Name: Rahat Yusufi

Born: Muslim / Indian / 18.11.46

Occupation: filmmaker

Appointed: Prof. & Head Dept of Film Direction & Screen Writing 01.06.82.

Terminated: 31.07.85 

Note: There are only two such cases in the 50 year history of Film (&TV) Institute. The other was Ritwik Ghatak.

Now, the story goes that to recognize the unique value of a teacher and an artist, most people wait for the perspective of distance & time. Those, aware of how striking is the match between ‘personality & work’, however, would have a more immediate clue. Welcoming young minds to a New Universe of Cinema; sharing an awareness of its past, present & future. Completely immersed in resonances, vibrations and new tones echoing from these young minds; refining & orchestrating them with the tuning fork of vivid intuition; radiating in company, eloquent, satirical & witty. There is harmony between my work and talk. My revolt against ‘cliché’ never ceased. I used virulent, pungent language retaining a revolutionary boldness of the youth of New Cinema, yet always directed by intelligence & discrimination, never blind or inaccurate. Trying never to destroy anything but mediocrity, hypocrisy & falsification I attacked only what deserved to be attacked; never in personal, petty or blind anger.

My fights are waged against those who always stood in the way of vast, original projects because they could neither perceive, nor control them. Ironically, one never even had a ‘complete’ work-shop to work with. I am filled with concepts I could not carry out for lack of necessary institutional support, that it to say, I needed the very machines which are so freely entrusted to young, unformed minds in order to fill the void of intellectual engagement. I needed the studio for explorations into further articulations of Film Form following great traditions laid down by Paul Klee and Serge Eisenstein to establish new praxiological paradigms; only to be broken and improved upon by the next generation of course, and that is how I see Film Form & Film Sense growing; not sitting on the shelf out there.

Here at FTII, I have seen with my own eyes; after molding our men & women to standard form, corrupting and inhibiting them we were trying to find ways & means of getting creative ideas out of them. These men & women, reduced to automations were like half filled footballs. One kick & they go ‘thupp’ at the next spot. To get some bounce in them I suggested we call artists bubbling with ideas. There was long studied silence, and since I didn’t shift my gaze, “oh, yes, we know,” they said, “you mean those mad fellows who wear not ‘clean clothes’ will not come on time and can not be controlled”. Here ‘control’ is the key word! Everyone wanted men who could be controlled- disciples, imitators, derivatives. No one dared to consult the source, fountainhead of all creation and invention; the most wonderful worldly phenomena. It would require a critic, a scholar and a Director of the institution of equal stature to approach a young artist who, by natural rights of the creator, is the Director in his own province.

At long last something seemed to be happening to our management. Younger, more vigorous, more intent and more scientifically oriented managers were seen even in academic & governing councils. New modes of organization were being tried out at some other level of recursion. Ironically, as classic case of left hand not knowing what the right has done; the following year after my expulsion I was nominated a member of the Governing Council of FTII! 

I speak of these signs with a strained voice, with the air of a shipwrecked mariner sighting a sail. The reason is that we have really left it rather late to attempt an adaptation to new circumstances, as did dinosaurs before us. It could yet leave us managerially un-adapted and in the end extinct; purely in relation to the ‘rate of acceleration of change’ if nothing else; devastating digital technological advances as well as rapidly altering theories and practices of Film Culture leave behind orthodox Brahmanism of old sprocket hole culture in a haze of dust. Modern management must think about that. Their dilemma is whether to make a serious effort to understand cybernetic methods of co-operation or to streamline orthodox clerical procedures.

For explicit reference, one may consider the general system of ‘prestigious bodies’ that are created to administer on behalf of Government. Such a mechanism is meant for a) spending money as voted & b) making sure that such expenditure can be defended. If the money goes toward expansion of existing, popular or dominant forms, the system can not fail to demonstrate that the money was ‘well spent’. If, however, new ideas or fundamental research and experimentation are perused, they might fail – by definition – then all members of the said ‘prestigious body’ and those who appointed them would be vulnerable to criticism.

The first reason why heurist ideas often fail and old ideas prevail, is benign, mere human weakness; the second is malign, meaning that not only is it beyond the comprehension of the existing system but that the existing system finds it threatening to its own status quo. Half a Century old, centrally sponsored, member of International SELECT group of Film Schools, we can not maintain our prestige merely by holding on to status quo. Its viability and indeed survival is threatened by at least three State owned Film Schools and a score of University Departments countrywide, and counting. It is no longer the only one this side of Suez!

