‘Memes are high art, they’re just not given their due’: Bahaish Kapoor

BAHAISH is a portmanteau between two languages. ‘Baha’ is splendour or light in Persian, and ‘Ish’ is Sanskrit for Ishwar. If your name itself is wordplay, it can safely be said your career is mapped out for you at the christening itself.

Bahaish Kapoor is the man Instagram is currently in love with. For the last two months, or less, he has been posting vintage Bollywood film stills, teaming them with speech bubbles from modern lingo or Gen Z speak.

So, there’s Tina Munim telling Amol Palekar in Basu Chatterjee’s ‘Baton Baton Mein’, “You remind me of the sea.” He asks, “Because I’m wild, romantic and exciting?” She replies, “No, because you make me sick”. Ashok Kumar tells a female actor “I think I love you” to which she quips, “Think Again”. A black-and-white actor (we’re too young to recognise them) says “Do you have Onlyfans” and the actress retorts, “I have Onlyproblems”. You get the, well, picture.

But Sharon Stone, Patricia Arquette, Hrithik Roshan and now Ishaan Khatter are among the 3,22,000 followers and regular re-posters.

“They have been around from before I started doing vintage Bollywood memes,” Kapoor, 38, tells ROLLA. “I used to post about perspectives on art, what we call ‘glimmers’ when doomscrolling that fill you with hope and optimism. Plus, I’ve been a lecturer on film theory so I used to post about what filmmaking was like before CG. Cinephiles would like that. But yes, Ishaan is a new follower.”

Kapoor is the son of the acting teacher and author Kishore Namit Kapoor, and taught at his father’s acting institute. His bio also reads screen writer, sound engineer and cinematographer, and he says he has written short films for a while. He wrote four of the six shorts in Nagesh Kukunoor’s ‘Modern Love Hyderabad’ series. He also dropped out of college after Grade 12 because someone published a poem he wrote at 17. He then followed it up with a diploma in sound engineering. Kapoor is now writing four films and plans to direct one for a big studio, he shares.

The idea of comedy with old Bollywood came when he wanted to give people a dopamine rush that follows a joke. “Comedy is like that. I wouldn’t touch Mehmood and IS Johar because they were legendary comedians. I use more serious scenes or romantic scenes – I want to create incongruences, and that creates irony,” he explains.

Kapoor wanted to also place himself in the time of dial-up internet. “Computers would scream an existential scream every time we wanted to use the Internet,” he laughs. “It would take hours for a photo or a song to upload to email. Only when Facebook arrived, could pictures be shared with friends or a community. I don’t know if the young people can relate to that.”

The West had its Renaissance paintings to make memes of, but Kapoor says he didn’t want to touch Raja Ravi Varma’s mythological works in the current political climate. “The next best was old film stills. I like the idea of reminding Gen Z of what happened before the Internet. They recognise Dilip Kumar, but now with more context hopefully. And how stylish the old movie stars were before the Internet too,” he shares.

"I really believe memes are high art, they just aren’t given their due. I would even say they are the folk art of our times,” Kapoor explains. “People respond in an artistic way and get a dopamine rush too.”

Where is he sourcing these very sophisticated, digitally enhanced photographs from? “Old books, deep internet research and a hermit who runs something called the Camel Museum out of Mumbai’s city limits, and houses the largest collection of film stills and posters in the country. No, he won’t give you an interview so don’t even ask.”

Kapoor says he has no plans of getting into merchandise but is happy to create campaigns for Nicobar and CRED. “We live in the age of capitalism, and if George Lucas can do it so can I.”