Meet Vishesh Azad, screenwriter, cinematographer, and director. He dances. He sings. He's a filmmaker and academician. His name means Special Freedom in Hindi, and the name fits. He's Assistant Professor of Photography at the National Institute of Fashion Technology in New Delhi and he shows his students how to live life large. He enjoys what he describes as ordinary treks to Triund in the foothills of the Himalayas. That’s a trek from Dharamkot near McLeod Ganj in Himachal Pradesh. Then again you may find him on a road trip where you'll see some of the most spectacular mountainous scenery in Northern India.

Make sure you visit my website: https://www.lovelacecook.com where you'll find a gallery of incredible photos of Vishesh Azad and links to his videos on his YouTube channel where you can see what a fantastic dancer he is. There's also a link to his most recent film Dear Shalini with subtitles in English, and his synopsis of the film is on my blogpost about Vishesh.

Check out my YouTube channel to see the video chat that is an unedited version of our podcast conversation.

Lovelace Cook: [00:00:00] Hi, good morning.

Lovelace Cook: [00:00:05] Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. I'm very excited.

Lovelace Cook: [00:00:18] No, that's fine. That's great.

Lovelace Cook: [00:00:22] You look fine. I'm just delighted to have a chance to talk with you. I have followed you. I have no idea how we got connected on Facebook. Maybe when I was in India, maybe another time. I don't know. We must have a mutual acquaintance.

Apparently, I missed my bus that night. So we spent the rest of the night waiting for the bus and singing on the road. That's how we got to be friends. Well, he's the one who's the common one between you and me.

Vishesh Azad: [00:01:30] I'm Vishesh Azad. Vishesh stands for special. Vishesh is special in Hindi and Azad is freedom. So I've often been called special freedom back in school.

Vishesh Azad: [00:02:27] I'm glad that. You know what happened in the recent lockdown is my dad turned 75 last year, and I've been wanting to make a film on him. It's like a film on a filmmaker because I always wanted, I've always been through that whole lens of you're a filmmaker’s son. So are you half of what he is, because I went to film school. He didn't go to any film school. So yes, probably I can give you quite a little story out on it.

I grew up in Bombay, I think my eyes open. And I remember my early days in Bombay which is a very fast-moving city compared to Delhi. Delhi has a lot of time for celebration. Delhi has a lot of time to sit and chit chat and all of that. Delhi believes to take it slow, but Bombay is very professional. You can party a ‘til four in the morning, but six o'clock, seven o'clock, you're on the set doing your job.

[00:03:57] They tell me, when I was really small, I went down to a hotel with my father where a lot of film stars were dancing and I pulled my father and said, I want to dance. I was just in the middle of a lot of film stars, just doing my thing, not caring about anybody. That's when he realized that maybe he should put me into a dance school.

[00:04:56] I don't know how he could pull it off on a set of 500 people without shouting. Yeah. And so he was a very silent, accommodating, smiling person who made his way to the film industry, ran out of secondary and graduation from Delhi while he was doing theater, because he was infatuated with the film industry, landed up into Bombay, got into touch with some very big names.

[00:05:35] So with all these inhibitions, I was growing up doing my own thing, trying to keep myself away from cinema, but I couldn't help being in the middle. I was always there in the local festivals, dancing on stage, or painting or singing in the Christmas functions at school. And in my 12th, I was already making some tiny videos with a friend's camera but I [00:06:00] was very sure I'm not going to get into the film industry, because we wake up with him, not there and go to sleep with him coming later. That had a bitter feeling to me. And also that he worked for a good 35 years in the industry. He made some good 17, 18 feature films, worked for the Indian government, worked with the Indian Film Censor Board. He's done a bit. I can say he's done a lot, but he didn't quite get there.

[00:06:41] I'm sure probably through my perspective, any city can be larger than life if you put somebody at that age into that thinking or that spot. Inside, I was bursting with art, but on the outside, I was very scared to do it. To go out, to go ahead and do it. I started earning some pocket money right from classics, and I started paying my own fees, buying my own clothes, my own toys or whatever you want to call it. And 2012 is eventually when my father and my family decided they were going to go back to Delhi because that's where we belong, and they'll spend whatever the lifespan that they wanted to spend in that city.

[00:07:43] I was pretty fascinated with the performing arts scene in Delhi. It was bigger than Bombay, because in Bombay, everybody's very commercial and confident, but in Delhi not everybody's that really commercial and confident in their personality.

