Yasser Usman’s book on Indian cinema’s legendary actor Guru Dutt is a mirror that reflects the hard hitting realities of cinema ever since its inception. It is a narrative that shatters the myths, the rose tinted glasses with which we as viewers look up to the film industry. The tales of the 50s were almost as jarring and whimsical as it is today. If this book had been documented in those days, maybe the lens with which we view cinema today, would have been a little less blurred.
Yasser is a renowned author who has previously written books on Rekha, Sanjay Dutt and superstar Rajesh Khanna. Usman doesn’t beautify or sugar coat his narrative of the stars. He tells the story of these actors in simpler, understandable and glamorous ways, exactly the way we know them.
Guru Dutt An Unfinished Story is a collection of Dutt’s life stories, starting with the screening of Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam at Berlin Film Festival in 1963. He doesn’t waste the reader’s time in painting a picturesque early life and childhood cliche of the actor. Usman gets straight to business and starts with a hard hitting reality of Dutt’s life, perhaps his first taste of what one can call failure as his film failed to get an audience of more than 25 people in a foreign land and how he lost his protege - Waheeda Rahman.
The book is melancholic, just like Dutt’s idea of scripts and his life. If you’re reading this book during the pandemic or you’re alone or get triggered by sensitive topics like life and death (Guru Dutt committed suicide), you may want to park the book on your bookshelf until you’re ready to immerse yourself in the world of Guru Dutt. That doesn’t mean that you mustn’t pick up the book. You must! But with caution.
Usman thanks and dedicates the book to Guru Dutt’s sister, Lalitha Lajmi, an eminent artist who has contributed to the book (as told to Usman) with anecdotes from Dutt’s life. This book talks about the tough life, poverty, struggles, mental health woes, the fickle logistics of the film industry, starry tantrums, lack of digitisation, risque budgets and personal sacrifices.
“Like his films, his life was a dream in two parts - the building of the dream and then the destruction of the dream. We tell it here as it was,” writes Usman. By the end, you’ll know Guru Dutt, the boy who had a disturbed childhood, why and how was his iconic film Pyaasa made, his extravagant nature, his heartbreaks, unwillingness to stay alive, and most imperatively, that we lost a man who told real stories, had real - common man’s struggles, and a creative brain which was difficult to comprehend to for people around him. Lastly, the book shows how little value we as a society attach to the art & culture community, as compared to scholars from other fields when it comes to monetary compensation and respect.
Published by Simon & Schuster, the book is available on Amazon.
