BILLBOARD
MAKING WAVES
SHORT TAKES
ROUGH CUTS
MEMORIES
ARCHIVES
MOVIES CHAT

The immigrant experience

Suparn Verma

Harish Saluja. Click for bigger pic!

"I'm a short, bald, Punjabi man. Who would want to see my film?" Harish Saluja asks with a twinkle in his eye. Actually, quite a few, going by the response to his debut film at the recent Mumbai Film Festival in Bombay.

Many people have many ways of coping up with mid-life crisis. Saluja, now 51, did it by making his first film, The Journey, starring Roshan Seth and Saeed Jaffrey.

Though a mining engineer by profession, trained at IIT, Kharagpur, Saluja used to get his kicks selling drawings to an ad agency in India. "They would buy my drawings but wouldn't give me a job," he complains.

Despite his background, he was attracted to the arts. But he stewed in his own juices till he planned to go abroad. "The decision to leave India was the hardest one I've had to take," he says. But go he did in 1971, funded by a sale of his paintings in Dhanbad, Bihar. He was 25 years old.

Harish found the going tough, having to do a telephone sales job which paid him two dollars an hour. "Things got so bad that I had two carrots and a glass of milk to last me for two days. So I decided to kill myself... Here I was, an mining engineer from IIT, Kharagpur, I was a published poet, I taught philosophy and art in school, and I couldn't even find a job here," he thought.

Thankfully, Saluja did not do away with himself and, in 1972, got a part-time job at a technical publishing company.

Harish Saluja with Roshan Seth. Click for bigger pic!

"I worked 36 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 3 years. In 1975, the owner fell sick and asked me to look after the business. I implemented my ideas and raised the sales from 500,000 dollars to 5 million. I loved publishing -- it was miniature film-making."

In 1985 Saluja held a successful exhibition of his paintings. "I sold a lot of art, $ 80-100,000 worth of paintings." He also started a trust to help struggling artists. "This fund enabled any artist to... buy himself a meal, buy himself some fresh paint and paper. It was important to reach out the message that there is no shame in asking for help. Today it's had a small trickle down effect -- those people I helped and who have become successful must be doing the same for others."

For the last 25 years, Saluja has been hosting a a show on the National Public Radio, Pittsburg, called Music from India. It started out as a 30-minute show, now it spans two hours.

While success continued to dog him, his 45th year brought on a low.

"I was really depressed. I thought to myself that I have a good life but my life isn't complete." And since, after viewing Satyajit Ray's Teen Kanya, he was certain that film-making was the highest calling in life, he decided to turn director. He decided to learn Bengali and Rabindra sangeet. Even Saluja's production company, New Ray Films, is named after his 'guru'.

Saluja with Saeed Jaffrey. Click for bigger pic!

Saluja realised his limitations. "I had to be a good story-teller. Secondly I needed to be a good writer. Then I need to know about acting, to tell from good from bad. I should have knowledge about music. I should have a visual sense. I should have a marketing sense. Lastly, I needed technical knowledge."

Saluja boned up on the theory bit, reading up books on films and attended a technical workshop in Maine. To gain an insight into film-making, he became the associate producer in Tony Bubba's film No Pets. "I would take on extra work so that there'd be no area that I wouldn't know about."

Then he called people over for dinner and told them a bunch of stories asking them to pick the best. Saluja spent six months honing up the script of the one that received the most votes. He finally called up his pick of the actors, Roshan Seth and Saeed Jaffery, who liked the script about an Indian going over to his son's family in the US and coming to terms with new realities.

"We Indians are the most visible minority, the richest, educated and successful minority in the US. There are people who are jealous of us. We have to safeguard our interest, the only way is to reach out to the politicians and through mass media, using it to make our presence felt. That is why it is so very necessary for us to make films about us."

Roshan Seth was initially a little apprehensive of the newbie director. "So we sat down and discussed the entire script for the whole day. Later in the evening he met the other members for dinner and told them I was okay.

Seth in The Journey. Click for bigger pic!

"Roshan is a very focussed actor. On the sets he needed his space and would retreat to his trailer... while Saeed couldn't stand a quiet moment. He would be constantly be doing something on the sets. His energy level is very different."

Seth now admits he did have a problem with his character, "The scene where I don't know how to use the tea bag and so I tear it open... It bothered me a lot. I said that since my character travels in an Air India flight to the US, he would certainly have been served with tea bags. Harish insisted I do it his way," smiles Seth.

Post-production took another five months. "After a point you know it in your heart that the film is complete," says the perfectionist.

Saluja's upcoming project is Chasing Windmills. It is the story of a man who wins the Pulitzer and realises there's no place higher to go. His first attempt fails so he announces he will commit suicide six months later. Till he meets someone who draws him back.

"There was this poem which translates roughly as 'Throw a rope down to someone else when you reach a mountain.' That is the difference between achievement and greatness." Harish Saluja is aiming for the latter.

A tale of two cultures