[Goanet-News] Homi Adajania: Love and longing in Goa (LiveMint.com)
Homi Adajania: Love and longing in Goa After Parsis, the director finds lovable eccentrics in the Goan Catholic community for his forthcoming film ‘Finding Fanny’ Opinions about Homi Adajania are divided neatly down the middle, which is hardly surprising since he is only two films old. The adventure-sports fiend turned film-maker in 2006 with Being Cyrus, a wacky comedy set in his own Parsi community and featuring a bunch of eccentrics who derive their happiness from undercutting each other. Cocktail, made six years later, was a formulaic and conservative love triangle that saw Adajania floating uncomfortably in the mainstream. Finding Fanny sees him back in his comfort zone -- also known as cuckoo land. Set in Goa and following another set of mavericks (this time Goan Catholic) who set out on a journey to find a mysterious woman named Stephanie Fernandes, Finding Fanny might just prove right an ol—d belief about film-makers -- the first film is usually a pure expression of creativity, the second is a marketplace compromise, while it’s only in the third that a discernible style and attitude come into view. Featuring Deepika Padukone, Arjun Kapoor, Naseeruddin Shah, Dimple Kapadia and Pankaj Kapur, the English-language movie opens on 12 September. Edited excerpts from an interview: What made you set ‘Finding Fanny’ in Goa and among the Goan Catholic community? It happened very naturally. I wrote it without really thinking about this and then stuck to my instinct of basing it there. I sat in the Goan village of Salvador do Mundo for a month and banged out the first draft of the screenplay. I spent a lot of time with local Goan Catholics and observed how they spoke, their lyrical way of life, the evident split between the north and south, the Portuguese hangover, and stuff like that. Then I created a bunch of dysfunctional characters and dumped them in a fictional village. I had written the short story many years ago and it sat as some hybrid Marquezian Indian village in my head. Cecil Pinto, who is a Goan writer, was my bouncing board for accuracy and cultural research, but then I pushed it into a fictitious space. It’s a village that doesn’t really exist, a place the world seems to have forgotten. Which part of Goa did you focus on? From the northern tip all the way down to the south. In fact, just the fictitious village of Pocolim in Finding Fanny was shot over various places, including Saligao, Parra, Assagao, Aldona, Socorro, and Cortalim, where I pieced together different visuals to make it feel like one place. The idea of a road trip bringing out the best and worst in people is a well-travelled one. I never saw it as a road trip though it very obviously is. In my head, the structure was more in keeping with, say, Jack Nicholson’s As Good As It Gets, where the characters embark on a trip in the narrative but it isn’t predominantly a “road trip” film. Though after I showed it to some random focus groups, I found that everyone just wanted to get on to the journey and didn’t have the patience to immerse themselves into a place where nothing really happens and the people…well, they just exist. I don’t know how I have tackled anything. I don’t over-analyse stuff and just tell stories from my gut. Going by the trailer and the songs, ‘Finding Fanny’ seems to be in an off-kilter, broad and, may we call it, Parsi theatre register of humour. Will non-Parsis and non-Mumbaikars get it? This is a universal story about love and longing. It’s pretty layered if you want to peel away, but even if you watch it flat, it is entertaining. I don’t think that people will find Goan Catholics a minority as unfamiliar as the Parsis. The dark stuff is thrown away so shamelessly that it takes a subtle sensibility to really get that. Else, it works across the board as a quaint and entertaining story. The movie has a high-wattage cast for what seems to be a low-vibe comedy. How did you get the actors to wind it down? Various sessions and workshops and then a month before shoot, nothing. Naseer (Naseeruddin Shah) and I had to figure out how to make his character vulnerable and borderline idiotic until he grows a spine, so we worked on the body language and him speaking in a mid-range voice rather than his natural baritone. I needed to work with Arjun (Kapoor) a little more as his idea of throwing away a dialogue or performance and mine were dramatically different. Initially he was, like, “But now I’m doing nothing at all!” Though once he realized that this was exactly what I wanted, he achieved that effortlessness of just being. Dimple (Kapadia) and Pankaj (Kapur) are loud characters, so the main concern was to sustain a consistency. And finally Deepika (Padukone) was very easy because we share a great understanding. She just knows how to interpret what’s in my head, however bizarre that world may be. This is your second collaboration with Kersi Khambatta after ‘Being Cyrus’. Why do you like working with him?
[Goanet-News] Lovable rascal: the Alfred I knew (FN)
Lovable rascal: the Alfred I knew -- Frederick Noronha fredericknoro...@gmail.com Bernice, his classmate while they were teenagers, rang at lunch-time on Sunday to break the news. It was brief. It was sudden. And, like everything else Alfred, it was unexpected. Alfred Tavares, journalist and Goan expat in Sweden, one of those traumatised by the twist of events in Goa after the 1960s who opted out via migration but who always loved his home, had passed away at 70. Waiting for more news online, I opened the Herald Review -- it was a late start to the day after being up till almost dawn -- and his latest column was there! This triggers off memories going back a long time It was the 1980s, and we were only beginning in journalism. Raw, untrained hands, we got precious space to enter the profession through the Herald, which then had just added two tiny o's at either end of part of its earlier Portuguese name. From being an eight-decade-old (and one of the oldest existing papers in South Asia, founded 1900, but seldom celebrated as such) it was just shifting over from being a Portuguese daily, claimed to be the only one in Asia then, to an English-language daily newspaper. Since we trainees were not even out of college yet, to understand the complexities of journalism was not easy. Books were in short supply. Experienced journalists were few and far between. Alfred Tavares was one of the role-models-from-a-distance then. In 1987, the Bofors scam had broken out. It was to lead to the defeat of the Rajiv-lead Congress in 1989. The Indian news-media suddenly realised that they had nobody then to represent them in Scandinavia. Alfred rose to the occasion. His metre-long faxes -- maybe he sent a copy to the Herald too -- offering insightful and exclusive reports on the Bofors scam made it to the then young and just-founded *The Week* magazine. (For those too young to recall, the scam involved kickbacks concerning the $285 million contract between the Government of India and Swedish arms company Bofors for the supply of 410 155mm Howitzer field guns.) *The Week* itself was an outrageous experiment, an attempt to build a 'national' magazine from out of the south Indian commercial city of Kochi, tucked away in one end of the country, and as remote as could be from the news-making cities of New Delhi and Bombay. AfTER A LONGISH gap, one met -- or rather, encountered -- Alfred again, this time after moving from the 'subbing' desk to reporting. After Statehood came our way, the Bangalore-based *Deccan Herald*, the biggest paper in that city then, decided they needed a full-time correspondent in Goa. The work was fun, creative and offered quite some freedom to decide priorities; the employers kind, supportive and gentle. Only thing was that they had little space for a small and young State like Goa, at best for four reports a week. To undertake any other writing activity, staffers needed explicit permission -- which you were discouraged to seek at the asking stage itself. This, naturally, led to a certain boredom and ennui. But it also meant that one had a lot of time on hand, to track local events -- mostly politics, which was itself starting to get repetitive, and the coverage of which mostly lacked the depth that could explain why repeated governments were being toppled post-1990, what role the various lobbies were playing in politics here, and what were the real issues behind the headlines and statements of politicos. One day, as one walked into the the small and old but scenic (and now long-disused and disrespected, even heritage can be sectarianised) Goa Assembly hall, it was a surprise to encounter a bearded Alfred Tavares. He seated outside the Assembly entrance, in an old Portuguese-style chair, with a edgy policeman in the next seat, obviously keeping close watch. Having come in late, one had to ask a journalist with a local language daily in whispers what had happened. Toh bhoklo, reh... (He barked out) was the puzzled answer one got. In the interval that soon ensued, one asked Alfred himself what had happened. I told him, 'Speaker Sir, you are a bl**dy fool. And so are the 40 other members,' he replied. Probably it was around the time when a doctor had botched up an operation on Alfred's throat or nasal passage and hence what he said might not have been understood by all. Or, maybe we chose not to hear. Given the undefined privileges that legislators have across India, a legacy from colonial times, as subversive a thought
