Aspiring to be Ambani
Whether one hopes to join the Civil Services or become a billionaire, the real prize is the wealth of happiness
of my rst Broadway shows — Miss Saigon. I was in awe of that central performance. I love Meryl Streep in so many lms. I love lms of Wong Kar-wai and Almodovar.
Q: You and Sanjay Leela Bhansali go back a long way. What is your perspective on his career trajectory?
A: Sanjay is a lmmaker who has such a splendid career arc. We did
Khamoshi, a beautiful, simple and yet profound lm. Two years ago,
CODA, a European lm that narrated the same story — the one he wrote 28 years ago — won at the Oscars. His characters are so complex and layered. They undergo con²icting emotions, neither black nor white.
Q: Heeramandi, like Bombay
Se.., engages with the idea of nationhood. What is your take on it, especially since we are now witnessing a surge of nationalist and propaganda lms in Bollywood?
A: I am not in a position to comment on this topic. I would stay away from controversy as much as possible. Nationalism is important. Propaganda, I think, is the wrong term. You should be proud of who you are. Your heritage is where you stand. Everybody is entitled to their own opinions about it.
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Q: Your career has been through multiple breaks and upheavals. Where do you aspire to go from here?
A: The battle with cancer made me think of my mortality. After that, I wanted to slow down. As an actor, I have had a rich journey, and my heart is full. If a lmmaker I truly trust oers me something exciting, I will take it up in a heartbeat. Otherwise, I am happier doing nothing. I will travel, read, do organic farming, hike, and live away from the limelight.
Q: The Internet has completely transformed celebrity culture. How do you deal with social media, promotional interviews and airport looks?
A: I do my best to adapt to the new generation. [Laughs] I could probably write a comedy about an actor from the 90s trying to t in with the latest trends, like the airport look, only to realise that she is a mist. She will try hard, thinking, ‘Oh, this must be how it works’, and fail miserably. After a lot of stumbling, she concludes: ‘Okay, this is me, this is how I am going to be!’ because authenticity is what really matters.
Q: You have dabbled in lm production earlier. Do you wish to make another lm?
A: Producing the lm [ Paisa Vasool, 2004] was a traumatic experience. I was too naive; I did not realise what it takes. Somehow, we managed to pull through. I never produced a lm again because I lost money on Paisa Vasool. I also realised that lm production entails certain areas I do not want to be involved in. But times have changed. The industry is much more professional now. One does not have to go door-to-door to nd distributors or deal with all the hurdles that I went through. If I get into production again, it will be well-planned and thought out.
The interviewer is a lm critic and independent researcher.
India’s steel frame is feeling rattled. Sanjeev Sanyal, economist, author and member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, recently said, while every country needs a bureaucracy, “lakhs of people are spending their best years trying to crack an exam where a tiny number of a few thousand people actually are going to get it”.
And when they do get it, large parts of the job are “dull and boring” because it is all “about passing les up and down”.
That has raised some civil servant hackles.
Yet, Sanyal is hardly the
rst to say this. In Upamanyu Chatterjee’s famous novel English, August, the young protagonist, Agastya, thinks he’s leaving his listless upper-class life for a more “meaningful context” when he joins the Civil Services. He is told by a mentor: “In my time I’d wanted to give this Civil Services exam too, I should have. Now I spend my time writing papers for obscure journals on L.H. Myers and Wyndham Lewis, and teaching Conrad to a bunch of half-wits.” But
Agastya quickly nds his Civil Services life in the “real India” is a morass of mindless masturbation and marijuana.
Sanyal has been accused of elitism — dismissing the dreams of those from Tier II and Tier III towns where many civil servants come from these days. Sanyal has said he was not disparaging the service, just wondering whether it was worth spending the best years of one’s life doggedly trying to crack the examination, over and over again.
He called it a “poverty of aspiration” and wondered: “At the end of it, if you must dream, surely you should dream to be Elon Musk, or Mukesh Ambani, why did you dream to be Joint Secretary?”
Only Sir Humphrey Appleby, the bureaucrat of Yes Minister television serial fame, might have an answer to that. But what is interesting is how neatly the old holy trinity of the IAS ocer, doctor and engineer has been replaced by new icons such as Elon Musk and Mukesh Ambani.
There is nothing wrong about aspiring to be billionaires. Millions of people surely do. But Musk and
Ambani are essentially cut from the same opulent cloth. We have just replaced one straitjacket of ambition with another. English, August’s Agastya is told: “For most Indians of your age, just getting any job is enough. You were more fortunate for you had options before you.”
Trapped in a box
It turns out there weren’t that many options after all when it came to dreaming. If the old India had dreamed of a “stable job”, this new one is being told to dream of being billionaires. One box has replaced the other but we still do not dare to dream outside the box.
Responding to Sanyal’s remarks, his namesake, Sanjeev Chopra, a former IAS ocer and Festival Director of Valley of Words, wrote that had he not joined the Civil Services, he might have chosen a career in media or academia. “Would that make my contribution to the nation any less?” he wondered. “Others may want to pursue dierent professions — law, architecture, software, and so on. Why this
Civil Services aspirants outside an examination centre in New Delhi.
obsession with ‘wealth creation’ and maximising shareholder value?”
I have a close friend who is a very successful neurosurgeon. He was a good student but not the best student in class when we were in school, but over time he has excelled in his eld. His name pops up in the Best Surgeon lists routinely. He could rest on his laurels now. Yet, he is working even harder than before to set up his own start-up that could revolutionise brain cancer diagnostics by making the procedure minimally invasive. I do not think it’s because he wants to be the next Ambani in his eld. He does it because he has a dream to make a dierence and one life to do it in. When I hear him talk excitedly about tumours and technology, most of it goes over my head. What I understand clearly though is the excitement in his voice. He sounds frazzled but happy.
The battle with cancer made me think of my mortality. After that, I wanted to slow down. As an actor, I have had a rich journey, and my heart is full. If a lmmaker I truly trust oers me something exciting, I will take it up in a heartbeat. Otherwise, I am happier doing nothing
The true jackpot
We want to be rich or famous or successful or rst in class. But in the end, what we really keep hoping is that all of those will make us happy. The real jackpot for any of us is to be contented with what we are doing, whether that’s building a business empire, setting up a shelter for stray animals, drawing cartoons or being a librarian somewhere. In all this discussion about the poverty of aspiration, we routinely forget to talk about the wealth of happiness.
That’s why when we bless someone, we often say, ‘Live long. Be happy’.
And you don’t have to be a Musk or Ambani or doctorengineer-civil servant for that. is the author of Don’t Let Him Know, and likes to let everyone know about his opinions whether asked or not.
Sandip Roy