Relative value: A fine balance
Director Kabir Khan and actor-VJ Mini Mathur on how two strong, highly opinionated individuals can maintain the equilibrium at home.
They walk out of the elevator together, both dressed in white. And like any longmarried couple, they don’t realise that they are perfectly colour coordinated till they are facing the camera when Mini Mathur turns to her husband Kabir Khan and exclaims, “We look like Abbas-Mustan!” Focussed on pulling down the blinds to ensure that the light is right, he’s unfazed by her observation.
Khan was freelancing as a cinematographer and making documentaries when he met Mathur, a TV host, in Delhi. A Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) graduate, cinema was on the horizon but still a distant dream. However, soon after they were married, Mathur received an offer from MTV and moved to Mumbai. For a year Khan shuttled, living like a gypsy then, since it made little difference to his international clients where he lived, moved to this city. It was a soft landing.
Khan continued making his documentaries. Two of them, Taliban Years and Beyond and The Titanic Sinks in Kabul, took him to Afghanistan, put him in contact with militants and laid the foundation for not just his first film as director, Kabul Express, but also the one which would follow, New York. And for that, he has his wife to thank.
Mathur was hosting the twomonth Lagaan world tour and insisted her husband join her. So on September 9, 2001, Kabir landed in New York, joined his wife in Dallas the next day and from there they went to Atlanta on September 11; the day the World Trade Centre went down.
Khan and Mathur, along with the other guests, were herded out of their 40-storeyed hotel till all the planes had been accounted for. Then it was a 14-hour bus ride to Houston where they camped out for a week till the tour and flights resumed. At every airport, over the next month, a new story unfolded.
“Seven of us, including Ali, Kareem and Mohammed Morani, Mazhar Nadiadwala, Bunty Walia, Mini and I, were flying from LA to Washington, DC with 11 other passengers. The plane stayed on the tarmac for 40 minutes before some stereotypical FBI agents walked in and started interrogating us,” recalls Khan.
He’s still relieved that while the Feds asked about Pakistan, which he has never visited, they didn’t mention Israel, Bosnia or Afghanistan which he had, in the course of his travels along with journalist Saeed Naqvi. They were eventually cleared, but a passenger who had complained, resulting in the interrogation, still refused to fly with them and disembarked. “The plane took off after five hours and I continued to be picked up by the Feds for random questioning, triggering off the idea for New York,” says Khan.
When he was to travel to shoot the film, Khan was denied a visa and the immigration lawyer he hired told him that his file was with federal authorities who’d raised flags because of his Taliban and Afghanistan connections. They feared that since he was a Muslim, he could be “compromised”. Khan countered such assertions with a film, New York. The wheel then came a full circle: he received a call from President Barack Obama’s Under Secretary who told him to contact her if he ever had trouble entering the US again.
“His experiences have made Kabir plant all his films in a real backdrop and address questions related to international hostility and peace,” says Mathur, pointing to the upcoming Bajrangi Bhaijaan, which revolves around a man intent on reuniting a six-year-old child with her mother across the border.
Question her on any changes she has noted in her husband and Mathur points out that in all these years, he’d grab the newspaper to scan the headlines and international politics. “Now I see him sometimes flipping through the Bollywood pages too and tell him, ‘Boss, you have become filmi!’” she laughs, stopping her husband when he tries to butt into her answer.
However, she insists he’s still shy but just as secure as he was when she, as an MTV VJ, was more in the spotlight. “He enjoyed my success then, now I’m enjoying his, it’s our success at the end of the day and makes us happy,” she smiles.
Today, after 18 years of skittering about, Mathur has eased up. She’d rather be with her children. “Kabir took care of them when I was touring the country for Indian Idol or when I was shooting Iss Jungle Se Mujhe Bachao. I’m not going to waste my time reading lines from the teleprompter or watch a Bollywood star being paid Rs 2 crore for the TRP he or she might bring in. I’d rather focus on the film script I’ve been threatening to write for so long,” she says.
She won’t give up any more. All she’ll say is that since she’s a “peopleperson”, her script will be “full of human emotions and drama”. Will Khan produce it? He quickly points out that while they’ve always been each other’s sounding board, and have even collaborated on two documentaries – one on successful NRIs in England and the other on hand pump mechanics in Banda – they’ve decided to give each other all the support but also space and not work together.
“I’ve never taken any career decision without consulting Kabir, who will always be my go-to person if I ever make a film. And I know I’ll always be the one he shares every stage of the filmmaking process with, but it’s better for the marriage and our kids if we don’t bring the work stress home. I’ve heard too many nightmarish stories of couples who have worked together,” Mathur says.
Khan adds that even though they have similar ideologies and tastes in cinema, they are both driven by strong convictions. “So it’s better to have two parallel worlds with a great deal of overlap but not without complete juxtaposition,” he asserts.
