Scene of the Week : Rocket Singh – Salesman of the Year

For a while after Rocket Singh – Salesman of the Year perished at the box office soon after its release in December 2009, Jaideep Sahni wasn’t motivated to write another script. The film’s poor showing was a blow to everyone closely associated with it, Sahni admitted, but none of them were “big talkers” and so they dealt with the failure in their own way. The core team consisted of producer Aditya Chopra, director Shimit Amin, Sahni and actor Ranbir Kapoor. In the meantime, Chopra has backed a slew of films, Kapoor has established himself as a bankable actor with reasonable box office clout, and Amin has edited Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Sahni will finally have a release, Shuddh Desi Romance, after a gap of nearly four years, the longest he’s taken to come out with a film since he turned writer with Ram Gopal Varma’s Jungle in 2000.

Sahni is extremely soft-spoken and tough to engage into conversation at first. He seemed embarrassed while acknowledging the fact that he’s penned some solid Hindi films in a short career, among them Dibakar Banerjee’s Khosla Ka Ghosla, Amin’s Chak De! India and Varma’s Company. Sahni is extremely guarded, and seems to find a way to communicate best through his scripts.

As the interview went along, however, Sahni opened up, but Rocket Singh remained a touchy topic. “It’s like you throw a party and no one turns up,” he said, “and so you give the food away to your friends and then some other friend calls you up on Tuesday and says, ‘Man I really liked that pasta I ate at that other guy’s house’. So you feel like saying, ‘Arre, why didn’t you come to the party only yaar?’”

In the four years or so since the film released, quite a few people have consumed the pasta that is Rocket Singh on DVD, cable television and the Internet, even though no one quite turned up at the party. “It feels good to meet people who say they’ve watched the film,” he said, wistfully. Not “liked”, but “watched”.

Sahni puts a lot of the blame for the film’s failure on Bollywood’s “corrupt” marketing system. “We use songs to promote our films.

So, you have to insert songs where they are not needed because they are marketing ploys, like jingles. Ideally, our trailers should be telling us the film’s story.”

For Chak De!, Sahni said, he wrote a rap song for a promotional video, featuring Kabir Khan, the character played by Shah Rukh Khan, introducing the hockey players in his team. “The multiplexes threw it back at us and said people are hooting. People [were] saying things like ‘Yeh kya heroine hai? Kaun dekhne aayega?’ But the same audience couldn’t get enough of those girls for two years after that. So when you have that kind of a promo, our system just spits it out.” After a rather long pause, he continues, “If I don’t have songs I can’t run song promos. I can’t give anything to the music channels. FM channels can’t talk about my film for three months before release. Social media has helped the promotion of films now, but the Internet wasn’t big then.”

Chak De! was a slow opener – Sahni recalls going to a theatre with only eight people in attendance on the first day – but its audience grew with word-of-mouth, and it ended as one of the year’s big grossers. The same didn’t happen with Rocket Singh. “The film should have been crisper,” he admitted, “but we [Amin and Sahni] wouldn’t want to change anything about it, fundamentally.”

The film’s ending was unconventional, with the protagonist – a salesperson – being forced to sell off his company to his wily boss, even though the latter accepts defeat in the end. It was a tame finish, and while that may have appealed to a section of the audience, it’s also one that many found unsatisfactory. Sahni dramatically points to the ceiling, referring to the cafeteria on the third floor of a building in Yash Raj Studios, where this interview was conducted, and recalled the meeting he had with Chopra and Amin there. “We talked about whether we should go with a more conventional end, but none of us felt right about it. I had written Khosla Ka Ghosla and Bunty Aur Babli, both films where the protagonists con their way out successfully, but I didn’t want to do it again. Chopra knew that too, and as a producer he took the decision to not spoil the film.” While writing Khosla Ka Ghosla, though, Sahni knew he wanted to end the film in a more “audience-friendly” way. Banerjee had a different, slightly downbeat end in mind, where Khosla – fighting against a nefarious businessman to win back his plot of land– lost his home too, and has to move to a tent opposite the family home. Sahni was tempted by Banerjee’s vision, but convinced him to go with a more conventional end because “I wanted the film to be a hit.” Sahni had a point to prove, he said. Till then, he was introduced by directors at parties as “my writer”, like they owned him. Then there were others, who lied about having written their films when they hadn’t. When he collaborated with Banerjee, an old friend from Delhi, it was meant to be a last hurrah, before Sahni returned to the capital and contemplated a new profession.

While Khosla Ka Ghosla awaited release, Sahni met Chopra. He remembers his first meeting with the producer, one he was dragged to by Shaad Ali, a filmmaker looking for a subject for his second outing after Saathiya. Sahni had watched Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge on cable and was sceptical. “‘Yeh karva chauth mujhse nahi hoga,’ I told Shaad, but he said, ‘just come.’” At the meeting, Sahni admitted to Chopra he had watched Mohabbatein only the night before and didn’t see himself making similar films. “He told me, ‘Jaideep, I know my stuff. I want you for your stuff.’”

Chopra discussed an idea he had for a screenplay, about how aspirations can lead youngsters to perform acts they later regret, a story he wanted to set in Dharavi. Sahni scrapped the Dharavi setting and came back with half a script about a boy and girl living in small towns and looking to get rich quick. The idea was green-lit, and Ali directed Bunty Aur Babli, a film Sahni says is his most conventional, with large set-piece songs, including the chartbuster, “Kajra re”.

In the last eight years, Sahni has only written films for Yash Raj Films, because, “the place changed my opinion about the film industry”. At Yash Raj, he said, he feels he’s part of a mechanism, the interest of which lies purely in making films, even if they may go wrong sometimes. “Adi is a filmmaker first. When I took the script of Chak De! to him, he said we needed a director who could bring a certain kind of class and finesse to the written material. ‘Let’s get the man who made Ab Tak Chhappan,’. I am grateful to Shimit for having agreed to direct the film. I wrote it, but I could never make it. I needed him.”

Sahni has written five films for Yash Raj, among them Aaja Nachle, a film that taught him “what not to do again”, and said he’ll continue to write for the company even though there’s no contract binding him anymore. After Shuddh Desi Romance, there are two scripts Sahni will finish one after the other, both for Amin. It’s comforting to know the duo will be collaborating on another film. Hopefully, the party will be well-attended this time.

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