There are life stories and there is life. Lived with passion, heart and soul. In all its entirety, its dizzying highs, its crashing lows. Accepted with all its flaws, hurts, blows. Loved despite its imperfection. Film and television director Vinta Nanda lives her life deeply and nothing gets to that core where hope is eternal. Vinta has the guileless innocence of a child. She champions causes, riles against corruption but is never cynical or bitter. Though life has given her enough reasons to be but we are digressing.

Vinta’s  father worked in a transferable job with the LIC and so, “I grew up in Jammu, Srinagar, Amritsar, Kota, Jallandhar, Chandigarh, Indore and Ajmer. I graduated from Chandigarh and moved to Mumbai.” Due to the constant shifting, Vinta and her siblings acquired  a large extended circle of friends.  That open mindedness and an early love for books has impacted much of her work.

“We were all voracious readers, ” says Vinta and while her siblings went on to become academicians, she chose to visualise the stories in her head.

She shares, “My father passed away when I had barely started to work and my mother who had been a housewife throughout started to work as an insurance agent at the age of 50. She is my inspiration and at 75, is the highest earning member of our family. Through all my troubles, my family has been my greatest strength.”

Vinta started her career in television as an assistant director with the cult comedy Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi. That was when television was  redefining family entertainment with serials like  Hum Log, Buniyaad and Khaandaan.  She says, “I was consumed by music, art, design, dance, literature, words and everything pliable in this material world, which could be moulded in different shapes. I toiled, went hungry, lived out of bags in friends’ homes when I couldn’t afford my rent, wept, laughed and stretched the thresholds of my anxiety, pain, angst and anguish beyond the limits but never corrupted my expression.”

And it is to her ofcourse that Indian television owes the first modern Indian woman. Much before Sex and the City, in Vinta Nanda’s Tara, we saw a bunch of young women negotiation life in a metro. And how as Tara born?

Recalls Vinta, “I had worked as an assistant director with Nadira Babbar, Shekhar Kapur, Manjul Sinha, Mainak Trivedi, Raman Kumar and Ramesh Talwar. I had started to produce and direct short films and documentaries for Unicef and other government  agencies. I had heard about a new channel called Zee TV which was coming up in 1991. I found out that the office was in Worli, Mumbai, so one day I caught a bus and went there and walked straight up to the person who was there. I gave her a story written on three pages and left.  I would call the lady up everyday to find out if there was any feedback for me. One day she asked me to drop by and meet with the Creative Director of the Channel. I went and met Kamlesh Panday who told me he loved the story and if I would like to produce it. I was ecstatic. I went back and then tied up with some of my friends to produce the show. It was TARA. The rest is history. ”
She adds, “I saw  the likes of Ramesh Sippy, Kamlesh Pandey, Mahesh Bhatt, Amit Khanna, Ravi Rai and many others  creating some of the best works on television. But the quality of producers and creative people has deteriorated over the years. It has somewhat been coincidental with the quality of the politics in India.”

The end of creative freedom on TV for her was marked by the way Tara was unceremoniously  yanked off air in the late 90s.

Media was growing and so were the attempts to control it. Absolutist politics was making its presence felt in entertainment and says Vinta, “I was personally told to keep my work off the screen as it was “harming our society.” While my program was providing solutions to women when joint families were disintegrating and compelling women to become equal earning members, I was asked to turn my characters into regressive, sacrificing, forgiving women in the name of family, their children and god, while men remained breadwinners and had affairs.

I refused to change the texture of my work which was and will always be modern, contemporary and aspirational for women in present times.”

Television, points out Vinta was once about diversity but soon became preachy, ritualistic and religion centric.

Even though she has been associated with top ranking and diverse shows like Tara, Shatranj, V3Plus, Raahat, Ummeed, Raahein, Agnichakra, Cafe 18, Sansaar, Aur Phir Ek Din and Miilee, she says, “In every story, women in finery do precious little, other than to cry, pray to God and forgive their men for all the atrocities heaped upon them. The mindless stories from the worst cinema of the ’70’s and ’80’s found themselves on TV, instead of carrying the Indian society from one level of progression to the next, stories started to cater to the lowest common denominator. So instead of  alternate, multicultural, cosmopolitan solutions,  we have content that endorses false values and hypocritical traditions.  Today, thanks to our TV, we have a generation confused between morality and corruption. This schizophrenia is dangerous for our future.”

