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Dibakar Banerjee’s long journey to LSD
Forty-one-year-old Dibakar Banerjee’s similarities with his peers who direct
movies end with the unkempt looks which he struts around with.
Otherwise, he
is very unconventional—with the subject of his films as well as in his personal life. Unlike any other filmwallah who inhabits the western suburbs, Dibakar prefers the quieter surroundings in Parel in central Mumbai. “This offers me a lot of peace where I can think well,” he justifies.
His latest offering Love, Sex Aur Dhoka (LSD) has been met with good commercial success but the director is saddened by certain events around the film—the censors and some audiences. Unlike what you might assume, Dibakar’s reservations with the censors aren’t because he has been made to blur and cut short a sex scene in the movie, but because certain remarks on caste which the board felt were offensive.
On the other end of the extreme, he has been told that a group of patrons left the movie hall midway as the film did not satiate their voyeuristic expectations. There were cheers in the hall when the slide with the ‘A’ certificate played out, but the same group left the hall in the interval, distraught, rues the director. “I coined the name to drive home the irony of it but in the end it became something else. You realise that you have no control over it...it has to do something with the publicity of the film. The media picks up on Sex and we want our film to be seen right? So, it was a very chaotic experience for me—I was seeing the film being rolled but I didn’t know whether to be happy or sad or awed,” he says.
But for Dibakar, who grew amongst “a lot of Punjabis and a few Bongs (Bengalis)” in Delhi’s chaotic Karol Bagh and went to a school which had its affinities towards the Sangh, making LSD in itself is a long journey. Courtesy his parents’ strong musical inclinations—his mother is a trained classical singer and father plays the flute as a hobby—young Dibakar used to play the tabla, reminisce his friends.
“This guy was definitely not academic but very good at studies. Plus, he used to win in all the extra-curricular activities like painting, debates and quizzes. We always had this healthy competition playing tabla but he was better than me,” says Aseem Ahuja, a friend from school who runs a software business now. With Dibakar, what stood out was his ability to grasp. “He would see simple things happening in the market and would paint them with excellence, even getting right the colour combinations,” says Ahuja, who still meets his friend whenever the latter goes to Delhi.
OTHER STORIES : First Look: LOVE SEX AUR DHOKHA
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