Rajat Kapoor in & as & in RK/RKay!

Think the most absurd question the cartoonist Pran 19382014 was ever asked was by me When I was little I went up to the creator of Chacha Chaudhary wondering why over all the years Chacha had remained the same age Didnrsquot occur to me instead to check how Sabu came from JupiterQuite amused seeing me off at the door Pran recalled the question to his wife who from what I remember looked a lot like Chacha Chaudharyrsquos own wife in Pranrsquos comic stripDo characters from books or films often merge in your heads as they do in mine on occasionmdasha reason I maintain a log of every movieseries Irsquove watched sometimes to separate reality from fiction did I hear that in a film or an actual person said it Do you also see characters from one bookfilm as an extension of anotherNaseeruddin Shahrsquos Lalit Verma in Monsoon Wedding 2001 for instance in my head is merely Naseerrsquos DK Malhotra from Masoom 1983 20 years later genteel vulnerable caring upperclass Indian family manSince I read Albert Camusrsquos The Outsider and JD Salingerrsquos The Catcher in the Rye itrsquos hard not to see their lead charactersmdasholdish man Meursault young boy Holden Caulfieldmdashas simply the same existentialist personAnother matter is that like the maiden LSD trip does to some you canrsquot remain the same person anymore once yoursquove met Meursault and Caulfield on the pages especially at teenage Which character from fiction would you like to have over for dinner Surely yoursquove been asked this slambook question before What if they literally developed a life of their ownThatrsquos the conflict central to Rajat Kapoorrsquos film RKRKay Wherein RK is Rajat the controlled actor playing a writerdirector going through the usual anxieties of a directorrsquos job RKay refers to Rajat playing a character in a film within this film This sounds only as confusingly metaselfreferential as Vikramaditya Motwanersquos thriller AK vs AK with director Anurag Kashyap and actor Anil Kapoor in and as on screen avatarsOnly that RKRKay is way subtly funnier havenrsquot laughed as hard in longmdashpeeping into the world of filmmaking itself The posters in the editing room are of La Dolce Vita the Fellini masterpiece set in showbiz and The Invisible Manmdashpointing you to what the movie is aboutThe characters from the efficient assistant director Chandrachoor Rai to the realestate developer doubling up as film producer Manu Rishi Chadha are all too contemporary Only the film getting made it appears is from decades ago Guessing this from the deliberately hammy stylised actors on screen within the screenmdashin particular Mallika Sherawat the heroine besides the bottle of Vat 69But more so the villain named KN Singh spunky Ranvir Shorey which is obviously an ode to the ultrasophisticate menacing Hindi film antihero who frightened an entire generation through the 1950srsquo60s Between Rajat the filmmaker directing Rajat on screen who in turn directs Rajat the actor in the film within the film there is obviously the actual Delhiborn FTII grad Rajat Kapoor himselfmdashin many ways Versovarsquos very own Woody Allen the slightly stonefaced oddball actorauteur whorsquos scripted a career of consistently simple smart lowbudget alternate cinema over almost two decades right in the heart of Bollywood HowRajatrsquos first theatrical release Raghu Romeo 2003 similarly a film where life and fantasies merge was Indiarsquos first crowdfunded movie much before that was even a termmdashthousands of people received an email for helpsupport money was in movie got made Likewise RKRKay has about 800 lsquoproducersrsquo Irsquoll gladly send over a small cheque for his nextIn his worldbuildingmdashwhether about swinging couples Mixed Doubles 2006 or his underrated last Kadakh 2019 a situational comedythriller set inside a housemdashRajat seldom disappoints His Ankhon Dekhi 2013 remains one of the greatest films of the past decadeIt will find even greater love as time goes by which isnrsquot the same as a character in RKRKay puts it ldquoIndependent cinema ke naam pe log buri film dekh lete hain Some peeps will forgive anything so long as itrsquos indierdquoIn terms of believability RKRKay is the opposite of Ankhon Dekhi which was about how you must believe only what you see Yet isnrsquot metaverse supposed to make the straddling between reality and fiction possibleThe film also kinda touches on what great fiction writers have expressedmdashsometimes in the writing process the characters simply take over the penkeyboard to drive their own destiniesWith films of course those characters inhabit actual bodies and faces going through events and emotions Audiences are more willing to surrender their personal imagination Theyrsquove forever loved actors for their partsmdashassuming theyrsquore one and the same thing God knows movie stars have benefited most from these collective fantasiesThe opposite is also truemdashprobably why it takes precious courage to play deeply unlikeable parts putting your false self out there on screen like thatBefore a preview screening of RKRKay the film releases on July 22 I was telling Rajat about how I wanted to chat with him at some point about his icky creepy paedophilersquos role Tej Puri fatherfigure to Lalit Verma in Monsoon Wedding ldquoEhrdquo he casually shruggedMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture He tweets mayankw14Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper