Excerpt: The Ashes Are Warm by Mahesh Bhatt

This chapter from a book on the film maker’s memories of UG Krishnamurti, shows how his spiritual guru influenced the course of his creativity and career

I Have Failed My Way to Success

UG Krishnamurti (HT Archive)

‘What you teach your children, you teach your grandchildren.’ — Yiddish Proverb

If there’s one line that distils my journey — and all that has quietly flowed from it — it is this.

Because what I absorbed from UG Krishnamurti — the wind of his truth, the blade of his gaze—didn’t end with me. It flowed through me into those I touched. My children. My companions. And through them, into the bloodstream of

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But let me begin with a failure.

In 1979, I made Lahu Ke Do Rang — a thriller with Vinod Khanna, Shabana Azmi and Danny. It had everything — a twisty plot, Bappi Lahiri’s haunting score, even Filmfare awards. And yet, it flopped.

Just like Manzilein Aur Bhi Hain, Vishwasghaat and Naya Daur before it.

Four films. Four blows. I was 30, and already obsolete.

The phone stopped ringing. My name disappeared. And my personal life was a battlefield.

Parveen Babi — fierce, fragile, incandescent — was slipping into the shadows. I was torn between the collapsing circus with her and the trembling home I had built with Kiran (Lorraine) and our daughter, Pooja.

Then UG entered.

He didn’t console. He sliced. He looked at me and said, ‘You’re done. That chapter’s over.’

Then, like a surgeon after an amputation, he put me in a rickshaw in Bengaluru and said, ‘One day, you’ll look back and know — this was the happiest day of your life.’

Mahesh Bhatt (Courtesy the subject)

It felt like annihilation. But sometimes, the collapse is the gate.

When I returned to Mumbai, I went to Kiran. She was already living in a modest flat in Green Acres, Pali Hill — the Beverly Hills of Bollywood. The home was possible only because of Parveen’s tenderness and Vinod’s loyalty. But inside, I was empty.

Then one night — when the city had shut its eyes and even the child had stopped turning — I picked up Pooja’s school notebook and began to write.

Not to make a film. But to survive.

I had touched bottom. All that remained was the word. And so I wrote Arth.

It didn’t start as a story. It started as a scream. ‘In the beginning was the word. And that word, for me, was “arth”.’

That night didn’t give me a screenplay. It gave me back my breath.

I stopped chasing what the market wanted. I decided to make films from my wounds. Raw. Unvarnished. With the throb and cut of lived life.

That’s what UG had nudged all along—not to mimic, not to perform, but to face the mirror. He was an enigma. But in reducing me to dust, he cleared space for something real to grow.

While I was still wrestling with Arth, UG summoned me again. He had watched Lahu Ke Do Rang. He said it was ‘awful’.

I blinked. Then he dragged me to a cinema hall to watch a Telugu film, Maro Charitra, starring a young Kamal Haasan.

I didn’t understand a single word. But I understood everything.

The ache. The honesty. The silence between two people who both love and fear. That night, a door opened.

UG hadn’t saved me. He had emptied me—so something unfiltered could enter.

And so came Saaransh.

Then Janam, made for television and telecast without a break—a rare gesture from Doordarshan, instructed by the Prime Minister’s Office itself to delay the national news by 13 minutes.

And Naam — my first blockbuster, the film that launched Sanjay Dutt and resurrected Salim Khan after his split with Javed Akhtar.

The applause returned. The name came back. But what stayed wasn’t the comeback.

It was the stillness of that fall. The memory of UG’s voice saying, ‘You’re done. Start again.’

And somewhere along the way, I passed that voice on to my prodigies.

When my nephew Mohit Suri — quiet, closed, grieving his mother — drifted toward cinema, I didn’t give him instruction. I gave him permission to be himself. A mentor senses the unique perfume embedded in his protégé’s depths.

When Anupam Kher — 28, desperate, broken — landed at my door, I saw something erupting inside him. He was cast in Saaransh, nearly replaced by Sanjeev Kumar. He stayed. He detonated.

When Anurag Basu was humiliated and fired by a top producer for speaking his truth, I stood by him. Not as a mentor. As someone who knew what it was to be silenced.

And today, in 2025, I stand watching them shape the world I once tried to explain.

Anupam made Tanvi The Great — honest, bleeding, luminous. The bravest film in recent times. A film that doesn’t numb your senses but uplifts your soul. It was too raw for the box office. The audience looked away.

Mohit made Saiyaara — a love story that rejected every market formula. It soared to record-breaking peaks. Even the critics gave in. Hearts cracked open.

And Anurag released Metro…In Dino — not a juggernaut, but rich with soul. The critics understood.

In this single frame, I see it all. Success and failure. Day and night. Life and death. Side by side, like hands folded in prayer.

One child walks into the light. The other — just as brave — disappears into the dark.

And I, once the parent, now become the witness.

There is no method in what we do. Only a certain freedom. Passed hand to hand. Like breath. Like a secret.

Not taught. Just lived.

Co-author Sunita Pant Bansal (Courtesy the publisher)

In our tradition, when the student surpasses the teacher, the teacher bows and says: ‘Thank you. You have freed me.’

Perhaps that’s what this is.

A vanishing. A fading of the old urgencies—name, control, recognition. All dissolving.

And in their place a silence between frames. A trace left not on film, but on the soul.

I don’t see myself in their work. I see Him.

The man who once put me in a rickshaw and said, ‘One day, you will know—this was the happiest day of your life.’

And so the Yiddish proverb rings true: What you teach your children, you teach your grandchildren.

I have not lived in vain. Because when I see them fly, I am reborn.

I have failed my way to success.

And now…

Fade in.

Again.