Writing Yudh
Credit where it's due. (Ilford HP5+, Nikon F4, 50mm)
It was one of those days, a writer struggling to meet the deadline of a daily soap with a non-existent episode bank, was frantically typing away at his computer. The drone of the words getting slapped out on to the screen is broken by a phone call. A friend asking would you be interested in considering another show? I would have slammed the phone down had not the desperate plea from the friend somehow reached me despite my lowering the phone after my refusal. It's finite!!! 20 Episodes. And I brought the phone back to my ear.
When I met Bonnie Jain, my friend who had just started working at Endemol, it became clear that the show was a finite fiction show of 20 episodes with a Male Protagonist. Since I always wanted to write a finite series, which I believed to be more my strength than the long drawn out daily soaps which I always struggled with, I immediately jumped at the opportunity. That was when my friend dropped the bomb. The show would be pitched to Mr Bachchan. Having done more than 15 years of television, and having seen many shows with grandiose plans and great ideas failing to see the light of day, I must admit at that moment I felt like strangling my friend. How could he not see that this can never happen? After some futile attempts to wriggle out of the situation, which at the time I seriously believed was going to be a colossal waste of my time, I just gave up. I walked out thinking I need to get out of this mess quickly, and the best way would be to get fired.
Since I lived with the stigma of being considered a niche writer in the TV circles, and much ridiculed for being crafty and not truly melodramatic, I knew that getting fired was easy. All I had to do was write something I liked and they would throw me out. However, my optimism was short lived. The more the content was unconventional, non conformist and exciting the more it got accepted by everyone and even Mr Bachchan. I was sinking deeper and deeper into the quagmire of something I so wanted to write, yet had no time to write because of my other commitments. Then the lucky break happened. Mr Bachchan got Anurag Kashyap involved as the Creative Director when the larger story had been sort of locked. I thought this is great because I could now leave with my larger story credit and surely Anurag would have writers who can carry forward the actual screenplay writing.
However, my name again cropped up for writing the first episode screenplay. I was very reluctant because normally in Television it is the screenplay writing stage which causes maximum heartache. On top of it, the screenplay of a pilot episode, man, that was seriously like putting your head into a volcano about to erupt. Another thing that added to my reluctance was the fact that I had never written for Anurag, and though I much admired his work, I had no clue how he was as a person to deal with. Writers and Directors need to form a bond without which scripts become rather pedestrian. And Anurag was really busy to spare time for a bonding session. He would get free in a few months and by then we would need to have a bank of scripts ready. However, I felt a sense of challenge in this situation. Could I come up with a screenplay that could excite Anurag even if he just read it? We in India are more used to listening to narrations of scripts and reacting to them basis the competence of the narration. Would it become a good read? Because in the international context, part of the writer’s job is to make the script also a work which can be savoured by reading. So I decided to write the first screenplay and wrote it exactly the way I would have wanted the show to unfold. No concessions were made to any of the established Indian TV Scriptwriting rules. I was still somewhere hoping to get fired but I would go down on my own terms.
The Director's Chair. Not open for debate. (Ilford HP5+, Nikon F4, 50mm)
However, Anurag really loved the script and in some time I was writing all the episodes. I would have liked to detail out the plots for the balance 19 episodes but Anurag rightly insisted that we should write it in one flow. Go with the material. See where it takes us. That really made the writing process super exciting. I was just being loyal to the threads and characters as I went about creating a web of intrigue and drama. At the end of 4 months the 20 episodes were done and with all credit to Anurag the story had opened up layers and ideas, which no one had anticipated. Anurag had suggested a lot of key definitive scenarios, like the Protagonist having an ex wife, taking the story into a Mining Space, and all of them started assuming a story and relevance of their own.
It was a completely new experience for me, and a great learning curve. I guess it was the same for everyone involved with the show. And a million thanks to Anurag for making the journey such an exciting one. It is rarely that a writer in the Indian Television Scenario goes to sleep with his head buzzing with ideas and wakes up earlier than the alarm and runs to the computer to start writing. I thoroughly enjoyed writing for Yudh and hope the audience also enjoys to some extent the collective zeal and madness that went into it’s making.
