Latest / MUBI Podcast / SALAAM BOMBAY! & THE LUNCHBOX — Mira Nair & Ritesh Batra deliver realism and romance

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SALAAM BOMBAY! & THE LUNCHBOX — Mira Nair & Ritesh Batra deliver realism and romance · MUBI Podcast

• 0:00
  Heads up, this episode includes a little bit of adult language, a lot of caffeine, and spoilers.
• 0:13
  Some time in the mid 1980s, a documentarian named Mira Nair was in her birth country of India, specifically the megacity of Mumbai, sometimes called Bombay.
• 0:23
  And she's sitting in a cab, stopped at a traffic light when she notices a kid coming towards her.
• 0:28
  The first image that I saw was a young man who didn't have his legs.
• 0:33
  He had made a revolving board on rubber wheels that he would park himself on.
• 0:40
  That sadly wasn't unusual.
• 0:42
  Mumbai's full of disadvantaged street kids fending for themselves by any means necessary.
• 0:47
  But what happened next wasn't so usual.
• 0:47
  The kid reached out and suddenly...
• 0:52
  There was this gnarled hand holding on to my taxi cab window in the middle of a traffic jam in Bombay, and the lights turned green and we started moving.
• 1:02
  And I was terrified for this child who was holding on but with such glee that he knew exactly how to let go, and then how to pirouette on his makeshift platform.
• 1:16
  That idea of finding some kind of flamboyance and a performative glee with having absolutely, literally nothing, no legs, no nothing, was just a-- Was something I'll never forget.
• 1:32
  And that made me start thinking.
• 1:35
  A few years later, Mira Nair made her breakthrough fiction feature about a resilient Mumbai street kid.
• 1:41
  But instead of heavy traffic, she had her hero navigate another potentially treacherous side of the city, the world of tea delivery.
• 2:01
  I'm Rico Gagliano, welcome back to the MUBI podcast.
• 2:04
  MUBI's the global film company that champions great cinema.
• 2:06
  On this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema.
• 2:09
  Today we finish up season 10.
• 2:11
  We've been calling it A Feast For The Eyes.
• 2:13
  Just in time for your holiday dinners we've been digging into how and why so many filmmakers put food at the center of their movies, and today it's kind of a double feature.
• 2:22
  I talked to two US based Indian directors who, years apart, made very different films, both set in Mumbai's notorious food delivery systems.
• 2:32
  Everything is hand delivered in India.
• 2:34
  We had Instacart way before you guys thought of it.
• 2:38
  You already met the legendary Mira Nair, maker of essential movies like Mississippi Masala, starring a young Denzel Washington.
• 2:45
  Later, you'll hear us talk about that and about her amazing debut feature,Salaam Bombay!, a street level view of Mumbai through the eyes of a tea boy.
• 2:53
  Plus, a little bit about the dining habits of her son, New York's mayor elect, Zoran Mamdani.
• 2:59
  But first up, we're going to hear from the maker of a beloved romance inspired by a beloved Mumbai lunch tradition.
• 3:05
  It's just kind of this perfect system that's existed for over a hundred years.
• 3:09
  It survived everything.
• 3:11
  Ritesh Batra tells me about his 2013 hit The Lunchbox and about Mumbai's crack lunchbox delivery army known as dabbawalas.
• 3:19
  The Lunchbox was such a smash, it's now in rehearsals as a stage musical, by the way.
• 3:24
  I spoke to Ritesh via video chat and it was clear right away he's as into food off screen as on.
• 3:35
  First of all, I love that you're actually eating and having a coffee while I'm talking to you.
• 3:39
  It's like perfect.
• 3:41
  What do you have? What's the snack?
• 3:43
  I'm having a brownie, but I'm always eating something.
• 3:46
  It seems to me like I'm always snacking.
• 3:48
  - Really?
• 3:48
  - It gets me through my day.
• 3:50
  - Anything particular about the brownie?
• 3:50
  - Nothing.
• 3:53
  It's nothing exciting.
• 3:53
  It's just available in this kitchen.
• 3:56
  Sometimes you just got to eat to survive.
• 3:59
  Let's go back to the beginning of this project.
• 4:02
  Tell me about the moment that you thought about Dabbawalas for a movie.
• 4:05
  Oh, so you know.
• 4:07
  I left India when I was 18, back in '98.
• 4:07
  And then, of course, I have family there, so I keep going back regularly.
• 4:16
  And of course, I grew up watching the Dabbawalas.
• 4:19
  But I feel like when you leave and you come back, you see things in a way that you didn't see them before, you know.
• 4:26
  So then I really noticed them and I was like, "This is really interesting.
• 4:30
  "It's an interesting part of this city that I just took for granted." And then I just started doing rounds with them.
• 4:36
  My original intention was to just follow them around and see if I should make a documentary about them.
• 4:41
  For those who... Many of our listeners, I think, are not based in India.
• 4:46
  How did this service-- Where did this come from?
• 4:48
  Why is it such a thing?
• 4:50
  - And it's particular to Mumbai, right?
• 4:50
  - Yeah.
• 4:52
  You know Bombay, it's a long city, like Manhattan, you know, and like Manhattan all the offices are concentrated downtown, the residences are up north.
• 5:03
  So it's a system that evolved organically for the needs of the city.
• 5:08
  When Bombay was formed, people from all over India came there.
• 5:12
  Everybody has their own food.
• 5:12
  Everybody wants to eat their own food.
• 5:16
  Back in the day, there was not like different kinds of restaurants.
• 5:19
  So people preferred, you know, home food.
• 5:21
  And then the thing with Indian food is it's not a sandwich, you know, it needs to be eaten fresh.
