The Accidental Prime Minister made me a writing star

Not only did I co-write the upcoming Bollywood film The Accidental Prime Minister with lead writer Mayank Tewari (there are two other credited writers: the director and a UK chap who was included for contractual reasons as part of the film was shot in Britain), but I also have a bit part in it — though I have two short lines, you may miss me if you either blink or are mesmerised by Akshaye Khanna, who plays Sanjaya Baru, the author of the book from which the film was adapted. The book and the film are about the 10 years of Dr Manmohan Singh as India’s 13th Prime Minister, with focus on the first five years when Baru was his media advisor; the narrative extends over the second term during which Baru maintains occasional contact with Dr Singh and also gives his own interpretation of events. The film’s trailer released recently. As it stars vocal Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supporter Anupam Kher as Dr Singh, and with the BJP sharing the trailer on its official social media handles, the film immediately landed in a partisan dispute; happily, this meant a buzz around the film prior to its release.

My involvement in it was accidental: Mayank, a former journalism colleague, telephoned me in December 2017. He and the director wanted that I come on board for the screenplay, given my experience as a political journalist. On December 20, I submitted to the publishers the book I had finished, The Spy Chronicles:

RAW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace, co-written with former Indian spychief A.S. Dulat and former Pakistani spychief Asad Durrani, and after attending an engagement celebration at my in-laws, I dashed to Mumbai on December 26 for the project.

This entailed re-reading Baru’s book. With an extensive reading backlog, I have rarely gotten a chance in the past many years to re-read books. If the book is good enough, however, there is a lot to get out of it a second time. And though Dr Singh’s prime minister’s office had, a week after the book’s publication in April 2014, declared it to be non-factual and even fictional — they unjustly said Baru had misused his time in office for commercial gain. I found the book to be a wellwritten, cogent and coherent. (In fact, while we worked on the screenplay, I called up Baru for some detail and he told me that the book had initially found no takers for publicity on TV news channels, and it looked as if the book would flop. Then came the PMO statement, after which Arnab Goswami immediately called Baru for a one-on-one interview on his wildly popular TV news channel. The rest, as they say, is history: it became one of the biggest recent bestsellers, printing in several editions.)

What I liked about the book is that I found a rich emotional sub-text. The film’s director had made an attempt at a screenplay but it was essentially a list of historical events during Dr Singh’s tenure. Mayank and I discussed the book and immediately agreed that a father-son relationship between Dr Singh and Baru comes out in the book, which should be made the story’s emotional core. That has served the screenplay well. The discerning viewer will note that this emotional sub-text is what gives the film its true strength.

Working on the screenplay was an invaluable and unforgettable experience because I got a lot of practical hands-on experience with how Bollywood works. (It is a truism that no matter how much you might read up or hear about a subject, you never really “know” it till you “do” it.) From the software that writers use, to the way locations are scouted, actors are auditioned, costumes are ideated, and the way that a film set is like a living, breathing organism itself — these were all revelations that I found endlessly fascinating.

Nowadays there is a buzz around the film and over the weekend, a lawyer friend from Mumbai called up and asked how I managed to publish

a book that is presumably not on the reading list of India’s current prime minister, and then days later see the trailer release of a film that is not on the viewing list of India’s previous prime minister. Additionally, a few Congress party supporters who had become chummy after my September 2017 column (in another newspaper) about why I had changed my mind about Rahul, have all gone silent. It is a sign of the times that even journalists are expected to be for either one side or the other. A true journalist, it seems to me, ought to be an anarchist.

Meanwhile, the film’s producer has asked us (other than Kher, one supposes) not to speak about the film until its release. This is why I have not written about the film itself, just about the book and my own experience. No matter what reception the film gets, I cannot deny that I feel giddy like a teenager, having finally written a film. It’s an auspicious personal start to 2019.

It is a sign of the times that even journalists are expected to be for either one side or the other.