At a particular moment in Subash Sahoo’s documentary, The Sound Man Mangesh Desai, veteran filmmaker Satyajit Ray uses the word ‘indispensable’ for the sound mixer/recordist. Known for his precise choice of words, Ray’s endorsement should be enough to sum up the wizardry of Mangesh Desai, who has worked on an estimated 3700 films in a career spanning four decades. Ray’s son, Sandip Ray, makes an interesting observation stating that when Desai sat behind those controllers, he and the machine ‘became one’.
Those haunting footsteps of Gabbar Singh in Sholay? Or the sound of those empty swings, after Thakur’s family has been shot dead? Sippy recounts how releasing the film on an audio cassette (replete with dialogues and background score) was an ode to the genius of Mangesh Desai. While talking about the classic Bollywood film, how many of us actually knew about Desai’s contribution that elevated the film to such great heights?
Veteran ad filmmaker Prahlad Kakkar paints a fantastic picture saying that when the tiny, frail Desai would sit behind his sound controllers, he would transform into this 7-feet tall beast, whose aura filled the room. Kakkar calls Desai the ‘Pope’ of sound, who was ‘unafraid’ of silences. Irreverent as ever, Kakkar compares Desai’s physicality to a gloomy ‘vulture’, his pointed nose appearing like a beak, and how he would sit on his leather throne while pronouncing judgement on the works of everyone who walked in through the doors of V Shantaram’s Rajkamal studios.
It didn’t matter if the man in front of him was Raj Kapoor, Yash Chopra, Satyajit Ray or Ramesh Sippy – Desai knew only how to speak his mind. The king of romance, Yash Chopra, even recounts an incident when Desai sent a film’s leading man packing home, after he couldn’t time his dub correctly because of a lack of interest. Desai was a serious perfectionist, and he had no time to waste by mollycoddling mediocrity. Vanraj Bhatia describes Desai as a ‘tyrant’ to his junior colleagues at Rajkamal studios, scaring them with his no-time-for-BS temper.
Sahoo’s documentary has such an electric subject at its core, that you almost forgive the fractured way in which he goes about unearthing the legend of Desai. A sound recordist himself, it’s fitting that Sahoo begins his film with a shot of the not-supposed-to-be-seen boom mic. Educating the audience about something we take for granted, Sahoo not only makes a point for what an important role sound plays in filmmaking, but it also underlines how Desai could change a scene purely by his choices.
Working on Sholay at the famous Abbey Road studios, Desai took time to warm up to the ‘restraint’ that his counterparts from London, were exercising. They didn’t have Desai’s astute understanding of how sound blared and bounced in a Bollywood single screen. And that’s why even though Desai didn’t say a word through those 3 months, when he came back to Bombay he (in his own words) ‘undid’ some of the work of his colleagues in the Abbey Road studios. Having been involved in a majority of the biggest films through the 60s and 70s, he knew what a Hindi film should sound like.
He knew how to sonically dial up the masala quotient in a scene, like that iconic scene from Deewar. Chopra distinctly remembers how it was Desai’s idea to cut between the close-ups of both Amitabh Bachchan and Shashi Kapoor (for exactly four frames, multiple times) before delivering the punchline – Mere paas maa hai.
Sahoo’s documentary offers little insight into Desai’s family, leaving aside Desai’s days as a freedom fighter when he used his degree in chemistry to make crude bombs and gather pistols from Goa. It does, however, recount how a touching vignette of him presenting his daughter with the preserved ticket of her first bus ride, nearly 20 years ago. Desai’s son went on to become a surgeon, and the father never failed to joke about how his son only operated on one body at a time, while he conducted ‘surgeries’ on eight tracks simultaneously.
The Sound Man Mangesh Desai isn’t quite as comprehensive as say, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s stellar portrait of film archivist P.K.Nair in Celluloid Man, but it is equally important. In an industry, where the glamour and the headlines are sentenced to the faces, this documentary is an ode to the silent heroes tirelessly working behind the scenes. Sahoo’s documentary also passionately persuades us to not merely ‘watch’ the movies, but also to sit up and ‘listen’.
