Father Paul, Gabbar Singh and a lesson in self-belief

It was the year 1975. The year Sholay, one of the biggest Hindi movie blockbusters of our era, was released. If you’re an Indian, any attempt at explaining the impact of Sholay would be redundant. If you’re not, any attempt at explaining its impact, would be futile. Lets just say, if you combine Gone with the Wind, The Godfather and Star Wars and multiply their impact with 10, then you come somewhere close to understanding its cultural relevance. The movie was singularly responsible for spawning off several new trends and products. Like the best selling two-cassette set of its complete audio soundtrack. The soundtrack was not just its music, but the entire audio, all 3 hours 24 minutes of it. In those pre-internet, entertainment starved times, millions of fans resorted to maximising their fondness for the movie, through its audio soundtrack, replaying the movie in their heads, as the lines from the movie played in the background, on their ‘two-in-one’ players (a popular name for a combination of radio & cassette player). One, among those millions, was a six year old me. Listening to its soundtrack was almost a daily post-school routine. My favourite part being when the chief antagonist, the dreaded dacoit Gabbar Singh makes his entry, a chilling sequence that has him rebuke three of his men for returning without any loot from the nearby village, in a six minute spell-binding oratory firepower, that ends with his using the real thing to kill all three. Like countless others, I had this sequence memorised by heart. 

Cut to my school. Our Vice Principal was Father Paul. In my faded, ageing memory, I recall him as a tall, jovial character, with a hearty laugh and a kids’ favourite. Well before Tom Peters made MBWA (Management By Walking around) popular, Father Paul was its original practitioner! He was habituated to conducting school rounds, walking into a class and engaging the kids in casual chats on topics not necessarily related to the subject being taught. So in walked Father Paul in our English class, as we were going through another prosaic chapter of our Radiant Readers course book, and asked a question that was rather surprising, even by his own unconventional standards, “Who has watched Sholay?” Most hands went up. The next question, “Who knows Gabbar Singh’s dialogues?” (In India, ‘dialogues’ is a colloquial term for movie lines, even for a monologue!) No hand went up this time. I faced a split second dilemma. I knew the ‘dialogues’ and not admitting would be tantamount to lying. On the other hand, if I did, I risked being asked to do a Gabbar Singh in the class. But eventually, the decision was easy. Not admitting the truth to the school Vice Principal was not an option. So my hand slowly went up, not in a confident straight up vertical way, but in a confessional askew ‘L’ shaped way. Father Paul smiled and said exactly what I dreaded, ‘You do! Nice, why don’t you perform the dialogues for us’. I reluctantly started enacting the familiar sequence, voice trembling, but soon gained enough confidence to raise my decibel level, even adding my rendition of the dramatic background score. The last bit had me recreating the sound of gun shots, complete with echo effects, with Gabbar Singh declaring something to the effect of, ‘if you’re scared, then you’re dead’, the Bollywood equivalent of YOLO. A lesson, I’m sure, different from the ‘moral of the story’ of the Radiant Readers chapter that got interrupted. I wasn’t sure how Father Paul would react and had a brief moment of anxiety, not too dissimilar to what Gabbar Singh’s men might have experienced, before he shot them. Father Paul walked up to me, slow clapping, I was not sure if he meant it or was being sarcastic, till he patted me on the back, said well done, and walked out continuing his MBWA rounds. Phew!

The next day, as I was playing with my friends during lunch hour, I was summoned to the teacher’s staff room. My heart skipped a beat ,”Oh God, its my Gabbar Singh performance. The English teacher is not happy since I disrupted her Radiant Readers lesson!”, I told my friends. When I reached the staff room, the English teacher said to the rest of the teachers, who were in various stages of finishing their lunch from their tiffin-boxes “he’s the guy”. To a six year old, merely entering the teachers’ staff room can be intimidating, let alone all the teacher’s staring at you a day after you’ve interrupted a Radiant Readers session with a Gabbar Singh performance! And then the English teacher said, “Can you do Gabbar Singh again?” 

Something got triggered inside me from there on. A belief got embedded that if you practice something hard enough, people listen and appreciate. Of course, as a six year old, I didn’t think too deeply about this then. It just made the subsequent Gabbar Singh performances, and a few others, less stressful. While I don't stake a claim to have any special presentation skills, over the years, I have never found it daunting to present to an audience, in fact I find it rather stimulating. The fact that I recall this incident so vividly, is perhaps indicative of its positive impact on my mental make up. 

Many of our experiences are seemingly insignificant, but have an outsized impact on our self-image. A chance encounter here, a random remark there - one never knows what sticks and gets permanently etched as one of our foundational beliefs. Perhaps the best way to help the next generation discover their foundational beliefs is to give them an environment that allows them their Father Paul moments!