Portrait of Indian pop culture: Mayank Shekhar on finding SRK in Berlin, pissing off Salman and growing up

Mayank Shekhar and I share one thing in common. Growing up we both read Target, the children's magazine owned by Living Media. Each issue opened with a two-page cartoon spread - Ajit Ninan's "Funny World". As budding schoolboy writers, Shekhar and I sent our poems to Target. We received our first rejection slips. Oh, the trauma of being nipped in the bud.

Shekhar's Name Place Animal Thing (NPAT), a collection of his newspaper columns and magazine pieces, is about the people he has met, the places he has visited, the Great Indian Circus that is Indian society, and all the little things in between, "the stuff about India and pop culture" that make him go: "You're kidding me!". He started writing these in the pre-Internet era, "before blogs (or micro-blogs) became like as*holes: everybody had one".

Shekhar's writing funda is simple. Early on in his career he rids himself of the self-conscious idea of being a writer: "The English became proper. The words developed weight. This school of thought frightened the living daylights out of me. Even now, I have to remind himself that I am not 'writing'".

This first principle serves him well. NPAT is an eminently readable and entertaining book; Shekhar brings his lively intelligence to bear on a range of subjects. His writing is unpretentious and speaks directly to the reader; his biggest strength is his inbuilt crap detector. He sees it, he nails it. You can hear the hammer in Dolby sound.

Why does the ugly Indian male love Emraan Hashmi? Because Indian males "even in their worst self-image, don't feel any less attractive than him". Why doesn't terrorism evoke any terror in Bombay? (His parents were inside the Taj Oberoi on November 26, 2008): "The city already extracts enough out of you. Survival is too strong a distraction. Terror will fail when we are naturally unequipped to pamper fear".

Why are Indian cinema halls always named Regal, Liberty and Plaza? He finds exceptions to the rule in his hometown, Patna - two halls called Mona and Elphinston. On a Berlin street, he accidentally stumbles upon Shah Rukh Khan: "Over five hundred young girls and old aunties, all local Germans, being blessed by one 'Sharook Khan'".

NPAT is lush with anecdote. When he tells Salman Khan that he has coloured his hair, Salman shoots back, "Haan, so?" A Hindi journalist joins the two: "'Likho, behn****, likh, maderc***, jo likhna hai likh," Salman would say every few seconds to the poor Hindi journalist who hadn't said a word; he was merely taking notes."

It turns out that Salman is ticked off with Shekhar because the paper he works for, Mid-Day, had just carried a scoop: pictures of Salman in a heated argument with Abhishek Bachchan. The story carried Shekhar's byline. He was 22, a rookie reporter. Later that month, Sohail, the actor's brother, points a clenched fist at young Shekhar on a discotheque dance floor.

Shekhar has an ear for memorable cinema trivia. What does the "T" in T-series stand for? Trishul. When Zanjeer comes out in 1972, the posters make no mention of Salim-Javed. "The writers hired a drunken painter one night, gave him some money and a stencil, and sent him off to paint their names on every billboard and poster of Zanjeer in the city, from Juhu to Opera House. No filmmaker messed with them over credits after that."

Or this about names: Yusuf Khan changed his name to Dilip Kumar in the 1950s. India had recently been partitioned and he didn't want to alienate his Hindu fan-base. AR Rahman was born Dilip Kumar but is "widely loved by an adopted Muslim name". Times had changed.

In "When Films Began to Talk", Shekhar goes to meet the oldest man in Bollywood, the 93-year-old Ramesh Roy, still puffing away on his Capstans. Roy had carried the cans of Alam Ara to the film's crowded premiere at the Majestic on his shoulders: "I was 19-years-old when Ardeshir made Alam Ara. The simple task of carrying the films print to the theatre was a nightmare. All that people wanted to know was: 'Gungi film bolti kaise hai.'"

As an advisory member of the Censor Board, Shekhar sits on a screening of Mastani Bhabhi, which has lots of mysterious solitary moaning but no sex. He attends a meeting where the Board members discuss the duration of a lovemaking scene in Sudhir Mishra's Khoya Khoya Chand; "Eleven seconds is too much, said one. Yes, it should be cut at least by half, agreed another."

We learn that the Examining Committee members, read school monitors, are paid Rs 800 to attend a film screening: "This is the first time I'd got to observe the entire army in one place. Some of the members had come down from neighbouring Satara and Pune. An ID card given by the Board allows them free access to into any cinema in the country, so they can check and report to the police if the Board's rules are being violated. Some of them claimed that they had even got theatres shut down. Many spoke at length of the declining morality of Hindi films."

But cinema is not the only thing on Shekhar's mind. The book is shot through with memories of growing up in the pre-digital 1990s, when we "rattofied" lyrics from Archies songbooks, and kids from Pitampura played cover versions of songs at the Great Indian Rock festival.

In New York, he hangs out at a U2 concert; in Amsterdam he pays a visit to the famous red-light district. He watches a football match in Tehran and eats butter chicken in Amman. In Patna, he meets Shruti Kishore, the quintessential Patna girl who complains: "When we travel to Delhi and other cities, people ask, 'Oh, you're Bihari? You don't look like one!' What is a Bihari supposed to look like?"

Perhaps the most moving piece in the book is "Ghanshyam the Guard". A DVD player is stolen from Shekhar's Bandra office. His mother sends one Mr Rao to investigate the matter. Rao belongs to a private security firm, "the country's paramilitary force". The culprit is found. The guard falls at Shekhar's feet, begging his forgiveness. Shekhar knows the local police would love to get their hands on "soft prey", like "DVD chor" Ghanshyam.

He lets him go: "This beat-up machine of Chinese make was probably not even worth its own scrap. Some of my books cost more..." But he still loses his job. While leaving, Ghanshyam says something; his words haunt the writer even today: "Why me? Yours was the only door that wasn't locked".

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)