“Should not the People of the Book Defer to the People of the Library?” From The Impertinences of Bachchoo
A grand and cynical friend once told me never to do anyone any favours as the recipients would take their revenge for dependency. He said this when, driving through London a friend phoned to ask me for a couple of hundred pounds loan so that as he said he could keep the household in food for the week. This friend is by no means poor, so I didn’t ask why he was so strapped for cash, but went to a dispensing machine and took the cash to him. The “Sermon From the Passenger Seat” followed.
It’s the sort of statement that one rejects and then, in vacant or in pensive mood, reflects upon. Such a reflection recurred last week in Mumbai when, looking through the newspapers I came upon an article by a fellow I once knew.
The article was pompous nonsense about politics and it vaguely touched upon there being no gratitude in the cut and thrust of political advancement. Which then led to my recalling a story of various gratitudes.
This Mr Journo was a friend of my late ex-wife Mala Sen. I worked at the time as a commissioning editor for UK’s Channel 4 TV, commissioning programmes and films and bringing them to the screen. Mr Journo suffered a traffic accident, which Mala told me, resulted in a life-threatening infection of the marrow or the bone. There was no known cure. Mr J would have to suffer and perhaps die.
Except… except that an Indian researcher told Mala that the disease was being worked on in Britain. Mala asked me to make enquiries. I did and found that the particular research experts in the field were a husband and wife team of expatriate Kashmiri Indians. I mentioned this fact to a Kashmiri friend, who did the English subtitling for Channel 4.
Quite by chance he said he was acquainted with the same Kashmiri doctors. He got in touch with them and found that the “cure” that they had been researching into was still in the experimental stage. It had promise as a feasible remedy, but had not undergone any of the tests that would make it legal to use on human beings.
Nevertheless our calculation at the time was that a person under sentence of suffering or death should grasp at this straw if we could persuade the research doctors to break the rules and making a very unusual exception, issue some sample of the drug as a curing course.
I think the argument that this could act as a real human trial without jeopardy in the UK was deployed.
Or put it down to their kindness. It worked. The medicine was sent to India and in a few weeks or months we were told that the cure had been effective.
Mr Journo was on his feet again. We might have raised a glass in congratulation.
At the time I was, with Mala, working on a film called Bandit Queen, adapted from the book that Mala had written about the life and doings of Phoolan Devi. Mala had not only researched and written a book about the dacoit, she had also worked with a brilliant Supreme Court lawyer to have Phoolan Devi released from the indefinite sentence she was serving in a Central Indian jail. That move also succeeded and Phoolan was released. Was she grateful? Read on.
The film was made, expertly directed by Shekhar Kapur and acted by Seema Biswas who played the central character. It’s a grim story and one of the first to recognise and expose the all-too-prevalent phenomenon of the rape of helpless women down and across the boundaries of caste and the rape of women by people in petty power such as policemen.
Nevertheless, Phoolan Devi herself was induced by a gang of people to go to the Delhi high court to have the film banned as they wanted the explicit issue of the rape of a woman who was still alive swept under the carpet. The court ban didn’t work.
Phoolan was after a cash settlement which I, on behalf of Channel 4, of Mala and the producer and director offered her. She accepted, leaving the petitioners who had sponsored her court case looking very foolish. The film was released to great acclaim all over the world, including at the Cannes Film Festival.
So when Michael Grade, my chief executive summoned me to his office I thought I was being awarded a case of champagne. But no. We exchanged pleasantries and he showed me a petition he had received demanding my dismissal from my job.
“Who are these idiots?” Michael asked. I looked down the scanty list of signatories. This is the point at which one writes “Lo and behold!” There nearly at the top of the list was the signature of Mr Journo to whom we had sent the medicines. I looked down the list.
There was the name of a person whom I had paid to write and produce a film the previous year. Then there was the signature of a fellow whom I had commissioned to make a very disappointing film about the performance of Shakespeare in remote parts of India.
“Et tu Brut” came to mind. And then the story of Androcles and the Lion, from whose foot he withdrew the thorn.
In that moment the story suffered a twist in my mind: Androcles encounters the same lion in the Coliseum and the lion tears him to bits and shows the Roman liberals what ought to be done to benevolent Christians.
What did Michael Grade do? He used some language which one cannot repeat in a family newspaper impugning the integrity, intelligence and possible lineage of the signatories, tore up the petition, threw it away and remarked that it wasn’t even fit for another purpose to which paper could be put.
Sweet are the uses of gratitude.
