When he is not making films, Shekhar Kapur is busy creating platforms for the lesser-privileged and writing documentaries. It is through his latter work that he derives much happiness and joy. The greatest moments in your life are those when you drop your ego, he tells Divya Kaushik
The more he spoke, the more engrossing the discussion was. The ladies listened in rapt attention as if they were under the spell of the charm created by Shekhar Kapur with every word that he spoke. The filmmaker and producer was a part of the FlO’s (FICCI ladies Organisation) session ‘We are the stories we tell ourselves.’ While he spoke less about his films, he was open to chat on deeper concepts of life that we mostly do not think about in our day-to-day lives. Excerpts from the discussion:
What is a storyIJ
I think everything that we do is based on the story that we tell ourselves when we get up in the morning. We keep doing that until we get bored, then we change our story. Imagine yourself with a parachute and the parachute is the fabric of yourself, you are floating through life and sometimes there is a storm, you pull a lever here and there to balance and you keep floating, thinking that your fabric is pretty strong.
Then somebody tells you why don’t you look upIJ You reply, ‘I don’t need to look up, why should I look upIJ’ You look up and you realise there is no parachute and you panic, you scream and say, ‘I am falling.’ But the other person says, ‘There is nothing to fall to.’ You think, ‘I must have fallen from somewhere.’ The other person tells you that there was nowhere to fall from. So if you are not falling to anywhere and you didn’t fall from anywhere, who are youIJ
This is the right question. So what is the storyIJ A story is fundamentally a desperate need to answer that one question, ‘Who am IIJ’ We imagine our finite selves and look up at the sky at night and realise that space has been there forever and you try to comprehend the relationship of your finite imagination to your ability to see what is infinite, so what you doIJ You create a place where some nasty God chucked you down and as you were falling, you created gods that were trying to tear the fabric of your parachute. You create mythic gods and goddesses who were trying to save you and at the end you create mythic gods and goddesses who are trying to hold you as you fall.
All in an attempt to create a story and that is how our mythologies are born. They were born because we tested the way to comprehend the infinite. When we found that we could not comprehend the infinite without telling a story, we told stories and all our mythologies around the world were born like that. So we are nothing but stories, if we are not stories, we are not real. And why we are not real is because we are part of a huge eco system and we are unable to comprehend that. If you look at science today and you ask any scientist when did time start, he would say that time started with the Big Bang. But what existed before the Big BangIJ Nobody knows.
If time was there before the Big Bang that means it was always there and that which did not start can never end, therefore there is no linearity, so how do you create a today and a tomorrow. How do you create your next momentIJ We all are telling stories to define that next moment. When people tell me that they are depressed, I tell them that change the story of your life. There is enough scientific proof that says that neurons get used to the stories that you tell yourself.
You have to change it to change your life story. The moment you wake up, your mind starts whirling stories and it is up to you to control your mind in such a way that it constructs only creative and positive stories. Unless you are a Buddha or a very evolved person, your mind, if allowed, will only tell you negative stories. You have to come up with positive stories. A story is also a moral contradiction. The universe exists in contradiction. All arts exist in contradiction.
The concept of ‘forever’
When I was a kid we used to sleep on the roof of our house in Nizamuddin. Delhi was not polluted then and one could actually see the Milky Way and the sky would look like a blanket of stars. I was about 10 or 12 and in Physics I was being taught that in order for something to be something it needs to be measurable, it has to have length and breadth. At night I would look at the stars and ask my mother how far does this space goIJ She said that it goes forever. I thought how come I am watching something that goes on forever. Where does forever endIJ
There is no end to forever, she said. I asked her, ‘Where is that line beyond which there is foreverIJ’ Today I ask some friends of mine who say that if they are standing on the moon and I am standing here on earth and if I walk towards their direction, they can tell me how long I will take to reach. This distance is time. But if I am standing forever how far am IIJ If you are saying that you love the other person forever, you are placing that other person in a place with no measurable barrier. love is all about crossing a measurable barrier and being there forever.
Impact of work
Sometimes I make a bad movie and sometimes I make a good movie, but whenever I made a good movie I felt a moral contradiction that is very strong. If you saw Bandit Queen you can actually see that moral conflict and what I was going through. In fact, you become the antagonist and the protagonist both in that moral conflict. You feel that moral contradiction so strongly that you scurry into the minds of both. When somebody asked me how did Bandit Queen change meIJ I said that I am not burdened by being a Punjabi macho man anymore.
I grew up in Delhi and I was told that I had to be a man every time. But when I grew up and explored the idea of a rape and gangrape and what causes rape, I came to the conclusion that rape actually is an act of humiliation, it is not an act of sexuality at all. Then I asked myself why do men have to humiliate women and I came to the answer that they do it to feel better about themselves. It is ultimately a lack of self worth in the male that makes them go out and want to rape a woman. When I realised that, I asked myself how much self worth I had.
What’s the difference between seduction and rapeIJ All my life I have heard that you are man you have to make the first move, what’s the difference between the first move and the forced moveIJ I asked all these questions to myself otherwise I could not have made that film. In the exploration of that story, all my stories got involved and in the end I came up as a different person by understanding myself.
I am not affected by the success or failure of the film and I never take business or popularity as a yardstick to measure success or failure. The success of a film can be only found out from the generational influences that they create. For example, most films by Guru Dutt were commercial failures then but we still speak of them as brilliant cinema. That is success.
The magical world
We live in a world of reason. I think our existence is not reasonable and we don’t delve deep into ourselves to find the magical world. The magical world is full of demons and because we don’t want to deal with our demons we go back into the world of reason, it’s a protection and an escape mechanism. The real existence that we have is a constant battle with our own angels and demons.
I grew up in an Arya Samaji household, so we were not taken to temples. Bhajans were part of our growing up. I have started to explore rituals now and I find that rituals are a way of getting into your demons or your dark side which is essentially a part of you. When I say magical I mean unreasonable. If you can find and accept your demonic selves and accept that there is both light and dark, then the universe talks to you and then you will come to know about the magical world.
Joys of life
The greatest moments in your life are those when you drop your individuality and not those when your ego gets supercharged. If something happens in your life that makes you feel emotionally so strong that you can actually forget yourself, there is no greater joy that that. We recently launched the Dharavi Project in Mumbai.
People from my Internet company, AR Rahman and me, we all went and launched the platform for young people in Dharavi who do street music. Universal Music head came and did a show for us. I felt so humble that I started crying. So it’s not your ego boosters but your ego destroyers that make you happy. The most powerful tool that you have is humility. If something can make you feel so humble that you are in touch with God for that one moment, that’s the greatest moment.