Seriously Funny

Sitting at Hotel Mount View’s Coffee Shop,Bath recalls how making the film was “one big,happy family picnic”. “That’s what happens when you work with Dharamendra,Sunny and Bobby. Everyone makes sure they have fun,put in all their energies and go that extra mile,” he says.

Bath’s first shot at success came when he made his short film,Interval Part 2,a part of a student project at St Xavier’s College,Kolkata,where he was studying mass communication. The film won the prize for being the best film at college level,and ran in three film festivals. For his internship,he was chosen by Chandraprakash Diwedi of Pinjar fame.

He realised that his hobby of doodling and penning ideas and one-liners on Blackberry could translate into a career. “When you sit and write,something takes you over,it’s almost like divine intervention,” he says. Armed with his ideas,Bath moved base to Mumbai in 2004 and doled out gags for NDTV’s Angrezi Main Kehte Hain and worked as an assistant director with Ashwini Chaudhary and Diwedi.

“A nine-to-five job is not me. My calling is writing,for it’s a process of self-discovery. When Diwedi recommended my name for YPD in 2007,I grabbed it,” he says. Actor Sunny Deol gave Jasvinder a one-line concept for the film: “story of two brothers,lost and found”. “The idea was to celebrate Dharamji’s 50 years in the industry,to hail the cinema of the 1970s with its larger-than-life actors,dramatic scripts,all the lost-and -found-cases. It had to be the resurrection of the Manmohan Desai genre,” he says.

One of the four winners of British Council’s All India Script Writing contest held in Goa in 2008,Bath’s forte is comedy; it comes naturally to him. Despite the initial hiccups,like the intimidating meeting with Deol Senior,Bath says that the script for the film flowed smoothly. “The script was ready in a year,” he says. Now,Bath can’t wait to write YPD Part 2. “The success of YPD has brought back something that had almost died — buying tickets in black,” he says with a chuckle.

The words are in motion,and so is Bath. A comedy script he wrote around a jail is being mulled over,so is a period film “for history has great stories”. “The subject has to be challenging,something that keeps me in fifth gear for I can’t afford to be in neutral,” he says.