THE LITERARY PAGE
Creativity in chaos
MITA KAPUR
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Ads, poems and lyrics for film songs… Prasoon Joshi on how he separates the various ways in which he writes.
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Photo: Rajeev Bhatt
The man lives at several levels with one common thread; he lives intensely. He talks about conscious participation in cinema — “Why don’t we ever start a debate over pure entertainment cinema, which has a larger consumption, why are
we reduced to being passive listeners?” — about the impact of language, how people started talking like Amitabh Bachchan…
Prasoon Joshi, the poet, made many a heart stop with his poem on the 26/11 Mumbai blasts, “Is Baar Nahin”. He doesn’t exalt human emotions or glorify them; they are normal, basic and direct.
Strong desires
“My basic reason for writing is the way I feel, and it’s the only thing I can do. I went through my formal education in management but you can imagine how strong my desire to write is.”
His strength is “I try and understand people around me. It’s not easy to make a connection and to be able to communicate your thoughts to people. When I’m writing copy for an advertisement, I communicate the brand’s thought, not my own.”
When you step back and see yourself as a writer… “A conflict does arise when a writer’s instincts face the demands of commercial writing, especially when I write for advertisements.”
Realising that this conflict is dangerous, Prasoon “compartmentalised myself. I don’t carry the burden of expressing my poetry in advertising. I immerse myself completely in the brands; I encourage the people working with me to search within for their own strengths. I found a person on my team who loved to play the guitar and I told him ‘you can still do it.’ Advertising requires a talented, fertile mind; the finer creative instincts have to be fuelled to make it a more satisfying journey. But if you start mixing the two, you wind up being confused.”
The demands of advertising are different. “I have to communicate what is right for the brand. I’m just a loudspeaker. I identify the message.” His thoughts are chiselled, commenting on India as a nation. “I’m a passenger in a bus named India. The problem with the changing face of India is that that change has to manifest itself in society, in the minds of people. India is like that giant battleship that moves but you can hardly see the movement. That’s what New India is; you don’t get the sense of it when you interact with an individual but it is a collective change.”
Inspired by culture
The chaos that is India has its beauty. “I see creativity in chaos. At a conference in Stockholm for European Advertising Awards, I was asked how my mind worked. I answered, ‘I work like an Indian. Chaos has an organic balance; there is a rhythm to it. The West can’t comprehend it… Our culture is layered, it’s not linear and as a creative person I get an opportunity to express myself in more than one way, unlike what is happening in the West. We have much more material to play with. We can create endlessly, reinvent ourselves and are very receptive. I do not pick up ideas, the ideas land in my head and I welcome them with open arms.”
Prasoon picked up Michael Ondaatje’s poems while browsing a bookstore at the Heathrow airport. “I don’t follow reviews, I need to decide for myself what I want to read. I want to stumble over books myself and not deprive myself of the joy of discovering a good book. There is sheer joy in reading Ondaatje, Otherwise I’m very ill-informed about literature even though I write.”
He is clear in that “I’m going to be myself” and believes firmly that if you reach anywhere it’s because “you have what it takes.”
On the side, I asked him if he was all right with no questions on his “Taare Zameen Par” days and his filmi work, he laughed and said, “This is very refreshing. In the end, it’s about human emotions isn’t it? Without them we are mere organisms.”
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