Chandraprakash Dwivedi (pictured) has never taken a selfie and vows never to either. As someone who has spent a major part of his life devouring Upanishads, the filmmaker has learnt to look inwards for happiness. And the selfie, according to him, is the modern manifestation of man’s deepest problems — seeking approval from the outside. The ‘selfie nugget’ slips into the conversation when the filmmaker talks about the conceit placed at the centre of his latest film, the political satire Zed Plus that releases nationwide today. The film’s premise has the country’s PM — played by Kulbhushan Kharbanda looking dangerously similar to Narendra Modi — visiting a dargah in a remote town in Rajasthan at a time of crisis. The coalition government is on the brink of falling apart. When almost everything fails, the PM’s last resort is to visit that dargah, create a photo-op that will reach millions of Indian through social media and eventually save the government. “It’s all showing and no doing,” says Dwivedi, “Whenever there’s a crisis, the politicians resort to these appeasing tactics.” Dwivedi immediately connected with the story when a film journalist acquaintance ,the film’s writer Ram Kumar Singh, narrated it to him as an idea for a novel. Dwivedi found it to have an essence of our times, and the entire political history of India. “These issues are contemporary, but if you look back, these have been there since Independence. It is full of identifiable references throughout the political history of India,” he says. A look at Dwivedi’s body of work will reveal that he specialises in period-pieces — the iconic Doordarshan television show Chanakya took us to 4th Century BC, another TV show Mrityunjay was set in the Mahabharata era. His film on Amrita Pritam’s novel Pinjar was about the pains of partition of 1947. Zed Plus may not be a period film but Dwivedi says for him every film is one. “I am very faithful to the social dynamics of a period and Zed Plus is equally period,” he says, “The only thing is that I didn’t have to revisit literature or sculptures to recreate this film, I could walk out of my office and draw a picture.” Dwivedi’s office in Andheri, Mumbai, paints a picture of the man himself — with historical artefacts strewn around, heap of books on folk tales from ancient India on a table, jostling with that odd film trade magazine. Dwivedi is a qualified medical professional with a deep passion for literature who turned to theatre and finally filmmaking. For someone, who has spent over two decades in the industry, beginning with Chanakya in 1991, Dwivedi thinks it is harder to make a good film or a TV show today. “With the corporates coming in, we thought they would push novel ideas and projects but they too want bankable stars,” he says, “They aren’t interested in making a great film, all they want is great business.” For his modestly budgeted Zed Plus, Dwivedi went for the unconventional Adil Hussain to play the protagonist, the dargah keeper who meets the PM. If Zed Plus works at the box office, Dwivedi will roll out the scripts he has ready to be made into films. If it doesn’t, there are enough books to go back to.