• 5:27
  It's not something you can pack in a plastic foil and, you know, send it along.
• 5:32
  - A lot of sauces.
• 5:32
  - Yeah.
• 5:33
  So the men would leave for work and then the women would cook the lunch, put it in a lunchbox, the lunchbox delivery guy collects it and delivers it fresh to the man's desk, and then delivers it back.
• 5:46
  So when I was following the lunchbox delivery guys, I started hearing these snippets of stories.
• 5:51
  Like how some guy bought movie tickets for a movie he wanted to see with his wife later, he sent back the movie tickets in the lunchbox.
• 6:00
  A nice surprise for her.
• 6:01
  "This is what we're gonna do in the evening." And then the letters and stuff.
• 6:04
  So I was like, well, what if a lunchbox connected to strangers?
• 6:08
  Describe the system involved with getting all of these individual lunchboxes to, I'm guessing hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of individual desks.
• 6:17
  I mean, the system is kind of like a black box.
• 6:20
  There's these codes on lunchboxes that only the lunchbox delivery guys know what they mean.
• 6:25
  And we filmed it for the movie in all its glory and all its steps.
• 6:31
  In an opening sequence of The Lunchbox, we see the lonely heroine, Ila, painstakingly boxing up a lunch for her husband, who she can tell is falling out of love with her.
• 6:42
  The lunchbox gets picked up by a dabbawala on a bike, and then we're off on a tour through Mumbai as the lunchbox gets tagged, packaged up with other lunchboxes, then hustled by other dabbawalas onto trains, through rainy streets, and finally distributed by a final dabbawala to the office desk of the wrong guy, a lonely widower on the verge of retirement, played by the late great Irrfan Khan, who, unlike Ila's husband, finds the food she's cooked, amazing.
• 7:11
  And they start exchanging notes in the lunchbox.
• 7:15
  And then a love story blooms and transforms both their lives.
• 7:20
  We try to show that this thing never goes wrong, yet cosmically, miraculously, it goes wrong with this one delivery.
• 7:28
  But yeah, you know, I think describing the system is almost like counterintuitive to talking about it, you know?
• 7:35
  It's just kind of this perfect system that's existed for over 100 years.
• 7:39
  It survived everything, you know, survived the liberalization of the economy, people having choices...
• 7:43
  It still keeps going.
• 7:47
  So why not do it as a doc as originally planned?
• 7:49
  I just-- I'm not a-- I've started many docs and abandoned them.
• 7:54
  It's just not my jam, you know?
• 7:54
  It's just not my thing.
• 7:58
  Though I love documentaries, like the doc,All The Beauty And The Bloodshed I saw a couple of years ago.
• 8:05
  It's just poetry.
• 8:06
  - What's that about?
• 8:06
  - It's about the opioid crisis.
• 8:10
  Oh wow.
• 8:11
  But I just kind of thrive in this art form of narrative.
• 8:16
  I just like to, make shit up, I guess, you know?
• 8:20
  But it was just a great gift, to get into it, thinking it was gonna be a doc, to learn it intimately and then to weave a fictional story out of it.
• 8:29
  Well, let's talk about that story, because, interestingly, the couple are pretty much never in the same room together.
• 8:35
  Yeah, in the movie they don't ever set eyes on each other.
• 8:38
  The two lead characters never see each other except for once from a distance at a restaurant where they're supposed to meet.
• 8:43
  What was the point where you decided these guys are never gonna meet?
• 8:46
  'Cause that's not the easiest story problem to solve at that point.
• 8:49
  A love story without people ever hanging out together.
• 8:52
  You know, I didn't ever think of it as a story problem.
• 8:54
  I just thought of it as, that's what it is.
• 8:56
  Kind of them seeing each other would ruin the magic of the thing.
• 9:00
  There's also a character in the movie called Auntie who lives above the protagonist, Ila, in the apartment above her, and we never see her.
• 9:07
  We see a basket that basically represents that character that comes up and down the windows.
• 9:10
  But I don't know, I was talking to my little girl about this the other day because she was talking to me about whether we'll see her in the stage musical and I was telling her that storytelling is as much about what you show as it is about what you don't show.
• 9:29
  The things you decide not to show are just as important.
• 9:32
  It's true. In a way, though, it also is saying something about the modern world that people-- It's so hard for people to actually communicate face to face anymore.
• 9:40
  I mean, this movie was made a while ago, but in a way, it's sort of envisioning the world we're in now where everything is mediated.
• 9:47
  We're divorced from each other somehow and trying to come together.
• 9:50
  Yeah, I think there's an old worldliness to these characters, and they communicate through letters.
• 9:55
  At the time we made it, of course, there was phones and email and Facebook and stuff.
• 10:00
  But they never deviate from the old worldliness of letters.
• 10:04
  Old world, yeah.
• 10:06
  When you watch the movie, when you experience the characters, you don't question it because they just seem like old souls.
• 10:12
  They talk about old things.
• 10:13
  They talk about how things used to be in simpler times.
• 10:15
  Is this like wish fulfillment for you in a way?
• 10:18
  It's like also dabbawalas.
• 10:19
  This is something that's been around for 100 years.
• 10:21
  - Yeah.
• 10:21
  - You were longing for a quiet-- It's also a very quiet film.
• 10:26
  Was that going on for you, longing for a simpler time?
• 10:29
  You know, for me personally, and it doesn't matter so much'cause now it's a movie and people watch it and they take from it what they will.
• 10:37
  But when I made it, it was a very nostalgic thing for me because I'd been away from India now for, when I made it, for about 12 to 14 years.
• 10:46
  And now I've been away for even longer.
