Comedian, screenwriter, lyricist, and comic-book writer Varun Grover adds the title of director in his CV with All India Rank, a semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age tale of a reluctant IIT-aspirant and his middle-class parents. The film, which recently had its Asia premiere at the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, is not just an exploration of Indian society’s unhealthy obsession with engineering degrees. It’s also a nostalgic excursion into the simpler times of the ‘90s.
The era of Swad toffees, STD PCOs, Grihshobha magazines, and Doordarshan. “It was such a personal story that I knew that if I gave it to another director, they wouldn’t be able to capture the essence of it,” says Varun. “I was sure that if I got to make just one film in my life, it would be this. I had plans of publishing it as a novel in case it didn’t get made.”
In a freewheeling chat, the Sacred Games and Masaan writer talks about the challenges of presenting a personal story, how direction made him a better writer, and why he thinks filmmaking is like cooking.
Excerpts: From where did the idea for All India Rank originate? It came from a deep, personal level. In India, once you turn 17, people start treating you as if you turned 27. You have to decide the rest of your life at that young age. I remember, back in 1996, when I had just got done with my Class 10 board exams. That was a time, especially in North India when school kids got the longest break from school. There wasn’t any homework as such, moreover, you didn’t know what subjects you wanted to choose in Class 11. So, you have these 60 days with nothing to do and I remember thinking: ‘This is the last holiday of my life.’ That feeling stayed with me over the years and I always wondered why I thought the way I did. I wanted to do something about that feeling of impending doom.
As a writer, is it difficult or easy to write a personal story? In a way, both. Easy, because since it’s your life, you know all the minute details. Difficult, because you are constantly double-checking if you are romanticising something too much because it came from your life and maybe only you care about it. That confusion was tough to overcome. Since I wrote the film in 2014 and revisited the drafts in 2016 and 2020, it gave me enough time to look at the story objectively.
For somebody like you, who has been a screenwriter for long, does direction still come with its bunch of hurdles? Oh, it does. See, as writers we don’t know how to deal with people. We are used to sitting alone in a dark room and working. Moreover, we are very socially awkward people, I know I am. And now you have to talk to so many people and make them understand your creative vision while managing their egos. Direction, in a way, became a learning experience for me as a writer. Now, if I write with more description and clarity, it can lead to fewer questions on the sets and people can focus on the scene rather than pondering upon, for example, the colour of the curtains in the back.
This is a story of a young boy Vivek and the societal and parental pressure on him to crack into IIT. Since it is semi-autobiographical, I have to ask, how much of a pressure were you in to crack JEE? A lot. Not much from parents, luckily, but there was the entire neighbourhood, the whole school, and all of the teachers. At that age, and this happens especially in the North, although you already have a set of parents, everybody in your residential colony will be parenting you. Any random uncle will ask if you have filled out the form or how much you scored in a mock test. Getting into IIT was supposed to bring honour to your house, your school, and your entire neighbourhood. So yeah, pressure toh tha.
The film’s opening song is titled ‘Noodle Sa Dil’. Vivek’s mother is a diabetic with a laddoo obsession. In your online children’s comic Karejwa, a kid’s final wish is to eat a gulaabjamun before the world ends. Food seems to seep into your creative work… For me, food and creativity have a strong connection. Cooking for me is as satisfactory as writing a story. It is a meditative exercise. When Buddhist monks make Mandala art, they make it for days and once it is complete, they smear it. That’s the feeling I get when I cook. It doesn’t matter whether you put in effort for two hours, six hours, or two days, the dish will ultimately be gobbled up in 15 minutes. I feel filmmaking is also the same. You work on a film for years and people live with it for two hours before exiting the theatre. If it is good, they will remember it for one or two days. If it is bad, they might just forget it in a few hours. The beauty of both cooking and filmmaking is in the process and not in the end product.
Surprisingly, the film is as much a coming-of-age for the parents as much as it is for Vivek. Usually, young-adult films focus on the teen. The story begins when the train starts and the parents are left behind… I think Indian stories are about families and not only individuals. In our houses, not just a child, an entire family takes an exam. I wanted to focus equally on the journey of both the parents and the child. This was also done to contextualise where this whole hullabaloo around IIT comes from. It comes from the insecurities of middle-class families and the weight of their unfulfilled dreams that they pile upon their kids. By the end, not just Vivek, but the parents also had to realise that getting into IIT isn’t the ultimate goal. All of them had to come of age.