[00:08:33] I'm going to do that on the canteen table. So there's no way I'm going to let go of it because I started to feel it. A lyrical . . . Lyricism in my life, in my thinking, in my vocabulary, in my approach towards people. I was musical, I was rhythmic. I had a funny bone. After us a Bachelor's in English Literature, I went on to do a Masters in Mass Communication from Jamia.

[00:09:22] I got connected to a festival called the Osian Film Festival and I featured in the top 50 Asian filmmakers. And I was now getting really worried. That two years later, I need to get a job. And for the fun of it, for the love of it, everything's fine. Everything's going crazy. But how am I going to earn about this?

[00:10:04] Incidentally, I was teaching dance at a dance school near college and teaching also came very naturally to me. And I got an opportunity to be at a university for a dance competition. And I just, I won that competition. I came out of the backstage and I saw a poster vacancy for a faculty in scripting. And without a thought, I just went up to the faculty lounge and I knocked.

[00:10:46] And I saw the post. I can stop myself. They called me over. I got into this place. I started teaching film and I think that the rest is history. So I've been teaching cinema. I've been teaching photography for close to 12 years now, and I make films for the love of the game. I put them across film festivals. We've done some national award-winning films.

Lovelace Cook: [00:11:30] I've just been inspired seeing your photos and the videos on Facebook. And I thought, this guy is so comfortable in his own skin and he is so creative. There is ... You exude creativity in all of these areas. And when I saw a dance clip, there was a short dance clip with your students.

I thought, good God, you know, he’s really a great dancer. I think that with the creativity, you just called it lyrical or lyricism, you just embody that in your life and what you're doing.

[00:12:33] Like my first step when I enter a room. I need to blow the gathering away. I need to be at the center of everything. I need to talk to people. I need to be loud. Today maybe I think there is maybe there's a little more than needed. There's a little more electricity running in me, but my students enjoy it.

Lovelace Cook: [00:13:06] I see that. I thought ...are you familiar with the Pied Piper? Who attracts people? I thought, oh, this guy, you know you've got your students going up into the mountains. You're doing all these incredibly exciting things with them. And you have this magnetism that draws your students to you. And that's really obvious to me too, from just from following you. So if you think it's too much electricity, I don't think so. I think it's fantastic.

Lovelace Cook: [00:14:08] I think that's incredible. Do you still have the beautiful Royal Enfield motorcycle that you had?

[00:15:07] And then I used to get the feeling that I love this thing so much. This can bring happiness to somebody rather than just standing in my shed. So I went on and sold it away to another young boy who painted, spray-painted it there. He's in my Facebook list and he travels to Ladakh, and I'm really happy to see my bike going places.

Musical segue here

Lovelace Cook: [00:15:57] Thank you.

Lovelace Cook: [00:16:14] I agree completely. And I think that, I've been very concerned because of COVID in India. And you know, I'm looking at India and thinking. Oh, when you said you were getting a cold, at one point, I just panicked. I thought, oh my gosh, I hope, you know, because we get the news, and it sounds terrible.

When things shut down throughout the world, we have. . . actually our worlds, I feel like have expanded rather than shrunk because we have an opportunity. Our horizons are much broader as a result of technology, zoom, or whatever you're using.

Tell me a little bit about how things are in Delhi right now.

[00:17:20] But the problem here is with the kind of crowd and the kind of, you know, the kind of space and the equation of crowds in that space in the city. It tends to get a little dense and it's difficult for you to be, you know, to have their social distancing, to be away from people. Also for the cultural nerve inside you to go ahead and just jump in, hug people and, you know, shake hands and be close to people. The rate of distance has never been there. It's difficult for people to get that into your skin, but then the second wave, this time it was visibly there, because you could hear people in your distant circle in your acquaintance falling.

[00:18:15] So Delhi has been through its worst. I'm assuming we've learned our lesson and things are not going to be as bad again because people are getting vaccinated. A good lot of … percentage of people have already been through it. And assuming that we're developing the antibodies but COVID has been a great time to shut your doors from society.

[00:18:56] You're just listening to music and doing what you want, talking to your best friend on the call. But now people are making sure they take time for themselves, doing those little things that the thought is not required, like giving some time to the plant on the balcony, or just going ahead with a small little hobby they'd left back years back.

[00:19:52] So people start taking you for granted. There's a left turn you can always take, and I, my second [00:20:00] film I made after that film was a film called Red lights. Right. It's a film that talks about a cut that you've missed. And you don't want to go back to that long U-turn because you think it's just too far away, you just don't want to go forward.