• 10:46
  Trending on 25, right?
• 10:51
  But at the time, I was very nostalgic about Bombay and about India and stuff.
• 10:56
  So for me, the whole movie came from a place of nostalgia.
• 10:59
  It's a nostalgia that's reflected too in the food the characters eat, the way they eat it, and how and where it's prepared.
• 11:07
  So far this season, just about all the movies we've talked about are about high-end dining professional chefs who take even classic dishes and elevate them to perfection.
• 11:16
  Whereas Ila, and really every cook in the film, are just trying to make simple, everyday things to please the people they love.
• 11:25
  We put a lot of thought into the whole trajectory of the dishes she would cook for him.
• 11:30
  At first she makes her husband's favorite things, and then she starts making his favorite things, and then she shares things with him, like she finds a recipe for a spring apple sabzi, a vegetable dish with spring apples, in her grandma's recipe book.
• 11:44
  So the movie is really about two people showing themselves to each other and then we definitely use food as a device to do that.
• 11:52
  By the way, why spring apples as the truly nostalgic dish that she gets from her mother?
• 11:58
  It's also, again, it's a very old world thing.
• 12:00
  That's something your grandma would make for you.
• 12:03
  A pozole in Mexico is something that is comforting and your grandma would make that for you.
• 12:07
  In every culture, there is something that only grandmas would cook, right.
• 12:13
  Another food thing, there's this moment where, Irrfan Khan's character's coworker, is chopping vegetables on the train home from work.
• 12:27
  Which is-- I love the concept, even though it doesn't seem particularly sanitary to me.
• 12:32
  Where did that concept come from?
• 12:34
  He's such a lovable character, but where did you get that idea?
• 12:36
  Well, I used to take the train to go to college when I was growing up.
• 12:41
  In Bombay at the time we had college after 10th grade.
• 12:44
  So 11th and 12th I used to commute on the train and oftentimes in the evening, on the ride back, I used to see, mostly women,- just chopping vegetables...
• 12:52
  - Seriously?
• 12:54
  ...in the train. 'Cause these commutes are long, one hour, two hours, and then you could just get home and cook.
• 12:59
  I mean, it's a great idea.
• 13:01
  I'm just trying to imagine, like a train full of people chopping onions.
• 13:04
  Like that could be a real problem.
• 13:06
  I saw it. Oftentimes I saw people chopping vegetables on the train.
• 13:10
  But I just had fun with this because Shaikh's character does it and he does it from a place of love for his wife.
• 13:16
  He gets home before her, and he just wants to have the meal prepared for when she gets home.
• 13:21
  It's interesting you say that because you're right.
• 13:23
  Every character is using food as a love language, kind of.
• 13:27
  - It's a method of communication.
• 13:27
  - You could say that.
• 13:29
  - Is that conscious.
• 13:29
  - Writing is never so conscious.
• 13:31
  But, you know, at the end of it, after you're done and you look back at it, absolutely, yeah.
• 13:36
  Let me ask you something we've been asking a lot of guests this season: How do you make food on film appetizing?
• 13:40
  Like for you, what is the process?
• 13:45
  - What are the secrets?
• 13:45
  - Actually shooting movies-- A good part of shooting movies is pretty tedious.
• 13:50
  You know, shooting food is just tedious.
• 13:53
  Shooting process is just tedious.
• 13:55
  I remember telling Irfan that because we shot with him first for, like, the first 15, 20 days of the shoot.
• 14:01
  And a lot of his scenes were him alone by himself in the apartment.
• 14:05
  And that's very difficult for an actor.
• 14:05
  It's very tedious.
• 14:08
  And I remember telling him that, you know, you're you're getting off easy.
• 14:12
  Like, now we have to go and shoot all this food.
• 14:14
  So the making of it, you know.
• 14:16
  By the way, was it I mean, obviously it was actual food that he was eating, I know that something that actors complain about is having to eat something over and over and over again for take after take.
• 14:27
  Was there anything done to mitigate that process for him?
• 14:32
  You know, he is, he was...
• 14:32
  sadly he left us a couple of years ago.
• 14:36
  - Yeah. Died in 2020.
• 14:36
  - Yeah.
• 14:39
  But he was a literal genius in terms of, you know, how he interacted with the camera.
• 14:47
  For, I would say, 90% of the time in that movie, he's eating pomegranates...
• 14:52
  - What?
• 14:52
  - ...and you can't tell. He's a magician.
• 14:55
  He would bite something off...
• 14:55
  It is on camera, it's there but you can't tell. The sleight of hand of that man and how he knows how to, you know, work with the camera.
• 15:05
  I mean, it was something to behold.
• 15:05
  You know.
• 15:07
  Why pomegranates?
• 15:09
  Because they are healthy and he doesn't have to eat the stuff over and over.
• 15:12
  I've shot actors eating a lot, you know, with the course of my career.
• 15:16
  But never have I ever seen somebody being able to pull off pomegranates.
• 15:20
  And they're eating something entirely different, you know.
• 15:23
  I can actually, as I think about it, it's also because there's texture to it.
• 15:27
  You can kind of gnaw on it, but you're actually not ingesting all that much.
• 15:32
  - It's mostly seed.
• 15:32
  - Yeah.
• 15:33
  It has to be something that if you eat a whole bunch of it, you're not gonna be grossed out and want to throw up at the end of the day.
• 15:40
  And he's a thoughtful person.
• 15:40
  He's very thoughtful person.
• 15:42
  That is genius.
• 15:43
  What did you, eat on set?
• 15:43
  Was it as good as the food being cooked?
• 15:48
  Pretty close. Pretty close.
