My Uncle

If people say that there is no such thing as The Indian Dream, my uncle and my father proved them wrong.

The ‘good old days’ were far from good - at least in India. They were the days when the poor stayed poor and the rich got richer. It was rare to scale the oppressing wall of poverty and make it to the side of the ‘haves’. It was rarer to imagine that a boy could leave his village with eight annas in his pocket and within a few decades entertain the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and Gregory Peck.

That boy was my uncle, Ambalal Jhaverbhai Patel (aka A.J.), born in the obscure village of Ode, Taluka Anand, in the Kaira district of Bombay State (now Gujarat). Now here’s a village that had not seen the light of the 21st century, nor the 20th, and not even the 19th for that matter. Reputed to have the deepest wells, there was a little ditty putting a curse on any father that married his daughter to a man from Ode. If a girl had to rely on getting her water from a well, it would only be the beginning of all her problems. Its redeeming value, and possibly the only one, was the fact that it was a member of the Panch Gaam group of villages.

A.J., or Motakaka as we called him, was not one to follow his father’s profession. My grandfather, Dada, the son of a humble farmer, educated himself and became a primary schoolmaster, earning the equivalent of eleven rupees a month. With this paltry amount, he was able to support a wife and four children, my father being the third child.

Ambalal was a boy of vision, but not one to study. His grades at school clearly demonstrated that he would not graduate. One fortuitous day, a visiting photographer showed his camera to the young boy, whose fate and future was forever sealed. Determined to do something with photography, he landed a series of jobs, the first being an usher in a cinema theater. This led further to stints in a photo studio and a job in East Africa. By now he was experienced enough to return to the film capital Bombay, popularly known as Bollywood today.

In 1932 he opened a small camera shop in Bombay with a capital of five hundred rupees and called it the Central Camera Company. It was at this time that he brought his family from the village. My fifteen-year old father, at first delighted to leave the village, soon realized it came at a price. His brother insisted on him pursuing higher studies. Enrolling himself in school, however, he found that he nevertheless spent most of the time working at Central Camera and not before long, dropped the idea of school altogether.

By 1937, Motakaka and my dad were pretty involved in the photographic industry. MGM contacted him and asked him to do some research for their movie “Kim”, which was to be shot in India and later 20th Century Fox did the same for the movie “When the Rains Came”. Together the two brothers made great strides in making Educational Short Films and later also Indian Movietone News during the partition of India and Pakistan.

My father remembers the tough times. Whenever the film clips depicted Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru, the Muslims tore the screen. Every clip of Jinnah incensed the Hindus and they did the same.

In 1946 Motakaka started Film Center, a film processing laboratory, which initially only processed black and white films. By 1950 he had installed color film processing equipment.

He hosted lavish parties and invited many a foreign dignitary: Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, Caesar Romero, Stewart Granger, and Otto Preminger were among the notables, signing his guestbook. Indian film stars such as Raj Kapoor, Nargis, Dilip Kumar and others were also habitual guests.

One of the most famous stories of Motakaka is how he shanghaied Gregory Peck. Upon hearing that the famous American actor was coming to Bombay, he told his daughter Indira to go with his good friend Sabu (the actor famously known as The Elephant Boy) to the airport. Together they went onto the tarmac and right up to the plane, this being the pre-‘Take your shoes off and put your liquids in a Ziploc bag’ days. Armed with a smile, a namaste and a traditional marigold garland to greet him, Sabu and Indira then brought Gregory Peck back home to White House for dinner.

My uncle was a real family man. We spent most of our free time hanging out at White House. Almost every Sunday, he would organize outings and we would pack the picnic staple of puri-and-batata-nu-shaak. On Republic Day, he used to rent a truck and we sat on thick gadlas and munched on methi-na-dhebra, while admiring the buildings, which were decorated and lit up for the occasion.

Motakaka could be quite feisty. When a teacher at his daughter’s school sent a note home complaining that Geeta was not studying, he fired back a reply, saying that it was his duty to feed and clothe his daughter, and it was theirs to teach her, which is why he was sending her to Walsingham in the first place. Apparently, he wrote, I am doing my job, whereas you are not doing yours.

He built a bridge at Chowpatty in 1953, which he named after his father. Always building, planning and dreaming big, he bought property on Walkeshwar Road and called the complex White House, where his family still lives today. At one time, he had even built an open-air theatre, where his tenant the United States Information Service showed films free of charge.

Film Center soon became the largest color processing center, handling the majority of all Hindi films. Few times a week they would run a film check for quality control. Unbeknownst to dad, we would sneak in and watch the previews. Whenever, one of our favorite songs came on, we would beg the projectionist to replay it a couple of times.

There were times the producer or the director sat in as well, and I was gently cautioned to keep my caustic and sarcastic remarks to myself. You would think they would appreciate genuine critique from the audience, but apparently, I do not represent the average Bollywood movie-goer.

It was unfortunate that A.J. died at the age of 54. At the inauguration of Film Center, S.K. Patil had said of him: “Ambalal is a dreamer of great calibre and with rare determination and will to accomplish ever greater things. I wish India had a few more people like him.”

It was a pity he didn’t live long enough to fulfill those dreams.