Short Cuts

They had obviously lost their minds without a ticket to give them some sense. Buying a ticket to a performance or a film validates you as an audiencemember, gives you the right to say what you want, no holds barred. You are buying an anticipation as well you go in wanting the performance to enthrall you, take you somewhere magical otherwise you wouldn8217;t have spent hard cash and precious time to see it. With the purchase of a ticket, you buy the right to see the film, but along with that you buy the right to comment, abuse, love and apnao that film. And you are surrounded by hundreds of others like you, whose reactions are all interlinked with yours. It is not possible to quantify how much the whistling, cheering, laughing, repeating the dialogue along with the actors, and heckling affects your reaction to a movie, but without it, your experience of a Hindi movie would be entirely different. It becomes yours emotionally, if you like the film.

And if you don8217;t, you are somehow disappointed 8212; like a family member fromwhom you expected more letting you down. Like with the films I had seen 8212; I have roundly criticised the films to friends, but in astrange way they are also mine, and I am protective of them.

So I very rarely go to trial shows for two reasons. One is that I cannot trust my own judgment without a ticket. The second reason is that at a non-paying show, I am surrounded by others who, like me, have their judgement impaired without tickets, and therefore all the reactions that will affect mine are also warped.

More importantly, selling tickets forces integrity into the performers and the performance. If I as a poet, director or actor, am asking people to buy tickets to experience my performance, I am forced to attempt to deliver a show that will justify the audience spending time and money to witness it. I am not suggesting that every performer attempt to recreate the success of Titanic. Whenever a director tries to analyse the success of a film and deduce from that what the next big thing will be, he/she invariably fails.

But at the same time, forgive the pun there is a Sixth Sense, an audience gremlin sitting in your head as thefilm comes together. It asks you difficult questions as you try to sweep weaknesses under the carpet. It forces you to rewrite parts that you thought were so screamingly brilliant at midnight but fell apart in sunlight.

The gremlin is a filter that ensures that there is some degree of communicability in your work that what you are putting together will be understood by an audience. It comes to live in your head out of fear. The fear that if you don8217;t satisfy its conditions, that audience whom you have solicited so unabashedly to come and see your show is going to come after you with huge rocks the size of Worli and throw them on your head. The scary part is that if they do, you know that you are on the receiving end of some poetic justice. Because a paying audience is never wrong.