Varun Grover Interview | ‘Comedy Has an Incentive to Be Politically Incorrect’

This is part II of a long, candid conversation with Varun Grover.

(Click here to read the first part of this interview.)

Celebrated writer, poet, comedian and filmmaker Varun Grover sits down with Amborish Roychoudhury for a marathon two-part interview. In this concluding part, Varun decodes his approach to writing songs, the standup comedy scene in India, and how it feels to have finally directed a film.

AR: In the Film industry when someone says ‘writer’, they typically mean a screenwriter, right? And then there is a literary writer. These two can be very different. In your case you are kind of both, right? When you are writing a screenplay, you have language and structure to think about. So, do you get lost in language - I mean - is language important or are you just thinking of the story and the structure?  

 VG: Mostly story and structure, but language can enhance a screenplay a great deal, which I think a lot of people overlook. Random example, but I think why Pathan was way better than many other similar films, was because of the dialogues. The dialogues were very poetic and very sharp. I think the value Abbas Tyrewalla brought to Pathan as opposed to say a film like Brahmastra or Jawan, which had this one-track bombastic kind of dialogue which is the typical, Rohit Shetty school - which takes only the punchline as dialogue, as opposed to a conversation which has some flavour and some realism also. So that is something I miss a lot but I think that can help anything.  

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AR: Before Salim-Javed came along, the position of writers in the industry wasn’t very strong, something that they lamented and fought against. Since then, it has come down again. Is it true? If it is, why is it so? 

VG: I don't think there is a proper yardstick to gauge how the other writers during their time were doing. They were superstars, they were a big name, so it’s just a feeling that it was all good at that time. But they had this unprecedented back-to-back fantastic work and then they fought for the rights and they had the work behind them to fight for that status. But I don't think it has ever changed. It was not like in the 1970s saare writers ki izzat badh gayi thhi. Salim Javed ki badh gayi thhi, woh badhni chahiye thhi, but bakiyon ki toh nahi badhi thhi. So I I don't know if things have improved or gone down or stayed the same. I think it may have stayed the same.

Some writers are celebrated for their repeated success, for example, Juhi Chaturvedi, you know, who has done three back-to-back films from Vicky Donor to Piku to October and the last one I think, Gulabo Sitabo - were all celebrations of writing. Or, say, in the lyrics-writing world, the kind of work that Irshad Kamil has done in the last few years. So suddenly now you see an interview with AR Rahman, Irshad Kamil and Imtiaz Ali on a channel celebrating the lyrics writer also. Otherwise, you won't see many lyrics writers being on a channel for a film promotion.

But again, it depends on the individual also, the kind of work you do, you will be celebrated but that doesn't mean others will be celebrated in the same way.  

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AR: In terms of lyrics, right from the 50s till the 90s there is a whole expanse. There was evolution but at the same time, things were also roughly the same. Referring to the lover with a certain set of words, referring to certain situations with a certain set of words, which may have been informed by Urdu poetry to a significant extent. When you came - and I say this as a non-native speaker so I may be making huge lapses - you introduced a whole lot of words like moh, for instance. Something like Moora I think was about the milieu you were talking about. Boni is a word you hear often, but I’ve never heard it being used in songs. So there are these things you play around with. You have often spoken about being inspired by those earlier lyricists, but you have these words which people may or may not understand but those who understand will revel in it. Where does that come from? How do you look at it? Is it deliberate?  

VG: It is deliberate in the sense that every art is deliberate. But my attempt is to do two or three things here. One is to avoid the cliches, to avoid the words that have become boring for me at least. As for the audience, I think people don't get bored of certain words and every song has dil and pyar and mohabbat and ishq etc. They don't get bored and these songs are doing great. For example, a song like Sun raha hai na tu, ro raha hoon main…I love that song, but it has the most simple words, the most used words. But somehow the composition, the singing and the context in the film make it work. 

The second thing I’m trying to do is to make a certain kind of language for the Hindi film song. But it depends on the film’s context, the kind of music or the words that directors and composers want in the film. Thirdly, I consciously try to bring in words that I feel are not too complicated but are somehow deemed unmusical. They are not thought of as musical because there is this notion that they aren’t “poetic enough”. Machli is one such word. It appears in one song in Ankhon Dekhi.

Now, when I first wrote that line 'Tere haath machli bankar'...’our hands flow like fish’, the first reaction from the composer was, 'Machli is very very unmusical. We can't use machli in a song. The film is very philosophical. 'To machli kaise aayega issmein?'. I said we can try, sing and see. If the singer also feels the same, I can change it but I think there is nothing like musical or unmusical. ‘But the imagery associated with machli is not musical’, I was told. But the director Rajat Kapoor, thankfully, supported me. He said, 'Nahi nahi thik hai karte hain'. 