This analysis is not ventilation of an idle mind because I have personally suffered at their hands. It is worth noting that any conscientious person who comes to this realization has no choice but to opt out. But by opting out one strongly re-enforces the down-hill trend. This ‘dilemma’ could be resolved, but not by any ‘rebellious individual’ or a ‘patriarchal autocrat’; it might seem an oversimplification, but the answer is ‘structural’.  Reformatory zeal is not enough on the part of reformers as reforms soon become constrained for they hadn’t been thought through to start with; and old ideas prevail wearing a fresh suit. It is not because old ideas are successful, they are not; and FTII is in a worse mess to prove it.

If rain is falling from the sky some people would head for shelter, others would enjoy walking in it; their perception of what is happening differs. The fact that both groups will agree to the sentence, ‘it is raining’ does not mean they perceive the event in the same way.

The demon, eyeballing me presently, is break down. The one liner of acting director FTII on that fateful summer day in 1985 is a typical symptom. Something we know needs re-inventing or something we are evolving through a painfully slow process of adaptation & evolution. As for ‘job descriptions’ if at all they exist, they turn out to be descriptions of men, not jobs. For the fact remains that ‘jobs’ do not do themselves, men do them; and the result is that people describe what the man is doing, or what the boss thinks the man ought to be doing and not an impersonal flow charting of a job, which is quite a challengingly difficult job in itself as any computer software program writer will tell you. If a big effort was made to describe the job, chances are no actual man would be found to fit it. So the job has to change. Actual institutional structures are heavily dependent on particular people who fill acknowledged roles; when these particular people leave, the structure often has to alter as well. Real life is also like that, and it is a lot of fun. The question is whether ‘real life’ at the film institute is best described this way and whether a structure like this really helps best in solving problems that arise in transforming enthusiasts into film makers; our reality in other words. Fifty years ago, origin of this institute was based upon a similar notion. Controlled by autocratic impulses, those men did everything that mattered, by them selves. Those who worked for them followed a leader and did as they were told. But to allow the olden heavily personalized structure to become depersonalized was a mistake, because it atrophied into a structural convention which has no particular raison d`etre. It made generalizations in just the dimension (viz. group personality of a set of actual people) in which generalization is impossible. It ignored the dimension that really matters – the dimension of ‘control’ itself. The convention did not answer the question: how shall input be optimally converted to output? Worse, the convention tended to obscure the very existence of the question and stopped it from being asked by facile one line pronouncements such as one issued to me on July 31st 1985.

Today, however control is redefined as something much more than interaction of senior staff and managers. It means the ability to cope with information beyond the capacity of those senior people and to absorb & interpret it. If arbitrariness was the first objection to this orthodoxy, the second one is much more powerful. There exist today, technologies to cope with information vastly in excess of human capacity. The manager is no longer the arbiter of sophistication. He must delegate some prerogatives, please to note, to ones who are more expert than he, but junior! But he has to know, how to organize the maintenance, he has to organize hardware so that the system remains viable, and re-organize the system so that it can be computed with. Thus, with human resource becoming the decisive competitive edge, managers have to serve as facilitators.

We can hardly go on unless we agree that a new language and a new model is required, along with a sufficiently rich conceptual framework. When you have half the story, when you have lopsided loyalty, you can not achieve a balance. Because of this difficulty, I actually ended up reporting directly to chairman. But, in fact it proved totally unworkable because Chairman could not give his time and attention while every one wanted to contest my day to day dealings with my next superior, in line.

The dynamics of this present structure depends upon quantification of its performance. Material benefit to as many people in power as would keep the boat from rocking has been the lingua franca between students and management, so far. The notion that ‘budgets’ and ‘schedules’ be strictly maintained to maximize number of productions and diploma holders within a fixed epoch leaves right out of the count other factors vital to our future viability. They are the latent capabilities of Film Institute which may be built up and metabolized. Standard costing and deadlines are short term control instruments and will not detect mismanagement of latent resources, not until it is too late, although it is happening now, and ought to be checked.

We need a measure of achievement which is less loaded in terms of emotional appeal and which is more comprehensive in terms of ‘real resources’. This measure, nonetheless, must manifest for the whole of the institution. If money is not the unit then we must think in terms of pure values. This, we may do by undertaking operational research and work study of processes on a considerable scale; negotiating new agreements, raising the morale, improving the quality of our concern, and its management by creating multiple feed back loops for course correction at regular intervals in time. The common fear would be that latency will improve at the cost of productivity, but if a potent management can improve the ‘actual performance’ measures of achievement shall rise.

These ideas are not, of course, original, even though they are new. They are new because recent changes in our environment require them. Clearly there is no more important function for education to fulfill than helping us recognize the world we actually live in, and simultaneously, helping us to master the concepts that will increase our capability to cope with it. This can be achieved in a system which in Pt. J. Nehru’s words. “…stands for tolerance, for reason, for the adventure of ideas…and for the search of truth.”