• 15:49
  The best part about shooting in India is that the food is amazing.
• 15:52
  - Yeah.
• 15:52
  - The on set food is amazing.
• 15:54
  So when I'm not shooting in India, I really miss that.
• 15:56
  And there's always, like, great chai on set and I'm pretty addicted to caffeine and chai.
• 16:00
  So it's always like I feel like when I'm shooting in India, I just have to extend my hand out and somebody will hand me a chai.
• 16:08
  - So...
• 16:08
  - Just wherever you are.
• 16:10
  I really miss shooting in India, honestly, for that reason.
• 16:13
  I'll also say, I've been to India and I've been to Mumbai and there is a cinematic quality, or at least a visual quality to the way food is presented there that is like nothing I've ever seen.
• 16:25
  I remember going to a place, just a pretty standard, gritty section of town and walking down the street one night, and there just happened to be a street market there, and it was just like the vegetable vendors were laying out the food.
• 16:38
  It was like a geometric mandala of perfectly arranged, multicolored vegetables that just looked more enticing than any vegetables I've ever seen.
• 16:48
  I live in California, where there's a lot of really good vegetables.
• 16:51
  Yeah, I mean, it's such a big part of the culture and the being, you know?
• 16:55
  I mean, the hospitality is entirely based on feeding people.
• 16:58
  I feel like Indian people are always, you know, you get them together and they're talking about the next meal.
• 17:03
  Everybody's like,"What are you having for lunch today?
• 17:05
  "What are we having for dinner?" Half of the conversation over a meal is about another meal.
• 17:10
  Yeah, it's always about the next meal, though.
• 17:12
  I mean, it's nice.
• 17:13
  I have this theory that all human beings need is something to look forward to.
• 17:17
  And it's kind of like, that's a great way, every few hours, you got something to look forward to.
• 17:23
  It gets you through a tough day in a tough city.
• 17:25
  Tell me about the reception to this.
• 17:27
  First of all, this is, in a lot of ways, not an epic film, it's a very small scale film.
• 17:33
  What were your expectations as far as its success?
• 17:35
  I mean, none to not much. I guess.
• 17:39
  I just wanted to get it done, honestly.
• 17:42
  I remember the cut not working and it was-- We needed to turn something into Khan like in a month, and it was just not working.
• 17:51
  And I sat down over Christmas that year and I wrote that last voiceover, and that made the movie work.
• 17:58
  We went back and we changed a bunch of things to earn that voiceover.
• 18:02
  That unlocked something for me.
• 18:04
  So my whole attention was on that.
• 18:06
  But, you know, what's been surprising to me, in a way, is how the movie lives on after all these years, you know.
• 18:13
  Now we're doing this stage musical, right?
• 18:15
  And there's all these actors who were kids when the movie came out, but they're like, it's a big part of their childhood, you know, it's their parents favorite movie.
• 18:24
  And they wanted to be part of this musical because, you know, it's somebody's dad's favorite movie.
• 18:29
  Or I met a couple the other day who said it was like their first date.
• 18:33
  When was your first inkling that this thing was gonna do better than you maybe allowed yourself to believe?
• 18:38
  Well, we went to Cannes that year and we got a bunch of big standing ovations.
• 18:43
  And then, there's this award that's really charming, that's the rail workers of France, they vote on the best movie.
• 18:51
  That, to me, was a really nice award to get. It's from-- Because it's a movie about nostalgia and old souls, and then all the railway workers in France thinking that it's the best movie that year.
• 19:05
  It just felt so fitting.
• 19:07
  - The railway workers give out an award?
• 19:07
  - Yeah, they have this-- It's called the Rail d'Or.
• 19:10
  They award it in Cannes every year.
• 19:13
  I feel like that's the best prize to get in Cannes, you know?
• 19:16
  - It's so cool.
• 19:16
  - You can win the Palme d'Or, you can win the Caméra d'Or, you can win any award in Cannes, Best Director, whatever. I feel like winning the Rail d'Or is the real deal.
• 19:26
  It gave me real joy.
• 19:31
  Ritesh Batra.
• 19:32
  The stage musical ofThe Lunchbox opens at Berkeley Rep in Northern California on May 27th, 2026.
• 19:39
  Coming up, we talked to Mira Nair about a movie that probably isn't musical material, but it's got just as much to chew on.
• 19:46
  A look back at Salaam Bombay! That's in just a minute, stay with us.
• 19:59
  Alright, everybody.
• 20:00
  MUBI is the global film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are, in as many ways as we possibly can.
• 20:07
  We stream movies, we produce them, we release them in theaters, movies from any country, from legendary auteurs or brilliant first timers, we've always got something new for you to discover.
• 20:16
  And I want to tell you about a couple of things I think you will definitely want to discover after hearing this episode.
• 20:22
  First of all, a movie that many of the indie film lovers among you are probably already planning to see, the new one from Jim Jarmusch, one of the godfathers of American independent cinema.
• 20:31
  The movie is calledFather, Mother, Sister, Brother It is a comedy drama in three segments, each one about a different estranged relationship happening in a different country.
• 20:41
  But guess what?
• 20:42
  The middle segment, set in the UK, revolves around two sisters sitting down for a fraught afternoon with their mom over, yes, a genteel afternoon tea.
• 20:51
  In fact, coffee and tea are a through line in all these segments.
• 20:54
  Also, the sisters are played by Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps.
• 20:58
  The mom is played by Charlotte Rampling.
• 21:01
  The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
• 21:04
  I mean, I think that's probably all you need to hear to go see it.
• 21:07
  Father, Mother, Sister, Brother hits US theaters on December 24th.
