Opinion Sudhir Mishra writes: It’s difficult to imagine a Mumbai where Pritish Nandy isn’t there

A thousand desires such as these/A thousand moments to set this night on fire/Reach out and you can touch them/ You can touch them with your silences/ You can reach them with your lust/Rivers, mountains, rain/ Rain against the torrid hill’s cape/A thousand/A thousand desires such as these.

Or he could be with his gloves banging away at a sandbag, perfectly poised, totally focused. He was, in a sense, one of the last of the breed of men who could be soft and macho at the same time — a poet and a boxer.

Suddenly, another image comes to my mind: A graceful man who sat and listened to you and made a couple of really sharp observations. He could encapsulate an entire argument in a couple of perfectly structured lines. There was never an extra word. That’s the hallmark of a poet, I guess.

Now for a moment, let’s forget the marketing and the byline. Because first, you have to write the script.

Where would you begin? He was born in Bihar. The son of a middle-class official, he had two other siblings. He was the middle one, I think. The elder one is the great “Ashish Nandy”. Pritish Da adored his mother. I heard him speaking about her very warmly at times. They shifted to Calcutta with his family, and this is where the poet Pritish was born. Was it his mother,  who was the first Indian vice-principal of La Martiniere College, Calcutta, whose influence turned him towards literature?

What turns a man into a poet is too difficult to capture in a few lines. But the fact remains that the young Pritish Nandy burst into the Kolkata literary scene and took it by storm. However, he didn’t just want to be a poet. In that sense, he was like Latin American literary figures, who wanted to be more than novelists and poets. They wanted to influence their world more directly, sometimes even politically.

He might also want to be some kind of a facilitator for other poets, filmmakers and all artists. Suddenly, he became one of the most powerful people in Mumbai, the publishing director of the Times of India group and the editor of the Illustrated Weekly. It was a tough role as he was following the footsteps of Khushwant Singh. A lot of people remember his interviews from those days. I think you could learn the art of interviewing from him. The poet now became a journalist, an editor, a man whose opinion on all things mattered.

This is the Pritish Nandy I first met: The journalistic powerhouse, the art curator and the poet all rolled into one.

He could see through people, see through their bulls**t. He knew the man you were when he was talking to you, even if he had spent just half an hour. If you had the guts to listen, he would tell you some of your flaws. He could also be very critical in a strangely positive way. He often told me many things about myself that were not always very pleasant to hear. But they were brilliant, and I was grateful that somebody thought about me in such great depth. It was the mark of a generous man.

Sometimes, I implemented his ideas. In a sense, I changed myself towards being a person that he would admire more. I always wanted his admiration. There were many people who liked Hazaro khwahishe aisi but I felt content and successful when he approved of the film. It’s also because he knew his country well, and about that time, in Kolkata, radicalism was at its peak. That was perhaps also one of the reasons why he left Calcutta: He saw the best of his generation killed, destroyed, exiled, or merging into the crowds. He chose to step away and found them again in various places around the world.

I think that’s what he did and rediscovered himself. Some decisions in his life earned him a lot of criticism. However, I know, that even though he was very close to power, he was never its slave. He never sold his mind to anybody. There were a lot of things that he said about people that he was supposedly close to. It made me realise that the independent mind of Nandy was alive and ticking.

That sharp mind never gave up. In a sense, like many brilliant people, he refused to submit to the notion that others had about him. He went into film directions that neither got popularity among people nor amongst us, his initial admirers. He dared to leave his admirers behind and walked towards another path. There was nobody like him. Seriously.

It’s difficult to imagine a Mumbai where Pritish Nandy isn’t there.

The writer is a filmmaker