They walk out of the elevator together, both dressed in white. And like any longmarried couple, they don’t realise that they are perfectly colour coordinated till they are facing the camera when Mini Mathur turns to her husband Kabir Khan and exclaims, “We look like Abbas-Mustan!” Focussed on pulling down the blinds to ensure that the light is right, he’s unfazed by her observation.
Khan was freelancing as a cinematographer and making documentaries when he met Mathur, a TV host, in Delhi. A Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) graduate, cinema was on the horizon but still a distant dream. However, soon after they were married, Mathur received an offer from MTV and moved to Mumbai. For a year Khan shuttled, living like a gypsy then, since it made little difference to his international clients where he lived, moved to this city. It was a soft landing.
“There was no ‘struggle’. We didn’t sleep on the railway platform under the lamppost but under the roof of the house we’d bought,” laughs Mathur. “Social networks were in place and we just melted into the pot, which was already brewing.”
Khan continued making his documentaries. Two of them, Taliban Years and Beyond and The Titanic Sinks in Kabul, took him to Afghanistan, put him in contact with militants and laid the foundation for not just his first film as director, Kabul Express, but also the one which would follow, New York. And for that, he has his wife to thank.
Mathur was hosting the twomonth Lagaan world tour and insisted her husband join her. So on September 9, 2001, Kabir landed in New York, joined his wife in Dallas the next day and from there they went to Atlanta on September 11; the day the World Trade Centre went down.
Khan and Mathur, along with the other guests, were herded out of their 40-storeyed hotel till all the planes had been accounted for. Then it was a 14-hour bus ride to Houston where they camped out for a week till the tour and flights resumed. At every airport, over the next month, a new story unfolded.
“Seven of us, including Ali, Kareem and Mohammed Morani, Mazhar Nadiadwala, Bunty Walia, Mini and I, were flying from LA to Washington, DC with 11 other passengers. The plane stayed on the tarmac for 40 minutes before some stereotypical FBI agents walked in and started interrogating us,” recalls Khan.
He’s still relieved that while the Feds asked about Pakistan, which he has never visited, they didn’t mention Israel, Bosnia or Afghanistan which he had, in the course of his travels along with journalist Saeed Naqvi. They were eventually cleared, but a passenger who had complained, resulting in the interrogation, still refused to fly with them and disembarked. “The plane took off after five hours and I continued to be picked up by the Feds for random questioning, triggering off the idea for New York,” says Khan.
When he was to travel to shoot the film, Khan was denied a visa and the immigration lawyer he hired told him that his file was with federal authorities who’d raised flags because of his Taliban and Afghanistan connections. They feared that since he was a Muslim, he could be “compromised”. Khan countered such assertions with a film, New York. The wheel then came a full circle: he received a call from President Barack Obama’s Under Secretary who told him to contact her if he ever had trouble entering the US again.
“His experiences have made Kabir plant all his films in a real backdrop and address questions related to international hostility and peace,” says Mathur, pointing to the upcoming Bajrangi Bhaijaan, which revolves around a man intent on reuniting a six-year-old child with her mother across the border.
Question her on any changes she has noted in her husband and Mathur points out that in all these years, he’d grab the newspaper to scan the headlines and international politics. “Now I see him sometimes flipping through the Bollywood pages too and tell him, ‘Boss, you have become filmi!’” she laughs, stopping her husband when he tries to butt into her answer.
However, she insists he’s still shy but just as secure as he was when she, as an MTV VJ, was more in the spotlight. “He enjoyed my success then, now I’m enjoying his, it’s our success at the end of the day and makes us happy,” she smiles.
Today, after 18 years of skittering about, Mathur has eased up. She’d rather be with her children. “Kabir took care of them when I was touring the country for Indian Idol or when I was shooting Iss Jungle Se Mujhe Bachao. I’m not going to waste my time reading lines from the teleprompter or watch a Bollywood star being paid Rs 2 crore for the TRP he or she might bring in. I’d rather focus on the film script I’ve been threatening to write for so long,” she says.
She won’t give up any more. All she’ll say is that since she’s a “peopleperson”, her script will be “full of human emotions and drama”. Will Khan produce it? He quickly points out that while they’ve always been each other’s sounding board, and have even collaborated on two documentaries – one on successful NRIs in England and the other on hand pump mechanics in Banda – they’ve decided to give each other all the support but also space and not work together.
“I’ve never taken any career decision without consulting Kabir, who will always be my go-to person if I ever make a film. And I know I’ll always be the one he shares every stage of the filmmaking process with, but it’s better for the marriage and our kids if we don’t bring the work stress home. I’ve heard too many nightmarish stories of couples who have worked together,” Mathur says.
Khan adds that even though they have similar ideologies and tastes in cinema, they are both driven by strong convictions. “So it’s better to have two parallel worlds with a great deal of overlap but not without complete juxtaposition,” he asserts.