• 21:11
  Also, I want to tell you that the movie we just talked about, The Lunchbox, that's now streaming on MUBI in the UK, Ireland, Australia and Latin America.
• 21:21
  So if you live in those places, subscribe to MUBI at mubi.com make dinner for the person you love and have yourselves a great date night.
• 21:29
  We've got all the links and info you need about all of this stuff in the show notes of this episode.
• 21:33
  Speaking of which, let's go back to finish up this episode and this season.
• 21:43
  So like Ritesh Batra, when I first started my video chat with Mira Nair, she was in the middle of a caffeine fix, pouring herself a cup of chai, something she once wrote a whole essay about for The New York Times Magazine.
• 21:55
  Yeah, I can't live without chai.
• 21:56
  - Yeah, I can tell.
• 21:56
  - That's how this article begins.
• 21:59
  "I cannot think without chai," is the first line.
• 22:02
  And like The Lunchbox, her feature debut featured a lot of chai.
• 22:06
  But that is where the similarities end.
• 22:11
  Salaam Bombay! is the story of a ten-year-old named Krishna.
• 22:15
  His family has kicked him out of the house for accidentally destroying his brother's scooter.
• 22:22
  So at the beginning of the movie, he goes to a train station and asks for a ticket from the countryside to "any big city".
• 22:29
  The station guy hands him back a ticket to Bombay.
• 22:35
  "Come back a movie star," he says.
• 22:40
  Krishna's plan is a little humbler than that.
• 22:42
  He's determined to earn ₹500, about 40 US bucks, which he's sure will buy his way back into his family's affections.
• 22:50
  And to do it, he takes the one job a homeless kid from the sticks can land.
• 22:54
  Chaipau, which means tea boy.
• 23:00
  And through delivering tea, through brothels and through train stations and through people's homes, he gets embroiled with different characters in the streets and in the brothels of Bombay.
• 23:13
  Krishna's adventures take him to some pretty dark places, physically and psychologically, and every moment feels painfully real, which makes sense, given the way Nair cast it and shot it.
• 23:24
  I come from the world of cinema verité, which is the cinema of truth.
• 23:28
  I began, really, as a person viewing real life, making documentaries on the streets with people in the struggles of our lives, especially in India.
• 23:40
  Anyway, that was my first fiction film,Salaam Bombay! But because I came from cinema verité, I worked with an amalgam of real street kids with some unknown but trained actors.
• 23:53
  But in the streets and in the brothels and in the graveyards of the city of Bombay in 1987/88.
• 24:02
  It's interesting, I've heard you describe yourself as making movies "across oceans".
• 24:07
  A lot of them take place in multiple countries, or they're about immigrants.
• 24:11
  Your first documentary out of film school was about an Indian immigrant to America.
• 24:15
  The two movies you made after this were about immigrants.
• 24:18
  Why make your first feature very grounded all in one city?
• 24:22
  It is specifically not across oceans.
• 24:25
  Well, I am, you know, it's because my roots are strong that I can fly.
• 24:30
  I am born and raised in India.
• 24:33
  I happened to come to America on a scholarship when I was 18 years old.
• 24:38
  But my gaze and my politics has always been to make my art about what gets under my skin and doesn't let me go.
• 24:47
  So the resilience of our street children, of whom there are thousands, really inspired me.
• 24:56
  I mean, I'm always attracted to those who are considered marginal because I think in them I get inspired.
• 25:03
  Your mom was a social worker.
• 25:05
  I'm imagining this came in some part from her.
• 25:08
  Yes, she is a social worker still.
• 25:11
  She used to say, "No words. Action." And it's funny that she said that because "action" is, of course, what starts every shot of a filmmaker's life.
• 25:20
  "Action!" But it really was about that.
• 25:22
  She was the wife of my father, who is like, an Indian civil servant.
• 25:31
  And you know, she was supposed to wear beautiful saris and play mahjong.
• 25:36
  But my mum, in addition to wearing beautiful saris and playing mahjong, was always organizing, always wrapping up care packages for the soldiers on the border lines.
• 25:49
  She's a major, you know, influence on me and also on our son.
• 25:56
  - Yeah, I can tell.
• 25:56
  - Yeah.
• 25:59
  You cast from the streets, as you mentioned before.
• 26:01
  Tell me about that process.
• 26:01
  How do you pick from, obviously there's millions of kids in Bombay that are in this predicament.
• 26:08
  You know, India, we are riddled with class.
• 26:12
  We are riddled with coded behavior.
• 26:14
  You know, we live cheek by jowl between those who have and those who have nothing.
• 26:18
  And I did not, in Salaam Bombay!, I did not-- I wanted to only work with real street children because in their hands, in their eyes, in everything they have, they are the truth of what it is like to be part of this poverty.
• 26:33
  So I had no interest in looking for child actors.
• 26:37
  We rented a church, in the basement of the church in Grant road, which is central Bombay, went out on the streets with a little piece of paper that said the address of our workshop.
• 26:49
  Those days as ragpickers, they would make ₹25 a day, and we offered ₹50 a day.
• 26:56
  What were they doing as ragpickers?
• 26:59
  Oh, they would go through what people here do with recycling things, you know, go through trash and find out what's recyclable and then sell the recyclable things like tins and cans and bottles.
• 27:10
  129 street kids showed up and very quickly I whittled them down to 29.
• 27:18
  And for six weeks we took our 29 kids and we put them through a 9 to 5 pacing, which started with yoga and dance and then debate.
• 27:29
  And I also showed them many films because the diet of entertainment in India is movies.
• 27:34
  You know, the minute they make ₹5, they'd go to a movie, you know.
