There was an absurdist, Bollywood comic trilogy between 2005-08 that, it beats me now, how it’s rapidly expanded its fandom

Director and writer Anees Bazmee. PIC/ASHISH RAJE

Trust you me: I’ve been among film buffs at film festivals for long enough to be this gobsmacked, hosting a conversation with Anees Bazmee, 63, before a live audience, at the Jagran Film Festival  in Mumbai — surrounded by such die-hard fans, in a para-social relationship with a particular movie by the director, Welcome (2007), listing out favourite characters, lines, scenes… 

The claps don’t stop.

A woman in the hall reminisces how she had a broken leg with “Ek taang nakli hai” (actor Mushtaq Khan’s monologue) scribbled on her plaster. Watching Welcome helped her recuperate. 

Another girl declaims at length about how the film, for her, was “treatment for mental health,” recalling the climax sequence, with the entire cast inside a tree-house type structure, balancing on a bamboo stick.

Bazmee tells us a friend insisted on having him over for dinner with his dad. It’s when he made it there, he realised, the father had once been muted, paralysed for two years.

Stills from the absurdist comedies No Entry (2005)

The dad had been meaning to play Welcome on TV. It took his son a month to figure this. For a year after,........

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