Medium Term: I couldn’t help being impressed by Saif’s relentless quest for detail

Many months ago Saif Ali Khan phoned and asked if we could meet to discuss a movie he was planning.

I’ve known Saif for a long time largely because of my friendship with his parents, the elegant Sharmila Tagore and the late Tiger Pataudi, the classiest guy I have ever known.

Plus, it helped that for many years we lived in the same building in Bombay.

 

   Still, Saif had never before called me about a movie so I was curious to hear what he would have to say. It turned out that Saif was planning a spy thriller. Along with Sriram Raghavan, the director of the movie, who was also present at our meeting, he told me what he intended to do.

 

   He was calling the movie Agent Vinod after the cheesy Mahendar Sandhu movie off from the Seventies, he said, but that was only to indicate that the style of the picture was a few inches off the ground – it was going to be a big-budget commercial Hindi movie after all.

 

   But though he did not want to travel too far from the conventions of the spy thriller (more James Bond than Tinker Tailor…), Saif was also keen to ensure that the script had some grounding in reality.

 

   He wanted his hero to be an agent of the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) or some thinly-disguised version of R&AW and wanted to know how R&AW worked. Did it have undercover agents? Where were its offices? What were its chiefs like? Did it have adventurous agents? What were its principal areas of operation? And so on.

 

   He also wanted a cross-border romance. Would it be possible for R&AW and ISI to launch a joint operation? Did ISI have any female agents? When I explained that unlike R&AW which is, by and large, a disciplined department, ISI was a complex organization with many factions, many black operations and various dissident groups, he asked if it was conceivable that some ISI chiefs were perturbed by the things that many of their agents got up to? I said that yes, it was. Though we demonised ISI in India (just as the Pakistanis demonise R&AW), there were many ISI officers who were just professionals doing the reasonable job of protecting their country. Not every ISI officer participated in Al Qaeda operations.  (At that stage, admittedly, none of us knew that Osama bin Laden was alive and well and living in Abbottabad as an honoured guest of the Pakistani army).

 

   Then, Saif moved on to terrorism. Was it possible for a terrorist group to get its hands on a nuclear weapon? I replied that alas, this was all too possible. The Americans believed they had secured Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal but all it took was for one mad jehadi general to smuggle out nuclear material for the use of his fellow jehadis.

 

   Could India guard against this? Saif asked. I said that no, sadly no country could really protect itself against a lunatic who was prepared to sacrifice his own life. Our intelligence agencies might manage to foil the plans of 99 out of 100 terrorists. But the one terrorist who got away could create havoc. In the chilling words of the IRA, the terrorist motto is “we only have to be lucky once.”

 

"So now, all I have to do is to get to Director’s Cut, watch Agent Vinod and see if Saif has pulled it off."

   Saif kept at it. Were our leaders secured? I said that by and large, our leaders were okay. There was a nuclear bunker at Race Course Road where the Cabinet could take shelter. And the Special Protection Group (SPG) which protected the PM was, in my opinion, at least as good as the US Secret Service which protected the American President.

 

   How good was R&AW, Saif asked. I replied that while the organization had been weakened in recent years by political interference, bad choices at the top and the jealousy of the Intelligence Bureau, I still believed that it was a first rate intelligence service, far better (in intelligence terms not terror quotient) than the ISI. Unfortunately it could not talk about its successes while its failures always hit page one. For instance, I said, R&AW had gathered intelligence which could have prevented 26/11. It was just the inefficiency of the National Security Advisor’s office and the PMO that presented that intelligence from being acted on.

 

   I have no idea how much use any of the things we discussed that day were to Saif or Sriram. I don’t know the plot of Agent Vinod and have yet to see the film. But I couldn’t help being impressed by the relentless questioning and the quest for detail. After the first hour of our meeting it became clear to me that these were guys who wanted to understand how spies operated in the real world.

 

   It might well be that, having gathered all this information, they decided to shift their plot towards a less realistic space. It might also be that they decided that the conventions of the classic spy thriller were too strong to allow dull realism to get in the way. After all, James Bond is as credible a British secret agent as Tintin is a reporter. (How often does Tintin ever file a story?)

 

   But it impressed me that Saif and his director were so keen to understand the contours of the world that they were setting their movie in. There was a time when commercial Hindi movies operated in an alternative reality that bore no relation to the world as we knew it. In Hollywood, on the other hand, even if the plots were unbelievable (everything about the Mission Impossible movies is genuinely impossible in the real world!) they were rarely so ridiculous that you laughed out aloud. Good scriptwriters know how to get audiences to suspend disbelief even when situations are unlikely or contrived.

 

   In some sense, Saif’s attitude to the planning of Agent Vinod epitomizes the transformation in Hindi cinema. Even when our better film-makers plan slick, essentially hokey movies (say Don 2), they take care to ensure that you never have a chance to laugh at them. They know what they are doing. And if their movies depart from reality, it’s not because they don’t understand reality. It is because they know how to make the jump from the real to the fantastic.

 

   So now, all I have to do is to get to Director’s Cut, watch Agent Vinod and see if Saif has pulled it off.