Anant Mahadevan has spanned several tracks in the media and in the arts. He shifted focus from English theatre through journalism, through authorship, through films and television as an actor, and finally, as a director with a serious bent of mind where he has tried to create his own genre shifting it from one film to the next.
He is the recipient of Maharashtra State Film Awards. Ananth along with Sanjay Pawar received the National Award (2010) for the Best Screenplay and Dialogues for the Marathi film Mee Sindhutai Sapkal. The film also fetched him the special jury award at the National Film awards 2010.
His films focused on little-known people like Sindhutai Sapkal, Gour Hari Dastaan, Staying Alive and so on which had a strong agenda that ran like an undercurrent through the film such as Bittersweet a strong film on the terrible exploitation of women and young girls working in the sugarcane fields of Maharashtra.
So, his switching over to a short story written in Bengali by Satyajit Ray marks a noted shift in his directorial oeuvre. This has been translated from the original Bengali to Hindi and its original name is Golpo Boliye Tarini Khuro.
This film is unique in the sense that it throws up a very different perspective of plagiarism which defines the essential ingredient of the original story by Ray and has no reference to Mahadevan’s film.
The art of storytelling is almost a lost art our mobile and games-addicted children might not have even heard of. Grandparents narrating stories of the epics or fairy tales or Aesops’ fables was a part of our childhood, not theirs. However, Tarini Bandopadhyay (Paresh Rawal) the just-retired protagonist of this story, who has never held on to a job for longer than a few months, is known for his great talent for telling stories.
His late wife had even gifted him with a pricey pen when he retired, suggesting he begin to write instead of telling stories but Tarini Babu is not interested. Their only son is in the USA and despite his requests, Tarini Babu refuses to migrate to a ‘capitalist’ country and never tires of repeating the word ‘capitalist’ every now and then, forgetting that he is actually employed by a capitalist.
By a strange quirk of fate, he lands the job of a professional storyteller in distant Ahmedabad that will pay him a salary and also provide room and board. His employer is one Mr. Garodia (Adil Hussain) a very successful businessman whose suited-booted sophistication and home library filled with a wonderful collection of books besides antiques gives the lie to his education, as he confesses to Tarini Babu, stopped after the seventh standard.
When the inquisitive Tarini Babu asks him after the school where he is supposed to narrate stories to children, Goradia tells him that it is he who wants to listen to stories to cure his incurable insomnia. This marks the beginning of a friendship far removed from any normal boss-employee relationship.
Tarini Babu begins to narrate his stories at night as Goradia relaxes on his antique chair ready to take his forty winks. Sleep eludes him. But he falls in love with Tarini Babu’s stories and is amazed with Tarini Babu’s travails through the world of imagination and fantasies in his stories.
Tarini Babu, fed up with the staunchly vegetarian Gujarati food, begins to savour fish secretly with the reluctant help of the Gujarati servant and even shares the bones with the household cat. Goradia on his part, shares his sad love story with Tarini Babu and takes him on a sojourn to the ancient caves to show him where he proposed to the woman who subsequently married an IAS officer.
Tarini Babu begins to visit the local library quite often and befriends the young librarian Suzie (Tannishtha Chatterjee) who is quite fascinated by the old man’s fondness for intellectual reading.
One day, Suzie introduces him to a famous writer named Gorky through a Gujarati magazine which carries the picture of the author and who can it be but Goradia himself? There is a bigger shock awaiting the old storyteller. When he hears the stories this “Gorky” has written, he discovers that they are the very stories he narrated over months to Goradia!
What does the word “plagiarism” mean? “Plagiarism” is a term generally used in association with literature of all kinds – fiction, non-fiction, essays, even Ph.D. Thesis. But it also applies to other cultural and creative fields like drama, fine arts and cinema.
But Tarini Babu looks at it differently. He sincerely feels that Goradia has given his name a dignity by penning down what he had heard orally from Tarini Babu. While “Gorky”, a semi-literate, affluent and powerful businessman, has fulfilled his desire for fame and popularity despite his lack of education and intellectual proficiency. Goradia becomes so famous that he is chosen for a literature award for his novel!
Plagiarism refers to the use of another’s ideas, information, language, or writing when done without proper acknowledgement of the original source. Essential to an act of plagiarism is an element of dishonesty in attempting to pass off the plagiarised work as original. But Goradia had written down the stories Tarini Babu had narrated orally, wrote them down in Gujarati and passed them off as his own. Was this plagirarisation? The answer is given in a strange twist.
In the meantime, Tarini Babu goes to Kolkata for the Durga Pooja and muses over how his life changed after his friendship with Goradia though they are diametrically different in every way. But there is a strange twist in the tale which makes both men begin to write down their own stories in the privacy of their own spaces, Goradia in Ahmedabad and Tarini in Calcutta.
For Tarini, it is the realization that if he can narrate stories so well, never mind their origins, he might as well begin to write his own stories. He opens the box holding the fountain pen his late wife gifted him with and begins to write.
For Goradia, his writing is to discover whether he can write down the story of his own life the way he heard Tarini narrating his stories on anything and everything from an ordinary chair in the drawing room to anything else.
The technical details such as strains of Tagore songs and melodies of some emotionally appropriate Tagore numbers invest the soundtrack with a “Bengali” mood perhaps underlining the entirely “Bengali” identity of Tarini Bandopadhyay.
Ahmedabad also marks out the differences between the two cities, Calcutta (then) as a city filled with love for pleasures and joys derived from food, Tagore, the processions right through this festival-filled city and its river banks Tarini Babu often repairs to. Ahmedabad on the other hand, comes across more as a city of businesses, shops, and gated bungalows and servants who have their own air of arrogance and loyalty and the ancient stone-sculpted caves.
The cinematography is beautiful, catching the fading rays of the sun as Tarini Babu sits on the banks of a river in Calcutta, or the slight darkness in the caves the two friends repair to when he is in Ahmedabad. The animation used when Tarini Babu is narrating his stories to Goradia is a lovely touch though the stories remain quite sketchy and unfinished.
Adil Hussain is his usual, spontaneous self in his role as the semi-educated but successful businessman. Tannishtha has a new look and is very good as the librarian who befriends Tarini Babu.
The actor playing the servant is also very good. The entire problem with the film lay in the performance of Paresh Rawal in the title role of the “storyteller.” He and the director should have really worked sincerely on the Bengali accent and the Bengali-peppered Hindi he speaks through the film.
The Bengali has a strong Gujarati flavor and spoils the wonderful dialogues in the script, bringing the entire film down several steps down the ladder of this otherwise good film. Would Ray have approved of this imperfection? I doubt it.
Note: Tarini Babu’s stories could never put the insomnia-ridden Garodia to sleep.