• 27:38
  But that kind of Bollywood song, dance, fantastical extravaganza was the last thing I wanted to make.
• 27:46
  So, acting, the word acting became a bad word in our workshop.
• 27:51
  If the kids would swagger along and sound like Amitabh Bachchan, the other kids would say...
• 27:57
  Which is, "You fool, you're acting here, you're not yourself." You know?
• 28:02
  So then I brought the camera in and mixed them with professional actors like the pimp was played by Nana Patekar, now a great star.
• 28:12
  It was his first film then.
• 28:14
  In that process, I chose my protagonist.
• 28:16
  Who-- The kid-- Unbelievable performance.
• 28:17
  Where did he come from?
• 28:19
  What was his background?
• 28:21
  He comes from Bangalore, from South India, escaped alcoholic parents and he was just doing exactly what you see in the film.
• 28:29
  You know, sometime a ragpicker, sometimes a waiter in weddings, that type of itinerant life.
• 28:35
  What did you see in him?
• 28:36
  Oh my gosh, he...
• 28:36
  Firstly, he was tough.
• 28:40
  You know, really toughened by the street.
• 28:43
  He was both a child and a loner.
• 28:43
  He had depths of mystery.
• 28:49
  And that's something I'm always looking for in an actor.
• 28:53
  That was my first film, so I didn't even know how to identify it at the time.
• 28:56
  Except that when I would work with him, Shafiq Syed is his name, he would do what I asked, but there was a greater reservoir within him that I was deeply affected by.
• 29:10
  And then as we proceeded, you know, he slowly became more and more playful.
• 29:15
  But this reservoir was always within him.
• 29:15
  I've made movies now for 40 years, I've worked with so many kinds of actors and non-actors and real people.
• 29:25
  But this element of mystery, this element of enigma that you don't fully know what they are feeling is a gold mine, you know, for an actor and for a director.
• 29:37
  That's what he and Denzel Washington, for instance, have in common in your films?
• 29:41
  Yes, yes. So many.
• 29:43
  When did the choice come to make your lead character a chaipau?
• 29:46
  Very early on, because a chaipau, a tea boy, is somebody who will take us through the different layers of life, everywhere of Bombay.
• 29:57
  The chaipau traverses everything.
• 30:00
  And frankly, that was my first inspiration.
• 30:02
  The film before Salaam Bombay! was called India Cabaret, where I lived with 3 or 4 women who were strippers and dancers in a nightclub.
• 30:11
  And we would return home like two in the morning after they would have finished their shifts.
• 30:17
  And when they would wake up in the morning at 12, a chaipau would be there to give them hot tea, And they would very sweetly and intimately tell this tea boy, "Dance for us," like the men would have said to them the night before in the club.
• 30:34
  And there's a scene in Salaam Bombay! where something like that happens.
• 30:41
  Krishna, I think, brings tea to this prostitute and her daughter during a rainstorm.
• 30:46
  And the woman, like, dries him off, and then they all end up dancing together.
• 30:52
  Yeah.
• 30:57
  And then they would say, "Sing for us." Like the men would command the women to do the night before.
• 31:02
  And then the tea boy would tunelessly sing the one line he knew from the Bollywood disco songs and serve them tea.
• 31:15
  A tea boy goes through several worlds in the course of a day.
• 31:22
  I can imagine why tea is so important in India.
• 31:24
  The country produces, I think, the second most amount of it of any country.
• 31:29
  And on top of it, it was a colony of the Brits who love tea.
• 31:32
  What's the genesis?
• 31:33
  Do you know of this concept of hand-delivering tea?
• 31:36
  We like coffee in the States, but you go get it or you brew it yourself.
• 31:39
  Everything is hand delivered in India.
• 31:42
  We had Instacart way before you guys thought of it.
• 31:47
  It really is true.
• 31:50
  Tea-making is something that we consider very seriously, but it also takes 15 to 20 minutes per making tea because you boil it with ginger and cardamom and water and milk and then tea and...
• 32:02
  You know, it has to brew properly, it has to cook, and then you sift it and sieve it.
• 32:07
  It takes 20 minutes, you know.
• 32:09
  I make it every morning, so I know.
• 32:11
  - This ain't just putting a bag in a cup.
• 32:11
  - No, no.
• 32:13
  That's what we call mzungu chai, which is...
• 32:16
  The restless white folk do it like that.
• 32:20
  - Oh, sorry.
• 32:20
  - Yeah.
• 32:21
  It's not very artful the way we do it.
• 32:23
  No, it's very-- I've never had tea like that.
• 32:25
  But now you know, when I don't have time, I'm forced to.
• 32:28
  It's also, for us, it's really a point of camaraderie and a meeting place over chai, you know.
• 32:36
  All over, even in smaller towns where your cigarettes are sold, you can order a chai.
• 32:42
  It's just our adda, as we call it.
• 32:44
  It's just our meeting point is around chai.
• 32:47
  I do want to ask you, was this system-- At the time, was the whole chaipau system kind of predicated on this sort of exploited labor, like these kids?
• 32:56
  Was there a "legitimate" chaipau network?
• 32:59
  There is no union like there are dabbawalas where you can have-- It's a really amazing organization of those who take your lunches from home to the offices.
• 33:10
  But the chaipau, the tea boy is the lowest rung.
• 33:16
  It's the entry-level job for a street kid, you know?
• 33:20
  I ask because there's also a scene where the kids are, they clean up some guy's chicken coops, and the implication is that, the food system is propped up on exploitation.
• 33:29
  It's like, our daily lives are undergirded by this exploitation.
• 33:33
  Actually, if the kids did not have that employment of chicken cleaning and tea delivering, it would be a very miserable life for them.
