. A time when you feel that nothing shall go right and so it be best to resign ourselves to the eventuality, come what may. It happens. It is natural. I am certain a good nights rest would bring in fresh meaning. I do look forward to that.
My love and my care and … much more ..
Amitabh Bachchan