But I could sense that question in the room: ‘Machli kyon?’. But machli is a very simple word. It’s not so complicated. It's not how Gulzar Saab sometimes uses certain words that people don't even know…like the item song, 'Kajraare'. It is supposed to be the massiest song in the film. An item song is supposed to be for the masses and supposed to be the simplest. But it is the most complicated song in the film. It has words like 'kimam', it has words like 'jaise garmiyon ki loo hai'. 'Garmiyon ki loo hai' sounds absolutely unmusical, it’s an unsavory word to have loo in a song which in English means toilet and in Hindi also it means very uncomfortable. The line is ‘tera aana to garimiyon ki loo hai’ but part of it sounds like ‘kiloo’. Teen-chaar baar sunne ke baad mujhe samajh aaya ke ye ‘garmiyon’ bol rahe hain toh ye ‘loo’ hai. Very difficult but it's there in the song and it's one of the biggest hits. No song on Yash Raj’s official channel has more views. So this whole idea that there are certain words that should be used and certain words that should not be used is ridiculous. This idea comes from an establishment that is limited in imagination.  

So I want to transcend or break this and prove that it’s okay, that these words can be used. For example, Shauq I think is a very musical and poetic word…there may be other songs with it because it’s not a difficult word. But to use it in the mukhda….and I was lucky that the director was also a lyrics writer. So woh toh matlab sabse aasani se maine aaj tak ek gaana likkha hai jo ki 20 minute mein khatm ho gaya aur usmein koi rework nahi aaya, and that was Shauq (From Qala). It’s one of the most satisfying songs I have written because it allowed me to employ the kind of metaphors which generally I have to convince people to allow me to do. But in this case, it helped that the director Anvita Dutt was a lyricist herself and the composer was Amit Trivedi who is usually open to any kind of experimentation... He is one composer I have worked with who rarely says ke ye musical nahi hai etc. For him, everything is musical if it fits into the meter. That’s all he cares about. So that was also a good thing.

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AR: Lyricist Sameer says poets and lyricists are different animals. Hence, he concludes, Gulzar is a poet but not a lyricist. What are your thoughts? 

VG: I agree that poets and lyricists are two different animals. These are two different crafts, poetry and lyric writing. In poetry, no one is briefing you. While writing the lyrics of a film song, there are not one but 3-4 different kinds of briefs to consider. One is what the script demands. Then there is the language of the film, the music composer who gives you the meter and the tune. Lastly, there are market considerations that you have to use a certain kind of language that is easily understood, not too complicated and not thematically obscure. Toh ye saare considerations ke saath lyric writing is poetry with a lot of constraints. So there I agree with him. I don’t agree about Gulzar saab being a poet and not a lyricist. There can be and there are a lot of poets who are great poets AND great lyricists, and Gulzar saab is definitely one of them. 

AR: If someone wanted to start reading Hindi poems, what is a good starting point? 

 VG: I don’t know. I can never recommend poetry because the kind of poetry you like depends on the kind of person you are. It’s almost like recommending someone a life partner ke aap isse shaadi kar sakte ho, without knowing the person at all. So there can’t be generic advice - I can just mention the kind of poets I like, like Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena, Amrita Pritam (Hindi-Punjabi), Gulzaar saab (Hindi-Urdu), Javed Akhtar saab (Hindi-Urdu), Shiv Kumar Batalvi (Punjabi), Naresh Saxena and Uday Prakash. I don’t know which of these poets would resonate with others, but I personally love them a lot. 

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AR: What role did PassionForCinema.com (PFC) play in the beginning of your career? Filmmakers Vasan Bala, Neeraj Ghaywan and Anurag Kashyap were all active on PFC back in the day, as were you… 

VG: I was not very active on PFC as a writer, I was active as a reader. Yes, PFC did play a part in the sense that it gave me a sense that there is a community besides the big unreachable, unscalable Bollywood - uske bahar bhi ek film industry hai jahan pe ye log hain - Anurag Kashyap, Sudhir Mihsra, Dibakar Bannerjee, Hansal Mehta, ye log hain and they were kind of accessible in that space. I reached out to Anurag through PFC so yes, that was a direct contribution of PFC but otherwise, I was not a part of PFC, the main club - which was kind of a closed-gate community - or at least that’s what it looked like to me. So I was an outsider.

But still, just through a comment on a post by Anurag Kashyap - uske ek post pe maine comment ki ke maine ek kavita likhi hai and he called me and met me and that’s how our association started just through a random comment on PFC. Otherwise, I was just a bystander to the whole story…but I think it did give hope to a lot of people who were outsiders, people like Vasan Bala, Neeraj Ghaywan, Somen Mishra, and a lot of people who were just starting off and who could sense or imagine a world where they could be telling their stories which has come true so yes, PFC was a very important landmark in the modern history of Hindi cinema.

