WAVES summit x Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro | Cyberpunk reality in Mumbai-OxBig News Network

Drishya Ashok with her winning poster

By the third day of WAVES (World Audio Visual Entertainment Summit), the recent sarkari symposium held in Mumbai, I was tuckered out. Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered the inaugural address; thenceforth, sessions upon sessions — about cultural soft power, about innovation and the ‘orange economy’, about how Netflix created 20,000 jobs through its local productions in India.

Wandering around the vast Jio World Convention Centre in BKC, what caught my attention was a much simpler item on the agenda: a film poster-making competition. Arranged on easels, outside one of the venues, were 10 hand-drawn paintings. The competition was co-organised by the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) and ImageNation, a Delhi-based art group specialising in graffiti and murals.

In the age of generative AI and the off-putting Studio Ghibli trend, the young participants — hailing from various art and film institutes of India — were given three hours in which to finish their paintings. But what delighted me most was the choice of film they were tossed: Kundan Shah’s corrosive political satire Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro.

The irony was unmissable. A comic skewering of bureaucracy and crony capitalism from the early 1980s, celebrated, over four decades later, at the heart of corporate Mumbai. The winning entry — a sly evocation of this dystopian imbalance — was by Drishya Ashok, a 25-year-old art direction student from the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). Born in Palakkad but brought up in Pollachi, Tamil Nadu, Ashok studied architecture and later assisted in the art departments of the Tamil films Demonte Colony (2015) and Naane Varuvean (2022). She watched Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro for the first time in preparation for the competition — “It’s so political and timeless!”

Ashok’s winning Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro poster

The third eye

In Shah’s endlessly entertaining classic, two foppish but penniless still photographers, played by Naseeruddin Shah and Ravi Baswani, stumble upon evidence of a political murder. Their slapstick sleuthing unfolds against the backdrop of a transforming Bombay, the concrete wilderness taking root. In Ashok’s painting, an analogue Pentax camera peers down from a flyover, keenly surveying a city bent out of shape. Seen from a distance, the camera almost resembles a surveillance drone.

“In film school, we are taught that the camera is the third eye,” she says. “It can manipulate you, provoke you. Currently, surveillance is happening everywhere through CCTV… and in the age of AI, the camera can even control itself. It can choose what to watch and where to watch.” While many of the other entries interpreted the film literally, it is this forbidding retrofuturistic quality to Drishya’s painting that puts it in conversation with present times.

Ashok lists Blade Runner, Solaris, Stalker and Metropolis as some of her favourite sci-fi works. Her regard for the genre isn’t out of place with Shah’s legacy. In his book, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro: Seriously Funny since 1983, Jai Arjun Singh reports that the filmmaker had written an unfilmed script in the late 70s called A Detective Story, which combined elements of ‘psychological thriller, social commentary and science fiction’. The plot centred on a dangerous ‘wonder drug’ that eliminates hunger.

 I reached out to Binod Pradhan, the cinematographer of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, for a comment on Ashok’s painting. “The first thing that struck me was the unique font of the title Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro. It went well with the rather dystopian world created by Drishya,” he shares. “It’s so modern, far away from the times we were in during the making of the film. The images look like [they are] from the film, but as if [they] were made in the modern world. The camera that smashed the bridge and the two characters hanging desperately onto celluloid film — as we wish we could in real life as filmmakers. That’s a wonderfully thoughtful layer in the poster!”