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A different noise
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White Noise, Vinta Nanda's debut on the big screen, looks set to break new barriers, writes BHUMIKA K.
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— Photo: V. Sreenivasa Murthy
Vinta Nanda: `When all elements of sound meet in equal frequency, that soundlessness, the sound of silence, is called white noise.'
SHE SEES herself as caught up in the vortex of it all — saas-bahus, globalisation, saffronisation, and hypocrisy. Vinta Nanda has stepped out of her world of magic and turbulence to look at its seamier side, stripping it of its sheen, if only temporarily. Only to step back in again with, hopefully, refreshing freedom.
Debutante film director of White Noise, the chatteratis' current favourite, Vinta was popular as the director of teleserial Tara that kicked off a new tangent for women in soaps on the telly, and got an entire generation hooked.
Vinta has written, directed and co-produced the film White Noise, with Rahul Bose and Koel Purie in the lead, in a very contemporary love story set against the backdrop of the bitchy industry she's all too familiar with.
Seeing from within
Reputedly an autobiographical film, White Noise has garnered much curiosity and discussion to be running to packed houses since its release last week. But Vinta says it's more a been-there-done-that personal account. "I come from the world I have portrayed. It is relatable to the life I have observed. It was a decade of ups and downs, changes and lots of characters true to life. I am very much part and parcel of the very group of people I have painted on the canvas."
She, however, does admit that the characterisation of Gauri (the protagonist played by Koel Purie) definitely emerges from her. "The behaviour patterns — she's rebellious, confrontational, she's reckless; she does not care about consequences. But if she believes what she's doing is right, she'll take things head on," she says, almost distancing her own personality from her self.
And it is this tricky fine line of her depiction of her own world, that stepping out and looking at it objectively, that seems strange in a world where everyone's busy veiling it. "Yes, stepping out was a huge decision; and stepping out to step back in! That was my intention. It was never to step out and strip naked the world I was a part of. It was to even strip myself naked in the world that I was in, and look at the hypocritical nature with which everybody perceives life," she asserts frankly.
Don't blame K
It's refreshing and sometimes bizarre what Vinta sees in the melodramas on TV, that the average audience may never see. She believes the image of the woman was not made by Ekta Kapoor's `K' serials, but by the saffronisation of politics. "It's not the K serials. It was the politics of the time, the national politics. Every channel and production house started making those serials to survive, and it was all coming from the saffron politics at the top. And there was the constant desire in every TV serial to have a temple, and bells ringing, pooja and bhajans happening. Including me, everyone was dancing to the tune of a political song. You had no choice but to carry on that façade and fraud."
And it was this world of fraud, of the urban, edgy life, linked to the polity of the time that necessitated her to stamp her statement and seal it in a film. White Noise is based on the decade of the '90s, "an amazingly crazy changing time". The IT revolution went ballistic by the mid-'90s, then there was globalisation and internationalisation, and corporatisation. "Everyone was wearing suits and ties; there were large atriums. Clothes, looks, fashions, malls changed... I mean the whole world changed for us, yaar. But people were ignored. Mindsets remained the same and took a long time to change, which was the sad part. Obviously value systems also needed to change. Suddenly an entire generation was caught in it and I was a part of it. I, as a writer, observed, perceived and realised and felt victim to the same effect. It became necessary to make this film and mark it as a statement on that time."
The film's name was born by the riverside in Pahalgam, Kashmir, when she was grappling with its concept. "When all elements of sound meet in equal frequency, that soundlessness, the sound of silence is called white noise. When the roar within you and outside you merges. I correlated it with the world I was coming from— which was so cacophonous. And there are so many elements in my world that are disturbing me because I'm not falling into frequency," says the director, bordering on the metaphysical, tapping on her cigarette. And weaving it into the story, Rahul Bose who plays the role of a sound engineer, converts this theory of physics into the philosophy of his life.
Bose in an earlier interview termed it a feminist film. And listening to her, it has to be asked, what says she on feminism. While she laughs off Bose as "mad" she doesn't surprise you when she says she hasn't an idea of feminism. "I don't know what the word means. Because I'm a balanced person, and I like to call it equality instead. I don't even want to term it gender equality. As a woman, I feel as unequal to a man if a man is treating me such, as say a lower caste person in a village will feel about a Brahmin. Man and woman have to be on an equal platform."
It is the masculine-feminine balance in a single person that brings about the wholeness, she believes. "Rahul and I were discussing this concept and we came to the conclusion that men ultimately have to be in touch with their feminine side to bring about that balance, just like women have to be in touch with their masculine side. If you are true to yourself, that balance will never leave you. I don't want to carry flags and placards and say I'm part of a feminist movement, because I'm not. The moment you create a movement, you're doing what chauvinists are doing."
As Vinta's mind travels from thought to thought, it's tempting to bring her back to bitchy bahu serials. With the change in government at the Centre, she says, all characters have gone back to their existence and every single serial is running the non-saas-bahu track.
Starting April, she herself is doing serial another serial, Mili, about an orphan hired as a companion for an old lady in a dysfunctional joint family. "Heriones of today's soaps are very powerful. They are out there and in your face. Not scheming anymore. We're unfair to them and still on a hangover from two years ago. Ba (the ultimate matriarchal chief ma-in-law) went to Paris in `Kyunki ... ' to learn fashion designing, and that wasn't a small thing. Think about it! There's a whole conceptual visual change. I'm in deep trouble for saying these things. But I don't give a shit."
That's Gauri, the protagonist and that's Vinta, the director too.
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