AR: According to you, standup comedy in India jumped straight from Hasya Kavi Sammelan to the American style of standup and you also said you’d like to bridge that gap - have you been able to? 

VG: I think a lot of people are trying to bridge the gap. I’m not the only one. And a lot of them have done it successfully. Zakir Khan is a great example and he’s now a globally known star and possibly the biggest rockstar of Indian standup comedy and he performs in Hindi/Hindustani/Urdu. He’s not doing American style of comedy at all, and neither is he doing the Hasya Kavi Sammelan. He’s doing storytelling. He’s talking about his life, his experiences, and he’s as popular as a lot of big music stars or Hindi filmstars. So a lot of people are doing this and I’m also trying my bit.

AR: What is the gender dynamic in the Indian standup comedy scene? Why are there so few women? 

VG: I don’t think there’s a field where this problem doesn’t exist, and comedy is just a subset of the larger creative industry which is a subset of the society and the society is a subset of the nation and everywhere you see women are underrepresented. But my positive assessment is that while other fields don’t have any inbuilt incentive for more women - in fact a lot of fields have inbuilt disincentives for more women to join, like top management jobs or any positions of power - but comedy has an inbuilt incentive for women because comedy thrives on new stories, comedy thrives on new experiences, new voices. The newer the voice, the more different the voice is, and the more chances of it being successful and that’s why more women will come and are coming and the kind of growth in the last five years was probably double the growth in the previous five years and in the next five years it will be again the double of what’s happened in the last five years. So I’m very hopeful and I think that will change for the better.  

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AR: In the Indian comedy scene, how important has politics been, historically? 

VG: Always. Again, comedy has an inbuilt incentive to say politically incorrect things. That’s why people go to comedy, even if it's slapstick comedy, a lot of times it is politically incorrect, and that’s why it gets a laugh - so there is an incentive to include politics. Even if it is sometimes regressive politics and sometimes progressive politics, but it is there. So that’ll always be there. And that’s an important part of comedy. 

AR: Everyone has their own gods. Can you write a joke about those you revere? 

VG: Definitely. I keep writing jokes about people I revere. In fact, my latest standup solo ‘Nothing Makes Sense’ which I’m travelling with right now, has a whole section on how people like me, the so-called liberals have failed and there is a whole section on the figures of the liberals in India and that has a huge hand in shaping where are going. 

AR: Do you enjoy the process of directing? Will you do it again? How clear does a director need to be about what he wants to say in the film? 

VG: So, directing was a very, very, overwhelming experience. That is the first thing that comes to my mind. There is always so much to do - big and small - and I didn’t know any of them. Poori film jab tak khatam nahi ho jaati hai, khatam hone ke baad release nahi ho jaati hai, post-release feedback aap nahi padh lete hain, aur phir aap reviews nahi dekh lete hain, aur phir post-release interviews nahin de dete hain aur uske baad logon ke sawaalon ke jawab nahi dete hain,....it’s a long process, very very tiring but also very fulfilling. Creating anything with your hands - not just your hands, with your hand, body, mind, and heart - you apply all of them and the feeling you get is very different. “Different” is a rather boring word though. It’s actually very heavy. It’s like you have carried a huge stone up the hill like Sisyphus, and you’ve managed to do it, and that probably triggers a lot of these happy neurons in the brain. And also because you always see the grand narrative around us so…making a film is part of that grand narrative of cinema. It started in India in 1913.

So being part of that chain, and that chain has many many great films, many ordinary films, many downright horrible films, agenda propaganda, social message, it has all of that. And you then see that you are standing on that line, somewhere - as just a point on that graph. That grand narrative is very fulfilling. No matter what kind of film it is. It is there on that graph of all the Indian or Hindi films being made ever. So that is the narrative that works for me and that makes all the pain and all the stress worth it. 

I think you have to have clarity at every stage. That clarity may change. Shuru mein aap jo banana chahte thhe, uska woh kaaran thha, phir banate huye aapko jo mehsoos hua jiski wajah se aapne kuchh scenes change kiye, woh uss samay ki clarity hai, then edit pe ek aur clarity aati hai, so there are various stages and you have to be clear at every stage. Just that that clarity may keep switching, changing. 

AR: Will you want to take up the challenge of directing a big actor or prefer to direct non-stars? 

VG: I’d definitely like to make more films. I don’t know what that will entail - directing a big actor or a big star. I don’t know how that will happen. I can’t even imagine whether that will be a good thing, bad thing, sane thing…woh jab hogi tabhi pata chalega.  

(Amborish Roychoudhury is a National Film Award-winning author and film historian. His second book Sridevi: The South Years came out last year, and he has just finished his biography of Raj Khosla.) 

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