Lovelace Cook: [00:20:32] You have a huge heart, just the way that you reach out to people.

[00:21:02] Oh, I just love it. I love it because it's the real life. You also mentioned when you first made your films, that your hands were just it's like, what have I gotten myself into? What am I doing?

[00:21:49] So I can be on locations. The light is now easy to capture, whereas a film negative works with 10 times more light than the digital negatives. Plus the crew has now shrunken. You can hold like the ones that I have with me. You can have a wireless mic that I can put onto your collar, or like a shotgun mic that I put on my camera and things are easy. I can just vlog in the mountains, holding a GoPro or something.

[00:22:41] And hand-holding their stories and talking to them. My tiny treks. So I'm trying to work a PhD around it. So what I have tried to … felt in that time, if I compare with my father and the times when I started filmmaking, we have moved ahead in terms of technology, especially postproduction, because in post-production today, you have a lot of drag and drop filters.

[00:23:26] For the past two years I've been using Adobe Premier Pro, but I've grown up on FCP, but the FCP, the final cut pro recent version has a lot of drag and drop mechanism or design, which for, if I may say, a much more professional approach is not too apt because you're going frame by frame. A key frame, you're checking all your key frames and cuts and all those layers. You're working in 10 layers, 20 layers.

[00:24:09] Well, I must tell you editing is a very organic process. If I can see you smile, I will wait for those extra two seconds to have that smile on and you get that instinct to have a cut. Yeah. So you will, I'm sure you you'll get on with all of that. It's very organic.

Vishesh Azad: [00:24:45] Yes, yes. If you see Bollywood, I don't think anybody has to be introduced to Bollywood in India. Bollywood and cricket, as they say, run in the blood. It's pretty much on the background.

It's always there. It never stops running. You grew up There's a song for every time in your life, as they say in Bollywood. Plus Bollywood is the kind of fashion statement. It has always been, I think cinema all across the world has been that way. It has been feeding the masses with a very direct kind of a morality and also very indirect kind of you know, content is there, always there. Still Bollywood if I like it defined, I would say Bollywood has that quality to imbibe all different cuisines or recipes. And that's how I say that. Anybody can have appetite for Bollywood because you'll have a little of drama, melodrama, and you'll have a little action in it. You'll see a horror film where somebody is falling in love with somebody, very unnatural for a film student, because you're trying to write a very serious context and suddenly you need a song there.

[00:26:06] So there's a story within a story. And the narration and the presentation of these epics over the years have been vocal or verbal. So you have a verbal lineage of two grandmothers telling you small incidents about or small mini stories within a story. And they'll probably one time they'll tell a lullaby to you. They'll sing it to you. So now you see the same content. Content is now being sung to you. The same content when you like it, you're watching a play at a temple in South India. You'll have a huge chorus or narrator enacting it for you, or a huge get up of Ravana or the antagonist of the epic, you know presented in that manner.

[00:27:06] Masala means it is a mixed bag of so many things, you can't really define the genre for it. But when I was studying Bollywood, and also seeing my father's films, I felt that these films had a certain production quality that they required. So to be in a Bollywood film, you're always in a situation which is larger than life. You're standing and, in the rain, and a large wide-angle camera, this long violin, violin playing in the back. That wouldn't happen to you in real life when you're sad. So I used to wonder, why is, why is this, why doesn't this feel so real? And this is the times when I got addicted to the parallel cinema of India, which, like any other new wave around the world, got a movement that wanted to denounce the mainstream cinema.

[00:28:15] Not everybody can punch five people in the face. Not everybody can sing around the tree. So the ideal persona of the hero was now given a backseat and you had a protagonist who was lifelike, who had the real-life problems of India. And these parallel filmmakers were actually addressing problems of what India was going through, first the partition, the holy fight, then the famine, of similar casualties in India. But then the never dying struggle of the middle class, the working class of India and their lives of how they enjoy the little breeze when they walk on the sea front, or they're just having a small can of beans and just having a little chit chat about life and they see faces in the cloud and that means everything to them. So that was a very, I would say very beautiful, way of storytelling that I was trying to picture in these kinds of films. And those times, I saw a few filmmakers. I got really inspired by them and I started to make my own, write my own scripts and write my own ideas. And when you say about parallel cinema of India, which is also the middle cinema of India, it is not dependent on music. I will not say that it doesn't have songs. It would have songs. Sometimes the songs are a dream or an abstract scene.

