Sriram Raghavan had an idea similar to Danny Boyle’s Yesterday twelve years ago!

KAL KYA HOGA KISKO PATA…

A Reader’s Digest joke said Mixed Emotions is watching your mother in law go over a cliff, in your brand new car. A few days back, the first trailer of Danny Boyle’s Yesterday came out and within minutes, was the talk of the town. Everyone was WhatsApping it to each other. What a great, fantastic premise and so on. The basic idea is Jack, a struggling musician, who wakes up one day, after an accident, and finds he’s in a world where no one remembers the Beatles. They don’t exist. But Jack remembers all their songs… and naturally, everyone around him loves what Jack is singing.

He plagiarises the Beatles and is soon on a route of super success. Until…. Of course, the trailer doesn’t reveal much more, so we got to wait till July, when the film releases. Hmmm. Very exciting premise and yes, I too am totally looking forward to watching this first-day-first-show. Only, I feel like a comedian. Because I had a very similar idea some twelve years ago. In my story, it wasn’t the Beatles, but RD Burman.

My story was this. Dhruv, a doctor in a general hospital is depressed. It’s his 40th birthday and he feels he’s generally missed the bus in life. He’s single, not thrilled with his job or himself, and wishes he’d pursued his dreams as a kid and become a musician. Of course, like a thousand others, he succumbed to parental pressure and is stuck in a job he has no passion for. His guitar lies in a dusty cover, under the bed.

That night, whilst doing the hospital rounds, he sees a crippled patient trying to jump off the third floor and kill himself. Dhruv rushes to save him and during the struggle, loses his balance and ends up plummeting to the floor. He is rushed to emergency and is fast losing consciousness.

The next morning he wakes up and finds he’s in a parallel universe, where everyone is a different avatar of themselves. A zapped Dhruv also discovers that by a quirk of fate, RD Burman was never born in this universe. Nobody has heard of Pancham or his tunes. Of course, Dhruv starts plundering RD’s trove of songs and sounds, and within a few months becomes a super successful musician and composer…a rockstar! He falls in love with a girl who totally adores his work….and today he plans to propose to her…. he wonders whether to tell her the truth, and whether she’d even believe it. Armed with a bottle of champagne and a diamond ring, he crosses the road to greet her, when a speeding car hits him.

He wakes up in the ICU of his old hospital. He is told he was in a coma for six months….and the doctors played RD Burman music hoping that it would help….because they knew Dhruv loved the music. It was meant to be a love story, a musical and a science-fiction tale all in one. We had great fun making lists of RD songs we’d use and so on….but the third act of the script kept eluding us.

I and my co writers tried various versions of the story but I was somehow never satisfied. So we put it aside and went into other movies. And occasionally opened that file to see if a brainwave strikes. All that was yesterday. I love Richard Curtis and Danny Boyle’s work so am totally looking forward to the film.

Sometimes, you work on an idea and then find someone else has already made it. I had read Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying and loved the book. I wrote a script and excitedly narrated the story to Tinnu Anand who told me that they were making Baazigar, which was based on the same story. You can imagine how tough it was for me to watch Baazigar at Anupam, Goregaon East, in a housefull show, and the guy next to me jumping up and down his seat in excitement.

These little heartaches are part of the game. And sometimes it’s good to wait. Many years back, director Neil Jordan was stuck on a script. It was a good story with strong elements, but something was eluding him. He knew something was missing but he didn’t know what. Exasperated, he put it aside and moved on to other work. And then, TEN YEARS LATER, out of the blue, he got a brainwave. An idea that was the vital key to the story. The brainwave is a huge Spoiler so I wont reveal it here. But it was a twist that changes the story on it’s head…. The film was THE CRYING GAME (1992) and it won the Oscar for Best Screenplay. Kal kya hoga kisko pata, (KASME VAADE) Music: RD Burman.