• 33:42
  You know, I didn't regard it fully as only exploitation.
• 33:47
  I agree it is much cheaper labor than they would have to pay elsewhere.
• 33:52
  But with the kids being there, it's a way to make something you know, because otherwise you don't.
• 33:59
  You have nothing.
• 34:02
  Nair didn't leave her actors with nothing.
• 34:05
  With the proceeds from Salaam Bombay! she set up a trust for them and nearly 40 years later, it still supports Indian street kids.
• 34:11
  In fact, her mom runs it.
• 34:13
  But for her next feature, Nair returned to telling stories about immigrants, specifically Indians who come to America from Uganda.
• 34:22
  It shared one thing with her debut, though, a lot of the action and metaphors revolved around food.
• 34:30
  The idea of Mississippi Masala actually was brewing before Salaam Bombay! I made Salaam Bombay! and when it became a hit and people asked me what I would do next?
• 34:42
  And they flung me every child of every hue in every country as offers to make more Salaam Bombay! I turned them all down and went back to this original idea about Idi Amin's expulsion of the Asians in East Africa in 1972.
• 35:00
  The Asian community, who had never gone to India, had suddenly to leave a place that they had known as home, Uganda.
• 35:08
  But the interesting trick of history was that many of the Ugandan Asian exiles actually came to Mississippi, dirt poor Mississippi, where they began to own motels because they were cheap and because they could employ their own families without necessarily knowing the language or whatever.
• 35:27
  And it was this extraordinary thing of hardly being able to find a white American owned motel in Mississippi.
• 35:34
  And Mississippi, of course, is the birthplace of the civil rights movement.
• 35:37
  The African American community, who, like the Indians in Uganda, had never known the African continent as their home.
• 35:44
  And I kind of put these two things together, to see what if the young Ugandan Asian girl falls in love with an African American man in Mississippi?
• 35:56
  What would happen then?
• 35:57
  The interesting thing to me is, germane to this conversation, is that the first scene set in America in the present day, in this movie, is in a grocery store.
• 36:06
  It's the first thing they're doing.
• 36:09
  Piggly Wiggly, no doubt.
• 36:09
  The name of the grocery store.
• 36:12
  And it is a Piggly Wiggly.
• 36:13
  And actually, it reminded me, as I was watching it, of a movie that happened a few years earlier.
• 36:20
  There's a great scene in the movieMoscow on the Hudson, where a Soviet immigrant to America is going through a grocery store, and there's so many choices that he passes out.
• 36:29
  This isn't-- That's not what's happening here, but somehow it makes sense that a grocery store, this place with all this different food, is a representation of America.
• 36:37
  Was that conscious?
• 36:38
  Everything is conscious, my dear.
• 36:38
  Everything is deliberate.
• 36:43
  Because when I came to America, age 19, I had never been here before.
• 36:48
  And I quickly moved off campus and I had to learn how to cook, and I had to learn how to shop.
• 36:54
  And I remember, I still distinctly remember my first visit to an American supermarket in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• 37:01
  And it was just bewildering, both in its primal colors as well as the insane variety of things, as well as the fact that everything was packaged beyond.
• 37:13
  I'm still appalled by the level of trash I have to throw out on a daily basis after buying a bunch of tomatoes.
• 37:20
  Everything was so packaged, you know, and I walked around looking for something that I could buy to cook or eat.
• 37:28
  And I finally ended up only finding this thing, which it was my last name.
• 37:34
  Nair or Nair. Nair is my last name.
• 37:37
  But I found this thing called Nair and I said, okay, I'm exhausted with trying to find out what to buy, so let me just buy this Nair tube, whatever it is.
• 37:46
  And I bought it and it was just hair removal cream.
• 37:52
  Nair. It meant "no hair".
• 37:54
  - I had no idea.
• 37:54
  - Oh, that's right. I remember it now.
• 37:57
  I just did not know how to shop for quite a long time.
• 38:00
  So your first experience that you're going to set these characters in is in a grocery store.
• 38:05
  Well, yes, because so many reasons.
• 38:07
  It's really a portrait of Americana, you know, and Piggly Wiggly, I just couldn't get over the name of the franchise.
• 38:13
  It was-- And then just the contrast, what we as Indians purchase versus what other people do.
• 38:22
  I mean, Mina, Sarita Choudhury's character was buying 24 gallons of milk.
• 38:27
  - Yeah, for a wedding.
• 38:27
  - Yeah, for a wedding.
• 38:29
  They had to prepare so many sweets, so many things that needs milk.
• 38:32
  - Good afternoon.
• 38:32
  - Afternoon. 25 gallons of milk.- Ten buttermilk.
• 38:36
  - Holy cow.You opening a dairy? And you know, things like that.
• 38:40
  He says, "Holy cow." Says the cash register guy.
• 38:44
  You know, of course, not realizing that cows indeed are holy where I come from, and so on and so forth.
• 38:50
  It was riddled with double meanings on several levels.
• 38:54
  Yes.
• 38:54
  And I mean the name Mississippi Masala. Masala is a blend of spices.
• 38:59
  And you right away see it in this grocery store.
• 39:01
  It's like these two Indian women who then are served by a white cashier, and then their food is bagged by a black guy.
• 39:07
  - The grocery store is a masala.
• 39:07
  - Exactly.
• 39:10
  And I also, you know, we grew up in India after independence from the British.
• 39:15
  We grew up on a diet of English literature and Russian literature.
• 39:20
  I really wanted to have our words in the title, you know?
• 39:26
  So masala was perfect because it was really about this amalgam.
• 39:30
  And similarly with salaam inSalaam Bombay!, the power of seeing one's own language on a marquee.
