Interview: Priyanka Sinha Jha On Writing Folk Tales From Bollywood, An Enticing Account Of Lives In Showbiz

Journalist and author Priyanka Sinha Jha’s latest book, Folk Tales From Bollywood, is her first work of fiction. The book features exhilarating accounts from the lives of imaginary characters who’re part of Bollywood. The author writes this anthology having known the industry inside out. In this interview to News18, we try to understand how much of what she’s written is merely fictional and how much of it is inspired. Featuring 10 short stories, the book provides a peek into the awe-inducing lives of superstars which contrasts with the fickle nature of the profession. Excerpts from an interview:

The book seems to have made you revisit numerous encounters that you’ve had in the industry. How did you decide to pen these down without ruffling any feathers?

The book Folk Tales From Bollywood is my first work of fiction and that itself was very liberating because one did not have to worry about ruffling any feathers as such. Unlike my work as a journalist, which is based on factual information, this book has stories about the trials and tribulations in the lives of imaginary characters. It was very invigorating to take a departure from real life and build a fictitious universe using the real world of showbiz as a springboard for my imagination. P.G Wodehouse, Saadat Hasan Manto and Shobhaa De were huge inspirations when I embarked on the journey of writing FTFB with quirky oddball characters and a humorous undercurrent.

Folk Tales from Bollywood is a fitting name. The industry stories have always bordered on folklore and baffling incidents. What was the writing process like?

A Folktale by definition is a form of a story originating in popular culture, typically passed on by word of mouth. And so, I decided to adopt this form of storytelling using anecdotal trajectories to heighten the drama. To get into the character’s heads and think how they would progress in the situation that you have set them up in, was quite a task because while this is a fictitious world, it has to bear a resemblance to the world of show business and Bollywood. Spinning yarns and creating believable fictional stories about a world which can be quite surreal, was a new challenge and one that I enjoyed.

The film industry and its workings, despite being as old as free India, continues to fascinate people. There is a quality to it that still makes people wonder what happens “inside”. Why do you think that is?

The Indian film industry is older than modern, independent India and it fascinates people because it performs the task of entertaining them with larger-than-life on-screen stories that most people can only dream about in their own lives. And also because the film industry is a world of storytellers and performers, there is a touch of drama infused even into their day-to-day mundane chores which are often presented to the world in a very amplified hyper-realistic manner. For instance, things like film stars going to the airport or their outings to the hairdresser are all presented like a grand sighting or an event, thereby heightening the FOMO factor around celebrity lives. And so at every step, life in Bollywood is seen as the glamorous cocktail of fame and wealth which creates much curiosity in people’s minds about it. After all, we are just human and get swept up in the hype of it all.

You’re writing this book in the times of uninterrupted posts about actors on social media. A lot of it is rumor mongering and the internet is flooded with love and hate for these stars. Does this book bring about the human side to them?

These are stories set in the world of Bollywood so the protagonists are neither good nor bad. Indeed, I have written stories about characters who underneath the industrial-complex celebrity coating, are just human, warts and all. But, most importantly they have agency and are full of quirks. We might love them or not like everything about them, but we will surely recognise the universality of their emotions.

Did the pandemic play a role in convincing you to write this book? Considering how the industry was treated in the news, was there a part of you that wanted to tell the world how everything is not “easy” even for the stars.

The Pandemic had a very important role to play in the shaping of the book. In times when there was misery all around, people kept asking me for Bollywood news and I realised that what they were looking for was kisse-kahaniyaan to take their minds off the darkness around them. I kept getting asked, “Is it true that…?” This triggered off a creative process in me; instead of regurgitating information recycled from social media feeds, I sat down to write fictional stories about fictional folks from Bollywood. The stories were pitched to seem as though they were real, but are actually pure fiction. I got a great response from whosoever I shared them with, and thus was born Folk Tales From Bollywood.

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