[00:30:20] So I like to make films about these things. Recently, I'll just keep it very short. We made a film about two strangers waking, you know, who don't know each other, but wake up each morning having the same dream, right? So they get to meet at a party, and they get to be friends with each other.

So I've been writing on those lines of how to talk about films which are not really very, you know, political movements or big, big things in society. We recently again, made a film about three different strangers waking up at three mysterious locations one morning and wondering how they got there. It's like you waking up in your room and me waking up on a boat in the ocean and both of us are wondering, how did we get here? So apparently we had downloaded an app last night who was driven by Krishna, which is an Indian god who drives you according to your karma, according to your deeds in life. He drops you to your destined locations, according to what you've done in life.

Lovelace Cook: [00:31:50] When you talk about the nuances of life and what you're interested in, I think that to me is really a fascinating area because just dealing with our day to day, to dealing with the real problems of life. The real things that people go through, the struggles that everyone goes through. And you've alluded to that just a little bit. You've mentioned the difficult times. You mentioned taking off on your bike and maybe driving into the Himalayas. What did you say?

Vishesh Azad: [00:33:12] Back here, I would just plainly call it survival mechanism because there's so much around you. And you also want to be part of so much around you. The never-dying idea of, you know as people, like I said, there's an Indian code that says xxxxxxxx which means, whenever you see somebody, that person might have 10 to 20 shades. So you need to give it time.

Lovelace Cook: [00:33:53] Tell me something, is there anything that, I really haven't asked you a lot of questions, but is there anything that you want to discuss that maybe I haven't brought up that you want to tell people who are looking or listening?

[00:34:52] So I probably have in that gray area for that moment. Just like Waiting for Godot, it's sitting and having a conversation, whether to go or not to go. When I heard many years later that my father had begun his, he began his career in a Hollywood film. It was a film called Nine Hours to Rama by Mark Robson.

[00:35:32] I really felt that I am doing that now in my classroom. When I sit down with these young minds who are facing such tremendous stress, such tremendous stress from the virtual lives that they're living online because the glamour that Instagram and Facebook and all of these things can offer you, takes you to, it takes you to a high.

[00:36:20] But what I really find interesting is still going ahead with my films, which are talking about these lives, because these lives also matter. And more than that, inspiring them to make films about themselves or writing about themselves or understanding what a photograph can be for eternity and not just taking photographs because of the digital medium, you can take 20 in a click.

[00:37:03] I think my phone and your phone today have a zillion images that we don't revisit or scroll down to, but the albums that we have back in our houses, it's such a joy to sit together on a cold evening and, you know, sit, and talk about it. And so I really want to talk to them. And I find that very intriguing to talk to these young and creative people of what they can do with technology, but also to draw the line to stop being dependent on it.

[00:37:55] And thankfully I have a lot of people, a lot of friends around me who are really passionate for their art, and we always find time to sit together. And we make sure that we have a gathering every month and we probably go for a small trek which we can sing and dance in the open sky. You keep connected, be connected to the nature. That's very important since COVID has started taught us the same.

[00:38:47] Where can people find you online?

Lovelace Cook: [00:39:16] That would be great.

[00:39:39] The banner that he used in his production, which is named on me. It's called Vishesh Pictures. So I'm going to soon, yeah, I'm going to put up a channel probably on his birthday this year in September. And I'm also putting together a vlog on his life, a four-part series on Bombay and cinema and how my father, a really ordinary boy from old Delhi, ran off to Bombay in a very filmy story, a very Bollywood kind of a story, made his life, and still today, he's so excited. He's 77 today. And if you tell him we're going to watch a film, he's ready before you are, he's at the car before you are, and he's very excited. So I think that is something that is the love of cinema runs in him.

Lovelace Cook: [00:40:52] Well, I think you're right about content. It's difficult when you're trying to do several things at once to deliver the content.

I just want to say thank you so much, Vishesh. This has been so much fun for me. Your energy just inspires me. I really appreciate your taking time to talk with me.

Lovelace Cook: [00:41:22] I don't know if my body can do it.

Lovelace Cook: [00:41:30] Well, thank you. I really appreciate it. Like I said, you inspire me. And you are a very wise person. You bring so much to this world. So keep making those films, get that YouTube channel out there.

I'm very happy that you are going to do a story on your father. In my experience, working on films was like running away to join the circus. So it's extraordinary, but you've experienced that too. So I look forward to seeing that and I just want to say thank you. And I'm just really, happy that somehow along the way, we encountered one another. So, thank you very much.