Rebel Without a Pause

Actor, filmmaker and painter Amol Palekar marks his 80th birthday with a deeply introspective memoir

There's a heart-warming story behind the title of Amol Palekar's memoir, Viewfinder. When Palekar decided to direct his first film, Hrishikesh Mukherjee gave him a director's viewfinder which he himself had received from Bimal Roy before making his first film. It became a treasured possession for Palekar, imbued with symbolism. "How many great technicians, starting with Bimal da, must have used this priceless gift that I had received from Hrishi da," he writes. When monitors replaced viewfinders in film shooting, he passed it on to Roy's daughter, Rinki Bhattacharya.

For all the havoc it wreaked, the Covid-19 pandemic, with its enforced isolation, served as a creative wellspring for many, including Palekar. He had toyed with the idea of penning a memoir for nearly a decade. "Almost every publisher was after me. Many offers were that I would narrate and somebody would write, which I didn't like; because it is my choice of words and pace that makes my writing individualistic, and this must be there in a memoir," he says. Besides, he never had the time, being busy with painting, exhibitions and acting. Covid gave him the necessary solitude to "excavate" his thoughts, which he put down in longhand in Marathi, a process that took six months.

Then Palekar handed over the manuscript to wife Sandhya Gokhale to edit and curate. "Sandhya has this amazing capacity to look at my work with all the affection and yet with her critical faculties at their peak. That's why her opinion is the most important to me," he says. Sandhya took about seven months to finalise the Marathi version, and then did the English translation.