100 Crazy Fans. And a market that never d(r)ies. Congratulations Mithun da !

(Bollywood trivia alert)

Way back in the mid-90s, for most engineering students from our era, cinema was the prime medium to unwind ourselves & suspend ourselves into the make-believe, and to tuck our existential dilemmas away inside a dark theatre for a few hours.

Like most serious movie buffs, I too had, by the age of twenty, ‘found’ my cinema & earned my geek stripes with my proficiency (so I concluded) on matters of the screen. It also contributed to a certain snootiness that comes from partial mastery of any subject at a young age.

Woody Allen, Spielberg, Coppola, Tarantino, Kurosowa, Scorsese, Bergman, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Ramesh Sippy, Guru Dutt, Yash Chopra, Bimal Roy & the list goes on. For my generation of Indians, Hollywood was still about Sly, Al Pacino, Arnie & De Nero, while back home, Bachchan remained a favorite from our childhood memories (Shah Rukh Khan was to soon follow). And so on.

I mentioned snootiness. So yeah, for me a certain school of actors was off bounds, whose movies I wouldn’t wish to watch even at gunpoint. Mithun Chakraborty was one of them. Paradoxically so, because he was a fellow Bengali after all, someone who picked a national award on his debut & who went ahead to rule the Indian screen through the 80s and into the 90s, giving jitters to Bachchan himself. But for the snobbish moviegoer in me, he represented everything trash worthy about cinema. So, I avoided him. And tore his films apart in canteen debates & during drinking sessions or in the film reviews I would occasionally write, often without having seen the film itself.

Then one October evening in 1995, I got into this argument with Bunty. Pushing 30 and built like a wrestler, Bunty used to be a regular fixture at the ‘chowk’ (four lane crossing) where we would meet up in the evenings for chai and cigarettes (& to soak up?sights of the steady traffic of girls returning to the nearby hostel). I had, during harmless banter, made some unflattering remark about Mithun. And that got Bunty’s goat.

Bunty was a fan. I mean, a REAL fan. The ‘first day first show’?kind of fan. The ‘throw money at the screen’?kind of fan. The fan who would wait at midnight to be the first to see the posters of his idol’s new movie being put up on the walls. The fan who had a Mithun name tattooed on his arm, & who would do a ‘namaste’ to Mithun before leaving home. Rumor had it that he had missed his final interview for a forest ranger’s job some years back because he passed by a theatre showing Mithun’s ‘Boxer’ & walked right in.?I guess you get the drift.

At first I was nervous he might hit me (he was twice my size). But to my surprise, he got all emotional & teary eyed. He said he would prove to me what Mithun Chakraborty was all about. To ease the awkwardness, I played along & pacified him. We agreed on a nearby theatre. And an upcoming Mithun movie. Night show.

The first thing that caught my eye as we?backed out of the ticket counter was a steady & growing footfall outside this seedy theatre late in the evening. What was striking about the ensemble of young & middle aged men was the homogeneity in their hairstyles & the way they were dressed (most of them were wearing loose floral shirts and light colored tight trousers with narrow shoes). And most of them seemed to know each other, and Bunty. Some even came forward and shook hands with him. For a change, Bunty was completely at ease & without his usual scowl.

Then, just before the gates were to open to let us in, a guy (who himself looked like a close cousin of Mithun) walked up & a hush descended around us. He brought out a coconut & cracked it in front of the gate and proceeded to hang a huge garland?around a cardboard cutout of Mithun by the gate. The crowd started clapping & to my astonishment, I too joined.

Once seated inside, I could physically feel the intense aura around us. Happy chatter from happy fans. As the lights dimmed, pin drop silence followed. Till Mithun’s appearance. And again it was pandemonium! Shrill whistles, coins being hurled at the screen, and people getting on their seats in ecstasy. It was electrifying. I spied a look to check Bunty. He was beaming. Like a proud parent of a super-achiever child, or like a proud child of a superstar dad.

Long story short. It was a terrible movie. That’s not the point here. The point here is that I sat there wide awake till 1 AM (despite 200 ml of Old Monk rum inside me) and enthusiastically participated in the celebration of a crazy artiste by his crazy fans.

Later, walking back to the scooter parking, Bunty, in a rare philosophical mood, explained to me the logic of the Mithun magic. Unlike the convent-bred crowd in posh theatres who went into a movie for intellectual stimulation or light entertainment, the people we saw a little while ago led hard lives. Most of them were at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid – school dropouts and daily wage earners who would save pennies for the experience we just witnessed. They were men whose tough & back breaking days needed closure. And Mithun provided them that closure. It’s not that they foolishly ‘believed’ in what they were fed. But over the years they had brought themselves to love this man who reminded them of themselves & who would also effortlessly bash up twenty baddies?while shaking a leg with Sridevi or Madhuri Dixit. Mithun, as Bunty explained, didn’t need the classes. He had his loyal niche sorted. He was their escape plan.

I graduated some years on & left the city to start on a career in sales & marketing. As I grew older & educated myself on my craft through observation, study & experience, I have shed my monochromaticity when it comes to making judgments on what works with an audience & how. In the super-connected world of today, your reach and spread is a given. Anyone with a handphone & an internet connection has access to an audience. But the ease of access is also directly proportional to the fleeting attention span & appalling retention levels of your art with your audience. And when everybody becomes a marketeer, it becomes essential to trace out that market of ‘nobody’ – that fringe no one has reached or influenced yet. And when it comes to grab a market of ‘nobody’, the rules never changed. It always begins with 10 crazy fans who go out and bring you 10 more fans each. So on. And that’s how you scale. And stay. In magical fringes where competition cannot enter.

Like for example, in a small rundown single screen theatre in a Tier 2 city of Maharashtra, where a hundred ‘nobodies’ assemble in a holy ritual, to pay their tributes to another ‘nobody’.

I still do not like Mithun or his movies. Nor do millions of other Indians (I’ve heard he's very popular in Russia though). But ask Mithun about us and he might shrug it off and say that it’s fine. His art is not for us. And that’s fine.

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(Footnote?– This is an excerpt from my 2021 bestselling book, 'Life-ing it'. Mr. Mithun Chakraborty ,73 now, a former Rajya Sabha member & a Naxalite-turned leftist, is one of the most popular movie stars of India who has won, among others, three national awards & two Filmfare awards thus far. He has acted in over 350 films in multiple languages & holds a record for maximum releases in a year for 1989 (19 releases), a record he himself equaled a decade later (in 1999). He was the highest taxpayer in India between 1995 and 1999. And in 2024, Mr. Chakraborty has been conferred the highest honer of Indian cinema - The Dadasaheb Phalke Award ! Thanks DADA, for the memories! Koi Shak?!)

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