Penblunt & Hogwash

Indian Discovery

A couple of weeks earlier, I was at the Discovery office here attending a pre-launch sneak preview of the Travel & Living series on Indian cuisine.

This was followed by a film show by National Geographic, a film on Polynesian wayfinders, by the Nat Geo Resident Explorer Wade Davis. The film was one of the four on the relatively unknown societies and their intellectual prowess as well as survival techniques.

Superb becomes a euphemism on such occasions, and neither show was any exception.

That brought me back to my eternal pain and quest: why is it that our channels are not able to churn out such stuff?

Why, pray!

Take the series on Indian cuisine.

It has the most erudite hog, foodie Vir Sanghvi, and being a sort of chef myself, I am jealous of his fantabulous knowledge on the subject, from foie gras to chana masala to chai.

The magic of the series is that it does not have the what-have-you-Kapoor cooking in the kitchen and telling you how to make missee roti and sarson da sag. Take this first, mix a bit of that, light fry it in a shallow pan and deep freeze it in a backburner kind of ridiculous routine.

Sanghvi’s knowledge and Discovery’s attitude takes you through the magic of living Indian cuisine, not just eating it.

Discovery has broken the basic theme into sagas, like that of the Tandoori Chicken, which episode is titled “The Migratory Bird,” what with the stuff emigrated on to foreign menus without passport or visa.

In the episode on Indian Chinese, which Sanghvi calls a distinct Indian contribution to the global carte, he takes you into Tangra, China town in Calcutta, makes you go through the Chinese New Year festival with dragons and lights and all…

And then he takes you to meet the legend who created Chicken Manchurian sitting in Tangra, just to suit the Indian palate and yet, retain something of the original Chinese.

The Rajasthan episode is with his former history teacher at Mayo College, and his family, which has reinvented old Rajasthani cuisine and created an entirely new category of tourism.

Biting sarcasm, history, culture, witty chats with the likes of tea legend Makaibari’s magician Rajah Banerjee… fantastic landscapes magical photography… just takes your breath away.

I asked the Discovery senior managers what they would do when a famous Indian English news channel launches its lifestyle channel with a lot more of Indian stuff. They couldn’t care less.

One reason they would like me to have is that the cost of one of their 60-minute episode comes to $80,000 to $100,000… “which is about the entire running costs for six months of some of the Indian channels”, they said.

But that is not true entirely, I feel.

It is the attitude. It is a ‘re-run of the news channel’ attitude… come, shoot, scoot and dump it on the audience… maal to mil hi jayega advertisers se!

In all humility, I was part of making a documentary film on a most esoteric subject, the Buddhist Lama Dances of Sikkim… hardly a thing most filmmakers would dare touch. Or if they do, it would be the come-shoot-scoot-dump routine.

This film was made with four years of research into it, intricate research by a passionate scribe, and then 21 days of shooting while living in the monastery, eating their food, and finally, about 200 hours of non-linear digital editing of nine hours of footage.

The result, all to the credit of director Manas Bhowmick, has been anything Discovery could produce. The cost? Rs 2.20 lakh!

So money is not the issue. Passion for excellence is, craving for getting facts right is, competing with the best is….

We could have spent another Rs one lakh on the film, but we saved because we stayed with our crew at the best hotels in Sikkim all of 21 nights without spending a penny, because the researcher is so loved for his commitment.

This is what passion can get you: extraordinary shots inside a monastery even while rituals are on, which has never been allowed, for even still photography is forbidden inside monasteries!

If the people are convinced you want to do a good job on them, they will give you their best. In fact, a family actually faked their New Year rituals in their alter room, something they would normally shuddered to think, this faking!

But for that one needs to stay behind, be with the people, love their lives and see the rich meaning beneath their apparent simplicity.

That is where our channels lack completely. I haven’t seen an Indian channel doing a documentary without muttering F***ing S**t about once every few exhalations.

By the way, our good old but forgotten DD is showing a revival series called “Earth Matters”, on ecology, environment and societies, by Mike Pandey, and must say that it is way out. Costing Rs six lakh an episode, Pandey has shown what it takes to do a world-class environmental documentary series.

But that is because he has passion for the subject, desire to compete with the best and set standards.

Must see this series, friends, for a dose of revival of our national pride.