When Pu La saheb was here, he made sure that artists would not lack for anything they needed.” When we staged Girish Karnad’s Yayati at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai, where Deshpande had once been a beloved executive director, I asked a backstage worker tentatively for wings. The vyaktis and vallis that people the book are creatures of Deshpande’s bountiful imagination, but it is an imagination fed by a lifetime spent befriending the most incredible variety of human beings from clerks to musicians, scholars to sculptors, housewives to backstage men. The ‘vyakti’ of the title is the individual and ‘valli’ is the nicely off-kilter individual. Published in 1962, it won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1965 and is now in something like its 40th edition. Vyakti kee Valli, the subtitle of Mahesh Manjrekar’s biopic, refers to Deshpande’s hugely popular collection of character sketches Vyakti ani Valli. Film music is today’s folk music and Lata Mangeshkar is our real national artist.” In his essay on Lata Mangeshkar, he says, “Pundits turn up their noses at film music because their ears are blocked to all except one track.
But in music too, he laughed at stuffed shirt punditry and its hierarchies. He was serious only when he wrote about music and then his writing often bordered on the sentimental and the hyperbolic. His impish, indulgent, affectionate laughter, which carried not a shred of malice, was directed as much at his own foibles as at others. He was loved most of all because he made people laugh. He was loved because he carried no writerly airs about him. It is not difficult to see why – while other writers were only respected and admired, Pu La was loved. Both names, when pronounced, carried a load of love and affection. The other was Pu La, which stood for Purushottam Lakshman, his first and middle names. Both need to be explained to the non-Marathi viewer if such an entity exists for Marathi cinema.īhai was one of two names that writer-director-playwright-screenplay writer-actor-music composer-harmonium player PL Deshpande was known by. The recently released Marathi film, a biopic in accordance with present trends, calls itself Bhaai with Vyakti Kee Valli as a subtitle.
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