Binod Pradhan is a man of few words. On a mobile, you can't get him to say more than a wary 'Hello?' especially if it's a female voice at the other end. He puts it down to a fear of being pestered by ladies selling LIC policies and demat accounts! But even if you're not soliciting business, you know he'd like you to state your business and be done with it.
There's the stillness of a Buddhist lama about him - a calm he's carried with him despite three decades in the hysterical hi-octave world of films. When you grow up with the majestic Kanchanjunga as the mainframe of your life, it adds a certain stillness to your being.
As a quiet little boy in Kalimpong, some of Pradhan's best buddies were the perfect picture frames strewn around generously by Mother Nature. The texture of a bark, the exquisite veins on a maple leaf. The first blush of a rosebud. All set against rolling green vistas.
Each morning, instead of taking the school bus, Pradhan would walk the miles to St Joseph's Convent, in the crisp morning air, with a cloud or two for company. And once he reached his destination, there was the mighty mountain peak, beckoning, right behind the school loo.
So when nature called, it really did!
With such an excess of nature's bounty, what do you do, but befriend it. And like all good friends you want to take it home. So Pradhan's dad who worked at a photo studio, bought him a box camera.
Who knew then what journeys the shy, little boy would make with his camera.
We're sitting in his quaint home, tucked away at the end of a road in Khar. It's a suburb lying etherised upon a table - waiting for the makeover surgeon's scalpel. But Pradhan's home has resisted the advances so far. It's just the kind of house Raj Khosla shot his rain-soaked black and white thrillers…it's old, with real vines growing out of Gothic ones.
You're greeted at the door by his dogs - Maya and the Scottish, Malt. They're beauties and they know it. Pradhan is a little less self-assured. There's a puzzled
furrow on his brow: "Once again, why are you here?" And as you talk to him comes the startling realisation that, while the world's been raving about his work for years, Binod Pradhan has been spectacularly out of the loop!
He's unarguably one of the best cinematographers of our time. His frames stay with you long after you've walked away from a film. He uses his camera like a paintbrush. That sensuous, almost lyrical love-making scene between Madhuri Dixit and Anil Kapoor in Parinda, the breathtaking sweep of 1942... A Love Story, the luminescence of Aishwarya Rai's close-ups in Devdas, and now, he's excelled himself with Rang De Basanti. The cutting-edge camerawork transports you into the fevered and furious heart of the film.
"Yes, we've experimented a lot with Rang De.... Like we've used four frames per second for the title shots, we've used the tilted camera Dutch angle shots for dramatic effect; there're a lot of day for night shots that we've enhanced with lab work…for the right effect," says Pradhan, and he's still not very pleased with the sepia tones of the flashbacks. "It's not the tint I wanted."
As a little boy in Kalimpong, he'd painstakingly transform ordinary black and white pictures into living colour with just an old brush and watercolours...