Professor Kelpha was the stage name Shri Dada Saheb Phalke took on while entertaining neighbors in his chaal – gated community of yore in erstwhile Bombay, now Mumbai. As the city’s landscape is changing into tony towers the chaal kind of living too is getting extinct. Phal ke is how its written in Marathi and when it is transposed it becomes ke-l-pha. Behind this simple transposition lies the great leadership & entrepreneurship qualities of the Father of Indian Cinema.
This is a movie was directed by Paresh Mokashi , and was India’s Official Entry to the Academy Awards for the Best Foreign Language Film Category in September 2009. The film got raving reviews from the audiences, the critics and most importantly captured the life and times of Dadasaheb, with all nuances in great detail. Watching the film also got me to bookmark certain scenes as examples of entrepreneurship and its associated traits, here are some which I found note worthy.
1. Never taking oneself to seriously
By calling himself Kelpha, he laughed at himself and also tried to regale the audiences with his funny / magical acts on stage before becoming the movie maker he was.
To further his craft he kept selling off the belongings in his house one after the other. One day when he came back he saw his neighbors with forlorn faces and consoling his while, as if someone had died. Only to realize that the mourning was for the cupboard – an important element of every household till even now, was sold off. He shooed them off saying they are behaving as if someone is dead! And that they better mind their own business
2. Passion for his craft
There are days and nights he kept watching the English film that was screened so much so that his eyes got affected and his family thought that he has gone blind. He pledged his Insurance Policy as a guarantee, while going to England to learn about the medium.
3. Friends as #Angel #Investors
He borrowed money from his close associates and friends to fund for his first movie, and I suspect that this could be perhaps the first example of angel funding for commercial use.
4. A supportive spouse & kids
At a point in time his friends thought that he has lost his mind and took him to Thane Mental Hospital. His wife and his kids though encouraged him through the toughest of the phases giving him a princely sum to Rs.59/- through all the piggy banking they had done. The only elements left to be sold were his wife’s jewelry. That too got mortgaged when he came back from England and wanted to start making the first film.
5. A great sense of humor
His cast was an assorted mix of carpenters, masons, amateur actors. Those days it was not appropriate to work in films, and one of the cast got rejected by a prospective alliance because he told his would be bride that he worked in a motion picture company. Phalke, nonchalantly told them to tell everyone that they must tell the world that they worked at Harishchandrachi Factory! Because working in a ” Factory” was respectable and Raja Harish Chandra – on whom he based his first movie was an embodiment of truth.
6. Caring for your team
While he did not have money to pay, he ensured that everyone on the sets were well fed with home made food, there were no production units. His wife too participated in cooking for the entire unit.
7. Of audacious intent & pushing the bar!
He lived in conservative times and women rarely left their husbands homes, leave alone work and to work as an actress – was sacrilege. He went and requested prostitutes to play the female cast. When that sort of bombed, he got men to play the female role and demanded that their gait and dialogue to be perfect to the role. Getting the men to shave off their moustache was an affront to their “male-hood”
8. Handling disappointment & Out-of-the-box thinking
His first show under the banner of ” Coronation Cinema” had only a dog passing by, and the show was watched only by the cast and his close family. Bookings for further shows only numbers ~ 50 odd and he got a compliment from an English Gentleman. This too he put it as a great achievement for a first timer and kept the team’s morale up. He sent out hand-bills and town criers and used out-of-the-box marketing techniques till the movie became a rage.
9. Getting the regulator on your side
When you do something for the first time, you tend to get into the cross-hairs of the regulator. It happened to him when the entire crew got caught by the police for roaming around with a camera and creating a nuisance of themselves, with men dressed as women. Till, he did a special screening of a shot to explain how the movie is made, absolved himself and the unit of any misgivings and got the regulator on his side.
10. The big picture
He always had the big picture in mind. When Raja Harishchandra got screened abroad, the western film fraternity wanted him to stay back and make films in England. He refused saying, if he as a pioneer left his country with this knowledge how will the industry grow? How will his country be on the map of motion picture making countries of the world.
Today the Dadasaheb Phalke Award is the most prestigious award every cine-artist in the country yearns for. If it were not for him movies & their magic would have never touched India.
Thank you Paresh Mokashi & UTV Motion Pictures for the wonderful #movie Harishchandrachi Factory. I stumbled upon this gem 7 years later and learned much more than how the first movie was made in India.
The show must go on……
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