It’s impossible to introduce Aabid Surti in one (or many words). The National Award-winning Indian author is also a painter, artist, cartoonist and journalist. By his own admission, he calls his mind a “magnet” that absorbs the best ideas, no matter where it is placed. In a free-wheeling chat, he talks about books, heartbreak and the fact that had it not been for spirituality, he would have had long lost his sanity!
You are an author, screenwriter, play writer, painter and cartoonist. What amongst these gives you maximum joy (or the one who connect most to) and why?
Whatever I touch with love gives me utmost pleasure. Basically I am a painter. My default mechanism, you may call it. But the creative impulse demands expression in every avenue. So right now, my new exhibition, multi-media-canvasses, is ready for exhibition – it is a charity show for my NGO, which is called ‘Drop Dead Foundation’. Two new novels are halfway to completion. And I have almost completed writing my new, three-act, musical, political comedy play in Hindi titled ‘Mr And Mrs Brahmachari’.
As an author you have written around 80 books, that included travelogues, comics and even children’s books --- how do you express yourself so vividly through such varied genres, when most authors excel at a single genre?
My mind is like a magnet. Place it in any creative field: it will pick up the best ideas. For example, in the 1980s, an NRI friend wanted to establish a stained glass studio in Mumbai. He approached me to be the designer. I had never done stained glass designing in my life. So I asked him to get the latest books on glass designing from Germany, Europe and USA. I glanced through the three books, realised how advanced the western designers were and also realised that I have to go beyond them. Input process over, now my mind started churning out fresh ideas. Across ten years, I created more than 250 designs, out of which around 150 were executed across India.
One more example: A friend had some extra money to gamble. He approached me to write and direct a play. Once again, I’d never-ever thought of directing a full length play for the commercial circuit. But it was a challenge for me to jump into a new creative field. I grabbed the opportunity. Instead of adapting an existing English play, I wrote an original three-act Hindi play ‘Radhe Radhe Ham Sab Aadhe’. We completed more than 50 houseful shows in Mumbai and around fifteen at the prestigious Prithvi theatre . Last year, it was staged at the Delhi Drama Festival also.
Tell us about your autobiographical book Musalman, which is an account of your own childhood in Mumbai.
Its second edition has come with a new title in English ‘Sufi – The Invisible Man of the Underworld’. It’s a parallel memoir of two characters: one track follows the story of the author and the other one is the story of Iqbal, a kingpin in the underworld under whom Dawood Ibrahim worked as a tapori in his younger days. This true story is a result of a series of interviews and an investigation conducted over the course of two years into the golden period of gold smuggling. Originally written in Gujarati (1990), it appeared in Hindi (Musalman 1995) and Kannada (1996). Its Marathi translation was serialised in the newspaper Mahanagar (2004).
This true story covers most of the prominent points with facts and figures related to the rise of the organized Muslim crime-world in Mumbai between 1935 and 1965.
It is said that you became an author by accident when you suffered your first heartbreak? Tell us something about that journey
When your first love crashes, its impact is so devastating that it demands expression – the pain too much to contain. But I was an introvert. I became speechless. Again, silence was not the solution to come out of the tragedy. I thought I must express my feelings to someone I trust, but I had no intimate friend. The only way out I could find was to vomit it out, to write it down on a piece of paper. I had a couple of foolscap sheets with me.
I ended up writing more than 500 pages. Now, I didn’t know what to do with those papers. I was living in a chawl and my neighbour was a kabaadi. His eyes were on that heap of papers. One day, he asked, ‘What have you written?’ I didn’t know the answer, so I quietly handed him the bundle of papers. I was sure it would go to the shredder. Instead, he read it and forwarded the pages to a publisher ‘Swati Prakashan’ whose unsold books the kabaadi used to sell at half-price on the pavement. To my surprise, my pages were accepted as a ‘new wave’ novel. It was published in 1965 in Gujarati, under the title ‘Tutela Farishta’ (Fallen Angels) and later on in Hindi as ‘Tute Hue Farishte’.
You are the creator of lovable characters like Bahadur, Inspector Azad, Shuja, Dhabbuji: How does you connect with children so well? Also in the age of Ipads and play stations, are we losing out on the essence of childhood?
As a seven-year-old child, the first comic I stumbled upon was Disney’s Mickey Mouse. I was fascinated by the illustrations, the colours, the humour… in short everything about the comics. At the same time, my intuition declared, ‘If Disney can, you can.’ So easy. I copied every page and all the images of Mickey. That was my base. I wanted to be Walt Disney. Disney worked all his life for children. So have I. I am still doing children’s books, comics, even novels for children. This year, Sahitya Academy published a volume of my four books for children ‘Mera Naam Hai (My Name Is)’.
In the age of iPads and Playstations, cell phones and videos, children of this century have lost all the fun we had during our childhood: climbing trees like monkeys, shaking branches to make ripe mangoes fall, dancing in the first rains, playing hide and seek in the bushes, going to the fair to see naag-kanya, jugglers coming to our neighbourhood and making a kid sitting in a big basket disappear, and to top it all, the deadly fight between a snake and a mongoose.
Today, on the very first day of school, I see children crying bitterly while going, like goats dragged being dragged to a butcher’s shop. In our days, the first day of school was celebration, because till the age of five, we wore only banyan or short sleeved shirts. On the first day of school, we use to get our very first half-pant. Not only that, the village teacher himself would come to receive us with a bunch of kids and a drummer. Out mothers would place a garland of flowers in our neck. Now the procession would start. We would walk happily like bridegrooms and other children dancing and singing like baaratis. Can anyone today imagine the fun of the first day of school?
You live a quiet life in Mumbai. What helps you remain calm in a chaotic city? Does meditation help? How spiritual are you?
If there was no meditation (vipassana) in my life, I would have been a schizophrenic locked up in some mental asylum. All my life I struggled between a tsunami of creative ideas and no resources to give them shape. One year, I got two strokes within a month and collapsed on the railway platform and street.
In 1969, I began to go crazy because I could not afford canvasses to paint. So I attacked the walls of the single room in which I was living with my wife and child. I painted all the four walls and whatever came my way – doors and furniture, pots and pans… (The wife wisely disappeared for a few days with the baby)
Then I came across a friend who guided me to a Vipassana meditation camp at a dharamshala (inn) somewhere near Gol Deval Temple, close to Kamathipura, Mumbai. When I came out after ten days of meditation, I was completely transformed. My thoughts were under my control. Then I sent my wife for ten days. She was so impressed that she did two camps of 30 days meditation. Not only that, we sent our two kids also for children’s courses.
Finally, what is your message to the youth struggling to come to terms with life vis-à-vis your own life where you don so many hats?
Today’s younger generation is confused between knowledge and wealth. No student goes for higher education to get knowledge. They choose the subject that can generate maximum wealth. So my message is simple: If you want happiness, go for knowledge. Seek the company of wise men, read good books, at least a book a week. You may fail to get top grades in University, but I assure you that you will succeed in life. And that’s what matters.
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