• 39:38
  There's no words for it.
• 39:39
  When you're growing up in another country.
• 39:41
  Mississippi Masala, it does-- Although you do explore all the fault lines between races, I do think that it's ultimately fairly optimistic that people can get along.
• 39:51
  And I think about it now and a movie about immigrants set in the American South right now, would be a different movie today.
• 40:00
  And I wonder if you ever think about revisiting this.
• 40:03
  Oh, I mean, if Mississippi Masala were to be made today, there would be a lot more, I think schisms, real walls, more than they were then, between one community and another.
• 40:15
  Because it shows the racism in both communities, in all our communities, really about each other, and that actually the life is-- You're speaking about food, I mean, look at the commonality of food in Mississippi. When Denzel's family gets together, it's barbecue, it's corn, it's about gathering over food.
• 40:39
  And it's exactly the same in the Asian family, in the motels.
• 40:43
  When you gather for anything for a wedding or a ritual, or just for evening prayers or nothing, it's all about, you know, the puris and the dals and the food you share.
• 40:53
  But never the twain would ever meet except to clean their carpets, you know?
• 40:59
  And that was something that astonished me, our commonality and yet the distance between us.
• 41:05
  Well, listen, maybe on a happier note, before I let you go, I should just-- I should say congratulations on your son Zoran's election as mayor of New York.
• 41:12
  - Thank you so much.
• 41:12
  - I'm sure you're very proud.
• 41:14
  And I hope I told you a couple of stories which sort of you could see the own echoes in him, you know, which even surprised me.
• 41:21
  But the whole thing, the whole M-A-M-D-A-N-I.
• 41:24
  I mean, it's about, say your name, and say our names right.
• 41:28
  Yeah. Oh my God.
• 41:28
  Get it on the marquee.
• 41:30
  It's a long tradition that he comes from...
• 41:33
  - Absolutely.
• 41:33
  - ...with that.
• 41:34
  By the way, I forgot I was going to ask you this.
• 41:37
  It's unbelievable because he's asked, more than any politician I've ever heard of, what he eats in New York City.
• 41:43
  Yeah.
• 41:44
  What did he eat at home?
• 41:44
  I don't think anybody's asked, what's his favorite dish?
• 41:48
  When I would come home to my mom, she'd be like, what do you want me to cook you?
• 41:51
  And it was always pot roast'cause I'm a white guy.
• 41:55
  Actually, bagels and lox and cream cheese and all that is very much a Sunday breakfast, believe it or not.
• 42:02
  Wonderful grilled salmon with steamed vegetables and potatoes and dill.
• 42:09
  So it's not always only Asian fare, but at home I essentially make, you know, keema matar, which is like minced lamb with peas in a kind of stew.
• 42:21
  I make a lot of biryani.
• 42:23
  I make a very big rack of lamb, barbecued Indian style for Thanksgiving.
• 42:28
  Do you have an egg dish, by the way?
• 42:30
  We've been collecting egg dishes from filmmakers.
• 42:32
  Yes, we eat bhurji, it's called.
• 42:32
  B-H-U-R-J-I.
• 42:37
  It's spiced eggs with onion, tomato, coriander leaf.
• 42:42
  And you whip the eggs with flatbread or with naan or with a Gujarati bread we have called thepla, which is very thin, made with fenugreek.
• 42:53
  It's like a peasant breakfast that is the tastiest one on earth, with, of course, some mango pickles.
• 42:59
  What are we doing with shakshuka?
• 42:59
  This has gotta be the next brunch thing.
• 43:02
  Well, shakshuka has borrowed on this idea.
• 43:05
  - Oh, okay.
• 43:05
  - Ours is better.
• 43:08
  I'm sure lovers of shakshuka will have something to say about that.
• 43:12
  I know I've just-- I'm just having fun.
• 43:25
  Mira Nair.
• 43:26
  She told me she is currently working on a greenlit feature, her first in several years.
• 43:31
  Watch this space for more news on that.
• 43:33
  But till then, that's a wrap on the MUBI podcast for this season and this year.
• 43:37
  It has been an honor telling the stories of these tasty food films.
• 43:40
  If you haven't heard them all, go back a few episodes to hear my conversations with the likes of Brad Bird talking about his Pixar classic, Ratatouille. Meanwhile, we are going to take a much needed end of year vacation, but follow us so you don't miss what we have in store for 2026, including a career spanning conversation with the great Wim Wenders.
• 43:58
  If you are a regular listener, you've heard him on the show before and he's just the best.
• 44:03
  We talk about his love of movies, travel, and rock and roll.
• 44:06
  Follow us, you're gonna love it.
• 44:06
  Meanwhile, let's roll credits.
• 44:09
  The MUBI podcast is written, hosted and edited by me, Rico Gagliano.
• 44:13
  Ciara McEniff produced this episode with help from assistant producer Kat Kowalczyk.
• 44:17
  Jackson Musker is our booking producer.
• 44:19
  Steven Colon mastered it.
• 44:21
  Our original music was composed by Martin Austwick.
• 44:23
  Special thanks this time to Dallas Thomas for recording Mira and Ritesh.
• 44:27
  Also, as always to Corrina Lesser.
• 44:29
  And thanks to Rob Reiner for the decades of joy. RIP.
• 44:33
  The show is executive produced by me along with Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca.
• 44:38
  And finally, to watch the best in cinema, head to mubi.com to start watching.
• 44:43
  Thanks for listening.
• 44:44
  Happy holidays and I'll have a latke, a tamale, a pile of sugar cookies, whatever other holiday stuff that's bad for you, just pile it on. Ham, go for it.