Shows that revel in wife beating and verbal abuse while pretending to champion women’s rights, appall her.

She adds, “Every progressive nation has used television as a propeller for change. Creativity should be driven by intellect, not by economics. But she is happy to observe that viewers today are turning to reality, news, sports and online entertainment. Soap driven ad revenues are also diminishing.
She shares, “I have been approached by many a financier asking me to pull off a deal with a channel and then make the program in 50 per cent of the cost. If you do justice to the program, people don’t get paid, and if people get paid, the program is of bad quality. But money must be made and TRP’s must be garnered. So the alternative is to make a program and throw in women in distress, superstition and finery.”
Nobody, she says, wants to invest in development of programs and creative resources and adds, ”  I will not let corruption or deliberate chaos surround me. I insist upon clean toilet facilities in the studios I work in. Many times,  make up vans are allotted to stars while the rest are expected to make do.  I have spend 12 to 14 hours without going to the loo and actually harmed my kidneys when I was in my 20’s as I had to either go to the filthiest bathrooms or to the bushes in filmcity, one of India’s largest studios.”

When children work in her unit, she insists upon having playroom/nursery at the studio. Says she,” I know that if I stand up for certain things today,  many others like me will slowly grow in numbers and change will take place.”

Vinta produces most of her own work today. She opines, ” When I see deal fixers posturing as creative people, it angers me. I have always loved alternate works because mainstream invariably becomes formulaic. Fortunately, alternate is fast becoming mainstream. ”

Talking of the struggle to carve her own niche in the industry, she says, “Not being somebody’s daughter, wife  had its own challenges but because of my adversity, I grew faster as a writer.  When I  started, there were very few women in the business. My father asked me to never use my being a woman as an excuse during work. So I confronted every job powerfully and confidently. I realized at a very young age that I was different from my peers. I was fiercely independent and hated anybody patronizing me. I expected equality in all quarters of my life and never settled for less. I could never compromise on my values. The journey to this point therefore has been filled with ups and downs. I have seen the heights of success and the lowest depths of failure and the truth is that every decision, right and wrong, was mine.”

She has paid she says, for  wrong decisions and revelled in the right ones, be it in love, relationships, business and growth. Says she,”I had built a  life with my work through 20 years and because of a couple of unwise decisions which were taken by me to keep my values intact, I ended up losing everything I had made, to litigation.”

But the battle for the highest peaks of fulfilment is not over because she says, “Life has just started for me. There were so many things about people, places, attitudes, law in India which I was unaware of. The last five years have thrown open the doors and revealed to me all that I never knew and all that my over protected middle class existence had kept from me.  I had made mistakes by being too trusting. Signed checks, stood my ground for my values and therefore I paid for it. And the spiritual in me, took it all in positive note.”

She has never stopped working though.  She worked as Director Ideation at Zee Network, creating a content strategy for 16 channels simultaneously, from 2000 to 2002. Later she made her first feature ‘White Noise’ starring Rahul Bose and Koel Purie. She began to blog, wrote a book and a play. She also makes short films which showcase people, products and places and releases them online. “I’ve written the screenplays of three films and now that I am finished with all litigation, I will soon start working on the films, one at a time.”

Adversity she says, has sharpened her instincts as a writer and as a person. She says,”The passion for my work has kept me going. Also the faith I have in myself and in my family. I have always been honest and straightforward. Never done anybody any harm, nor ever lied. As long as I have the will to express, through any medium that comes my way, there is no way that anybody can harm me. Money comes and goes. I’ve seen lots of it and also lost it. I have found true friendships and relationships in this world where they say, everybody is ruthless. That gives me the hope to believe that there is more to this world than what meets the eye.”

So though she has been bruised and more than once been battle weary, she still has the courage to say,”It is alright to make mistakes. Whether in business or in relationships, if one has made a mistake, its better to own up to it, than to live with it for the rest of your life. Guilt is a useless emotion and all those who live in it, suffer. You can never undo the past, but the present is what is being moulded by you, so live only in that.”

And Vinta Nanda builds her future, by living in her present, one moment at a time.

Reema Moudgil is the author of Perfect Eight. (http://www.flipkart.com/perfect-eight-reema-moudgil-book-9380032870) . More on Story Wallahs.  Also check other books by Unboxed Writers in our Store.